bibliostructures

Here are some cool things Richard Prince owns: Nabokov’s desk copy of the Olympia Press first edition of Lolita, heavily corrected and annotated; a letter written by Sylvia Plath the day before she killed herself; the only known copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key to retain its original dust cover ($175,000 to you, sir); Jimi Hendrix’s letters to his dad; Neal Cassady’s copy of On the Road; Kerouac’s previously unknown original scroll manuscript of Big Sur (twice as long as the published book); the manuscript of The Godfather as well as the letter in which the editor suggested changing the title from The Mafia to The Godfather; letters by Thomas Pynchon written in the late Sixties, while he was at work on Gravity’s Rainbow, and… I’ll stop for a moment and let you catch your breath.Is there a logic to it? Or is this just a man who loves reading, and has the money to indulge his tastes?

“A slight logic,” Prince admits. “An artificial limit. The collection is supposed to start in 1949, the year I was born. Since Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949 - I’ve got a great copy - I decided to end it in 1984. I thought that’d be funny. I set that up about five years ago. There’s also obviously some art books, but mostly there’s photography, and there are three cultural aspects - beats, hippies and punks - any book that has to do with those social movements, as well as fine literature. Some authors are very specific, like Kerouac, Kesey, Richard Brautigan. I love Brautigan. But I do go outside - I have Hemingway. You have to have a Joyce.” That’s how you tell when someone has a real collecting kink: “I have Hemingway” - as frankly fetishistic as his paintings of masked nurses.

Is there an end point? Now he has a “dream copy” of Ulysses and can spend Saturday mornings alphabetising in his own personal two-storey library, where is there to go?

“I think the end point will come when the catalogue is done. I’ll design it and it’ll be an artist’s book. Probably three volumes. I’ll be able to enjoy the collection sitting down on a chair in my place. Anyway, I’m beginning to think it needs someone to take care of it, someone who can really take care of it. Eventually it’ll either go up for auction, or to an institution, or an institution will come and say we want to run the library, keep it intact. So those are the three options, and whether or not I will cherry-pick 15 of the books and some of the letters, I don’t know. It’s going to be very difficult to part with my letters from Kerouac to Neal Cassady…”

From an article by Hari Kunzru in the Telegraph

Richard Prince bag with Henny Youngman jokes for Louis Vuitton

Darwin, taking his first steps over the line between tradition and evolution, found himself occupying ground near those battle lines of class and religious warfare. He moved carefully. Didn’t announce his apostasy. Still, it’s possible to approximate the timing of this intellectual conversion: March of 1837, soon after his talks with Gould and Owen. Species changed, one into another. He knew it. He just didn’t know how.

On the cover he labeled it simply “B.” Notebook “A,” begun about the same time was devoted to geology. As a heading on the first page of “B” he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genufelction to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.

Months afterward he made another note, regarding the curious characteristics of his South American fossils and the Galapagos species he’d seen: “These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views.” But for new, he was keeping those views to himself.

He didn’t use the word “evolution,” not until later, not for decades. In July of that year he began what he called his notebooks on the “transmutation” of species. The first of them was a pocket-size booklet bound in brown leather with a metal clasp, small enough to be carried in a jacket, private enough to hold wild ideas and heretical doubts.

From a new book on Charles Darwin by David Quammen. “The Kiwi’s Egg. Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. A Fresh Look at Darwin’s Most Radical Idea and the Mysteriously Slow Process by Which He Revealed It.”

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” - or arguably, “web.”Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.
Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”
 
New York Times

Cellulose, a stiff chain of glucose units, is one of the most abundant natural polymers: it makes up 90 percent of cotton and half of wood. Plant cell walls are made of multiple strands of cellulose bound into fibers typically 5 to 10 nanometers thick. To make regular paper, wood chips are heated with chemicals or mechanical force to create pulp. Aggregated, 30-micrometer-thick bundles of cellulose fibers in the pulp are then intertwined to create sheets.The new nanopaper is made of much thinner 10-to-40-nanometer-thick fibers. Individual cellulose strands are very robust, Berglund says. “They have properties similar to Kevlar,” he notes. The hydroxyl groups and oxygen molecules on individual nanofibers attach to each other strongly. Even if a sudden impact ruptures the bonds between some of the nanofibers, the defect is small enough that the entire material does not fail. The paper can withstand nearly two-thirds more force than cast iron before it breaks.

