Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books Project culls “through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom.” Here’s an example below. Made me stare at my own book shelves to see what I could come up with…
At my house we watch a lot of How It’s Made, a TV program that shows how common, everyday items are made. Things like cheesecake, tires, taffy, and canoe paddles. So I enjoyed finding this Encyclopedia Britannica video on book printing and binding made in 1947… it shows the process from author to typesetter to printer to binder. The “How It’s Made” videos are usually about things made mostly by machine, although there are the episodes that intone “the worker has exactly 82 seconds to complete his task”. This video doesn’t say how long it takes to do any particular task, and while there are lots of large scary looking machines, there are lots of people involved too. I’ve seen a “How It’s Made” on book binding (doesn’t seem to be available on YouTube) and it’s all machines.
via Hang Fire Books
simple pleasures
gathered up—
this moment, this laughter
I’ve finished printing my 2009 calendar. For me, much of what makes life great is the series of simple encounters and observations I have every day — from the smell of freshly dug dirt when I’m working in my garden to watching a formation of pelicans flying over the bay near my house to catching a glimpse of a saffron colored sky at sunset. So this year my desktop calendar has 12 unbound letterpressed cards, one for each month of 2009, celebrating those moments with a haiku poem about life’s simple pleasures.
Here’s a thumbnail of all the months (click on it to see a lot more detail). The calendar is for sale on my webite ($20 + shipping).
I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter when I was about 10 or 11. I guess that was my first experience with fonts — I didn’t know that then but I remember liking that my typewritten sheets looked neat and tidy, as opposed to my crooked and messy handwritten reports. As a freshman in college, I worked in the computer center, where they had one of the first laser printers. I was envious of the graduate students using it for their papers and even computer program listings — they no longer had just fixed-width Courier at their disposal, they had beautiful Times!
But back to typewriters… I read with interest an obituary in the NY Times the other morning: “Martin K. Tytell, Typewriter Wizard, Dies at 94.” From the obituary:
Martin Tytell, whose unmatched knowledge of typewriters was a boon to American spies during World War II, a tool for the defense lawyers for Alger Hiss, and a necessity for literary luminaries and perhaps tens of thousands of everyday scriveners who asked him to keep their Royals, Underwoods, Olivettis (and their computer-resistant pride) intact, died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 94…. He made a hieroglyphics typewriter for a museum curator, and typewriters with musical notes for musicians. He adapted keyboards for amputees and other wounded veterans. He invented a reverse-carriage device that enabled him to work in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew. An error he made on a Burmese typewriter, inserting a character upside down, became a standard, even in Burma….
Mr. Tytell was proud of the rarity of his expertise, and relished the eccentric nature of his business. “We don’t get normal people here,” he said of his shop. And he was aware that his connection to the typewriter bordered on love.
“I’m 83 years old and I just signed a 10-year lease on this office; I’m an optimist, obviously,” Mr. Tytell told the writer Ian Frazier in a 1997 article in The Atlantic Monthly, commenting on the likelihood that typewriters weren’t going to last in the world much longer. “I hope they do survive — manual typewriters are where my heart is. They’re what keep me alive.”
Don’t miss Ian Frazier’s article about his search to fix the errant “e” on his beloved manual typewriter that lead him to Tytell — it’s a wonderful read. At the end, Mr. Tytell says:
“What’s so intriguing about a manual typewriter is that it’s all right there in front of you — all the thought that went into it, all these really smart guys that worked on it and gave their lives for it. The way these machines continue to function, it really is a miracle. You see some old beat-up machine in an attic or someplace and you touch the keys and it still works fine. Companies still make typewriter ribbons — the dry-goods business is as strong as ever — so obviously somebody’s still using them. Like in the war, nobody was making typewriters, but people kept on using them anyway. A little bit of maintenance and regular use and you can keep a typewriter running a long time. These other machines, computers and so on, even electric typewriters, they have a soul that’s hooked into the wall. A manual typewriter has a soul that doesn’t need anything else in order to exist — it exists in itself. People are always going to like that about a manual.”
(The photo above is by Patrick Burns for the NY Times.)
Books on Books: The Sixteen Pleasures
After reading People of the Book, I’ve been looking for more fiction that features books and bookmaking. My friend Sharon suggested Robert Hellenga’s 1995 book The Sixteen Pleasures, about a 29 year old midwestern American, Margot, who is trained as a book conservator and goes to Florence in 1966 when the Arno flooded and destroyed or damaged millions of books and other artwork. Ostensibly she goes to Italy to help repair and protect the books, but she’s really in search of adventure and the memory of living in Florence as a teenager. She ends up staying at an abbey of cloistered nuns and one day a nun comes upon a pornographic volume bound with a prayer book that has been damaged by the flood. It turns out to be the only copy of long lost erotic sonnets, accompanied by rather anatomically explicit engravings. The abbess asks Margot to take care of the book and sell it, to help the abbey (but to be sure the Church doesn’t find out about it). So Margot rebinds the folios and repairs the spine and covers and goes about trying to sell the book. In the meantime, there’s lots of fine detail about the restoration as well as wonderful passages about art and the life of Florence. Plus Margot finds lots of romance and adventure.
