Always on
This project successfully funded on 14th June 2026, you can still support them with a donation.
This project successfully funded on 14th June 2026, you can still support them with a donation.
We smashed the £1500 target with still three weeks to go, so the goal now is to prin...
Campaign successful! You can still donate £8 to reserve a copy of Don't Please Tell Anybody - available from Fri 3 July
Hello, I'm Ben Waddington, a Birmingham-based writer, researcher and artist.
Don't Please Tell Anybody is my new writing project, 30 years in the making. I have long been fascinated by the glimpses into people's lives offered by old postcards, doodles, lists and occasionally found notes and letters—compelling vignettes, thoughts made legible, flashes of the human spirit. Sometimes these hand-written memos are shredded by their recipients in impassioned response to their content, then scattered to the elements. I tend to find a lot of these torn messages—hundreds! My background as an artist has given me a raised awareness of my environment, and certainly my work as a tour guide means I'm always alert for lost stories.
Over the years, those shredded notes have become the street finds I value the most, and Don't Please Tell Anybody is a compendium of the most beguiling of the pieced-together remnants. It will form an unlikely document of dark comedy, high intrigue, dashed dreams and abandoned hopes; a vibrant expression of creating order and meaning from chaos. Don't Please Tell Anybody is interactive—its readers may be prompted to fill in themselves the missing pieces of these unfinished jigsaws.
The publication will be an attractively designed and elegantly presented art edition of 200 copies and will be the debut title of Nudge Press. The approximately 60-page booklet will be available in a range of editions, with extra rewards available for early investors in what is set to be a memorable first title from this fledgling publisher. The money raised will pay for the design and production of the book, its launch and promotion during a week-long exhibition at Jubilee Works on Sherlock Street, Birmingham. This exhibition, titled The Torque of the Town, will showcase my street-sourced artworks, formed of lost jewellery, lone playing cards and assorted mystery industrial components. All have been collected over a similar duration to Don't Please Tell Anybody—this is truly a project decades in the making. Backing the project will also pave the way for future art editions from Nudge Press.
Update: the book will launch on Fri 3 July at 5pm at Jubilee Works, Sherlock Street / Pershore Street, Birmingham B5 6UU
I hope you'll support my project and visit the exhibition. I'd love to hear your responses to the notes, and please do share with me your own torn-up street finds for Volume 2, due out in early 2055 ;0)
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made