The stretchiness comes from the pores in the mesh of nanofibers. When the nanopaper is stretched, there is enough space for the fibers to slip against each other. “You can stretch it up to 10 percent before it fails,” Berglund says. “Conventional paper can stretch a maximum of 3 to 4 percent, then it breaks.”

To make the nanopaper, Berglund and his colleagues first expose wood pulp to enzymes and mechanical force. This separates the pulp into cellulose microfibers. The pulp is passed through a device that uses high-pressure and high velocities in tiny microfluidic channels to create a uniform suspension of nanofibers in water. Finally, the researchers pass the suspension through a filter to create a gel, which they compress to make 100-micrometer-thick sheets.

Berglund says that the dilute, uniform suspension of the nanofibers is critical. It distributes the fibers homogeneously in the paper, making it strong. The porosity of the paper is also crucial. The researchers found that higher porosities led to paper that is stronger–that is, it handles more load per unit area–and tougher, which means that it does not crack easily.

MIT Technology Review

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover - and solve - a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound, with whom Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.  New York Times.

The architectural designer Eric Clough embedded 18 clues in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Klinsky- Sherry family, leading them on a scavenger hunt through the rooms of their home.The hunt involved ciphers, riddles, poems and custom-built furniture with hidden drawers and panels. A book with a narrative about a mystery, hidden behind paneling in the front hall, offered clues.

Behind the panels, large white letters laser-cut into teal blue acrylic spell out the words of a poem written years ago by Steven B. Klinsky, the apartment’s owner, for his wife, Maureen Sherry, and their children.

Behind a drawing of a plane that hangs in a hallway is a little niche containing a scale model of the kitchen, a clue that leads to a musical score written for the apartment, which is hidden in a drawer above the stove.

In assembling talents for his project, Mr. Clough aimed high. His first choice for the author of the book that contains clues to the scavenger hunt in addition to the mystery story, was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work contains its own sort of coded narrative pyrotechnics. Mr. Clough sent him a puzzle cube similar to this one, stamped with his firm’s phone number and the word “Please.”

A cross-section of a cellulose nanofibril film. Strong individual fibrils, and good adherence to one another, make for strong paper.

Researchers in Sweden and Japan have developed a much stronger paper, made from much smaller fibrils of cellulose. This “nanopaper,” they report in the journal Biomacromolecules, has a tensile strength greater than that of cast iron.

Marielle Henriksson of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and colleagues used enzymes and a gentle beating technique to produce fibrils on the order of tens of nanometers wide, roughly one-thousandth of the width of conventional fibers. The nanofibrils were then mixed with water, and the suspension was vacuum filtered to make paper.

The researchers report that the papers are rather porous, yet greatly resist tearing. They suggest that this property is a result of the high strength of individual fibrils and the way they adhere to one another. The researchers say that if it were developed commercially, the paper might have applications in construction or as a reinforcing material.

Henry Fountain. New York Times. June 10 2008

Retroactive I, 1963

The greatest inspirations for my bookbinding haven’t come from books themselves, they’ve come from artists, engineers, scientists and architects who’ve blurred the boundaries between disciplines and combined objects and ideas and worked with materials in new ways. Robert Rauschenberg was one of these. There’s an obituary for him in the New York Times today.

“A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” “

George and AIBO. Photograph by Fromform at Flickr.

 I began my custom book-binding business in the candy-coloured bioluminescent glow of the i-Mac era. Apple had made an internet-enabled computing device something as ordinary as a toaster or a coffee percolator, a part of everyday life. E-ink was printing electrically-charged pixels onto an opaque paper-like screen that could be read in daylight. Microsoft hinted at something similar, taking out ads in newspapers with a reproduction of the first page of Moby Dick, looking, on the screen, indistinguishable from a printed page in a book. I read Moby Dick for the first time towards the end of 1999, while I had a head cold and fever, imagining, in my delirium, Queequaig counting the many, connected, paper-thin flexible screens of an electronic book (on sale at Barnes and Noble for $25.99).

