About
Time Travel Opps started out as a 3.5″ floppy disk used to transfer an image of a robin from one computer to another circa. 2003. The image of the robin was then printed on a cd-r split single/audio christmas card given out in pubs in the days before Christmas that year, by Christmas Robin & Emphemetry (Robin Newman and me respectively). No-one knows what happened to the floppy disk, but the name ‘Time Travel Opps’ was passed onto the CD, and then onto my band The Little Explorer‘s self-released 7″/CD single sky/moon.
Basically, Time Travel Opps is a label of sorts for me and my friends to self-publish onto. After a few musical releases we started putting books out, because we were writing stories and wanted people to be able to read these stories on paper, in nice handmade form. Releases being handmade has always been the main part of Time Travel Opps. The aforementioned Christmas single was printed at home, the words typed onto each cover individually using a typewriter. The Little Explorer single was a massive undertaking where pretty much, aside from the vinyl and cd pressing, all parts of production were done by hand (including stamping both sides of 1000 pieces of vinyl). The books are handbound, stamped, and numbered. Everything is limited edition…due to the processes it has to be that way, but even if it didn’t there would still probably only be small runs…because we’re never going to shift that many. The reason being that, the reason I/we do things this way, is because of a fundamental and unshakeable desire, regardless of commercial viability or gain, to share with the world the things that mean the most to us…the things you wake up thinking about are the most important things you should do with your day…and Time Travel Opps is the manifestation of that feeling for a few people in the middle of a little city in the middle of a little country.
Hoping that all makes sense,
Richard J. Birkin (Biff)
FAQ
Why Time Travel Opps?
It’s short for Time Travel Opportunists (the full name we would later use for literary undertakings). ‘Opps’ was used because it sounded like ‘Operations’ but still alluded to the full title, the origins of which are that they’re the three words I wrote on the disk. Seriously, no prior thought went into it (some of the best decisions are made this way). Thinking about it after the fact, you could say that Biff (in Back To The Future II) was a Time Travel Opportunist when he stole the Delorean in order to go back to 1955 and give himself the Gray’s Sports Almanac with which he would then win every bet he placed in subsequent years and become rich and create a distopian 1985 which Doctor Emmett Brown and Marty McFly would unwittingly come back to after finishing their actually pointless trip into the future to change something that could have been solved on Marty’s driveway without having to travel anywhere in time at all. Presumably though, all that traveling in time could reasonably have sent The Doc mildy insane…insane enough to not realise (as he does so rightly and triumphantly at the end of Back To The Future III) that the future isn’t written yet, it’s what you make of it (Amen to that).
What’s the difference between Time Travel Opps and Time Travel Opportunists?
Time Travel Opps was the name given to the label. A long long time later Emma Lannie, Nathan Good and myself started writing stories and reading them in public, calling ourselves ‘Time Travel Opportunists‘, since we were putting out the books on the labeland were all obsessed by time/time travel.
What does Emphemetry mean?
It’s a word made up of other words. I did a couple of years of English Literature at university and one of the tasks (inspired by James Joyce (I think)) was to create a word out of other words, that had a new meaning that was a combination of those words. The first three words that came to mind were ‘ephemeral’, ‘empathy’ and ‘metric’ – the combined meaning of which is something along the lines of being able to measure the depth of someone’s understanding of their fellow man/woman/dog/cat/cow.