SEND WORD is a zine and an invitation to take part in a paper divination practice for people who need answers. It is the introduction to an ongoing papermancy project. It is the art of reading cut and rearranged words as oracular messages, and it is the door through which Seekers enter into an exchange with the oracle known as Paper Mouth. To hold this zine is to already be inside the practice. The question is whether you will go further.

Inside these pages you will find artefacts from papermancy, a word and a practice that does not yet exist in any formal dictionary but belongs to a lineage that stretches back through bibliomancy, rhapsodomancy, tasseomancy, cartomancy, and every other human attempt to find meaning in the things that present themselves by chance. You will find an archive of handmade collages, each one a real divination response made for a real Seeker who sent in a real question. The identities of those Seekers are anonymised. Their questions are not. Because the questions, it turns out, are universal. You may find your own question somewhere in these pages without ever having sent it.

The collages themselves are made by hand on paper. Words are cut from discarded print, from magazines, books and newspapers, packaging and anything that has already been read and set aside, drawn from an ever-growing physical archive and arranged by intuition into a response. No two collages are the same. Each one belongs to the question that called it into being. Alongside each collage, a song is chosen by the same logic, reached for rather than selected, pulled from an archive of sound to carry the message in a different register. The divination has many parts. It works through the eye and the ear, and in full practice, through smell and light too. It is a complete ritual in a small format.

Paper Mouth is the oracle at the centre of this practice. Paper Mouth is a papermancer, a designer, a reader of cards and coffee cups and palms, a maker of things by hand.