            Computers hadn’t and wouldn’t replace paper. Paper use had actually increased as offices made back-up ‘hard copies’ of data. But paper had ceased to be something manufactured for humans to write on with pens and pencils or to feed through typewriters. Paper now was now being manufactured with a smooth and dull and even surface that wouldn’t upset the delicate constitutions of photocopiers, plain paper fax machines and computer printers. A couple of years ago at an Office Works stationery superstore in Melbourne I compared paper from about eleven different countries: Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, Belgium, and France among them. It was all as uniform and bland as a McDonald’s French Fries. The rise of the superstore had also brought a flattening out in the character of notebooks and journals, they were now made in bulk and sold in bulk and diversity disappeared.

            In Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson’s quest to find the Tasmanian tiger, they quote a sign posted by Forestry Tasmania near a glorious, handsome four hundred year old Eucalpytus Regnans in the Styx Valley in Tasmania. It macabrely lists all of the uses a single 70 metre (230 foot) tree can be put to, generating timber for decorative veneers for a four storey hotel, solid wood for a full set of household furniture, the framing and roof trusses for an average family house, and, as an afterthought, enough pulp wood to “photocopy the entire works of Shakespeare more than 3,000 times over.” (more…)

Myrtis by Anslem Kiefer, from his Women of Antiquity series.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales owns this series of three sculptures. The notes on the wall say that Kiefer has depicted women from mythology “whose strength and intelligence have been seen as unruly or cause for demonisation, for example Pandora and Lilith.”

This is Myrtis who “came to a bad end for competing with men”. She was a Greek poet blamed for competing with Pindar and has a book instead of a head.

Close up the work is an astonishingly fine feat of bookbinding. The spine is strong and aligned, despite having been cracked open for millenia and the lead pages ripple like velvety bond.

I long for a feature I’d call the ZEN FEATURE STRIPPER, that goes through and cuts back the visuals and the features to nothing … just what I need, and I’d have a feature (with a minimal line drawing of a fox terrier) called FETCH. When I ask the phone to do something it doesn’t have the software or protocols for, it can decide whether it goes onto the net to borrow it (and I give it an allowance to decide how much it can spend on it, if it costs money) or acquire the feature.

I’m exhausted by visual noise.

I loathe the sound of my new Nokia 3G phone: with the advent of the ringtone business there are few ringtones bundled with this phone and they all sound like the kind of musical spackle that used to exist between dead-end recorded messages on customer service lines: ”your call is important to us, please hold the line. For billing enquiries please press 3, etc.)” I tried to download a free Mexican Grey Wolf howl, as a ringtone, from a place that’s trying to help endangered species, but I expect there’s some chafing between Australian and American standards, so it never arrived.

There’s a related point-of-view expressed in the Circuits Column in the New York Times about noise cancelling headphones.

So for today’s column in The Times, I reviewed noise-canceling headphones. It’s not a new category, but it’s a topic I’ve wanted to cover for years, and had never had a moment. The summer lull seemed a perfect opportunity. Surely, I thought, readers would forgive this one less-than-heart-pounding column.

Holy cow, was I mistaken - about the heart-pounding business, I mean. No sooner had the column appeared last night on the Web than my e-mail box began to fill up. Evidently, noise-canceling headphones are VERY exciting to a lot of people!

David: I was delighted to see you write a column about affordable noise-canceling headphones, but you do not seem to address my personal problems. Engine noise - airplane or train - does not bother me; I’m thoroughly used to it. I find it relaxing; sleep-inducing.

“No, the problem that drives me to distraction is the sound of other people’s music or TV, the bass pounding through the floor, the movie screens in planes with the speakers embedded in your seat top, the cellphone conversations and noisy music makers in the next seat.

As I write this it’s 4.30 in the morning in Australia (I rarely sleep) and either the groundskeepers for the State Library across the road from me, or the shopping centre next to it – like they do every morning at around this time – spend half an hour grooming the area with those noisy leaf blowers that I think were outlawed in California. There’s an electronics store whose alarm goes off, pretty regularly, at 6.30 a.m. and a truck that idles and growls for half an hour, around 8.30 am, while replenishing the stock for a fast food store on my block. I love city noise too. But these noises are aural spam.