bibliostructures

 Photograph by * cate *.

Many of my concerns about paper are environmental. When I see reports about what’s happening in other industries I apply those concerns to paper. I’m worried about the “fast food” sameness of cheap copy paper worldwide (thanks to reading Eric Shlosser’s Fast Food Nation.)

And my philosophy behind having a custom book-binding business is that I only make books that are needed, there’s no waste, no inventory that doesn’t sell.

And I’m very worried that paper is doubly destructive: destroying plants and trees to get the raw materials, and using massive amounts of water to extract the cellulose and wash recycled paper.

I read reports like this one in the New York Times today, about climate change, and I think that there must be someone, or many someones, applying these thoughts to the manufacture of paper, and I hope that this site is a magnet that draws them to me so that I can profit from their wisdom.

World Scientists Near Consensus on Warming

By JAMES KANTER and ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: January 30, 2007.  New York Times

A report will describe a growing body of evidence that warming is likely to cause a profound transformation of the planet.

Many experts involved in the intergovernmental panel’s process said there was hope that with a prompt start on slowing emissions, the chances of seeing much greater warmth and widespread disruption of ecosystems and societies could be reduced.Outside experts agreed.“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering,” said John Holdren, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an energy and climate expert at Harvard. “We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”

electric leaf  Photograph by cmurtaugh.

The holy grail for me is electronic paper that’s utterly organic and solar powered, through some form of photosynthesis I suppose. There are different methods suggested for ‘printing’ electronic words and images onto these “flexible displays”. The LED (light emitting diode) is a very early screen technology which is, I read today, the subject of some innovations.

“Researchers at the University of Southern California have designed a phosphorescent dye molecule that emits near-infrared light and have used it to make long-lasting organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The secret to the new LED is a specially designed phosphorescent dye molecule that the researchers use in the emissive layer sandwiched between the device’s two electrodes. Typically, organic LEDs contain an emissive layer that is doped with fluorescent dyes. The electrodes inject negative electrons and positive “holes” into the layer, where the charged particles combine and excite the dye molecules. When the molecules return to their unexcited state, they emit photons. The new phosphorescent molecules emit very efficiently in the NIR region. They also emit light for a longer time than fluorescent dyes, increasing the lifetime of the device–a traditional weak point for organic materials.

Universal Display Corporation’s phosphorescent organic LED display can be built on a flexible plastic substrate. The company, working with researchers at the University of Southern California and Princeton University, has now made near-infrared emitting LEDs and plans to make a near-infrared version of the flexible display. The display would be invisible to the naked eye but visible through night-vision goggles for covert military operations.

This is from the MIT Technology Review

It feels as if every time I find a technology that moves me closer to my ideal of the regular book-like electronic book, there’s a sinister military application suggested for it. But maybe this can be turned around and used for good. There’s a precedent.

 Louis Braille adapted his system of reading with fingers moving across raised dots from a night-reading system developed for the French military by Captain Barbier.

He recognised how, when the sighted eye ran left to right along a line of type, the eye did no more than present the brain with an alphabetical arrangement that the cerebral cells could convert in a flash to patterns with meaning, expression, instantly recognisable. Thus, his first cornerstone was a simple truth: it was the brain that read the words and not the eyes!

In his reasoning it followed that fingers could also present a recognisable picture to the brain, just as swiftly, just as certain as to meaning. There was the critical leap of imagination, the truth that flooded his dark world with shining hope! And there was the essential distinction between ‘feeling’ and ‘touch’.

Triumph Over Darkness: A Biography of Louis Braille. Leonard Bickel

Louis Braille also compressed Barbier’s system of notation to save space, and time, to allow the signals to be transmitted to the brain faster, and to use less paper. I’m only quoting from memory but I think the ratio of braille to regular printed words is 4 to 1.

 Alongside all of my regular paper projects is an interest in also making them adaptable for special uses, like Braille, not as something apart, but as just another regular option. Just as, for instance, the National Library for the Blind is one of the libraries that you can look through on the Library Thing online book cataloguing system: it’s simply there on the list, among the other libraries.

 In my

The PAPER FORAGER is a companion to whatyamazakireads (meditations on bookbinding) and Yamazaki’s Notebook (a local business magazine). It’s a chicken and egg equation for me (which came first the paper or the book?) and it’s less confusing for me if I keep my examinations of book-binding and paper on different pages.

When I lived in New York I started to clip articles from the New York Times, and needed to organise them somehow so that they were easy to return to and read. The first scrapbooks I glued them into were students notebooks made in China, bought from a business stationer somewhere in the shadow of the Empire State Building.

Photo from a series entitled “New York Times Deconstructions” posted on Flickr by ReyGuy

The majority of clippings in my scrapbooks are there because they’re amusing or illuminating, are well-written (and in reading and re-reading them I’m doing the journalist’s equivalent of looking under the hood and kicking the tyres) but there are those articles that are epiphanies, that shine a light in the darkness and illuminate a path where none existed before. One of these was John Seabrook’s 2002 New Yorker profile of the Fruit Detective.

“David” is David Karp, a sometime “provisioner” for specialty stores like Citarella, and a noted fruit writer. He is the Fruit Detective, a persona he invented around the time he worked as a provisioner for Dean & DeLuca. His job is to range around the country and the world and find exotic fruits, or uncommon varieties of common fruits. In recent years, he has travelled to Madagascar to investigate vanilla, to Sicily to hunt for blood oranges, and to the Australian outback to research bush fruits. But most of his work is performed in California. The Fruit Detective is a familiar figure at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market–he’s the one in the pith helmet with the leather chin strap, his fruit knife in a holster on his belt, looking like a slightly demented forest ranger as he interrogates farmers with rapid-fire questions and eats their fruit. Readers of Karp’s articles, which appear regularly in the Los Angeles Times and Gourmet, follow him on his quest for pomelos, Asian pears, mulberries, and persimmons. Most people experience a truly great piece of fruit very rarely–that perfect peach you ate one summer day long ago, a taste you hope for in every subsequent peach you eat but never quite recapture. Karp’s goal is to have that experience again and again. … Does he have any other interests? Aardvarks, Karp says. “I love them, because most people think they’re unattractive, but I think they’re incredibly soulful.” Once, when he was visiting the Philadelphia Zoo, he climbed into the anteater pen, hoping to commune with the animals, but instead experienced “a nasty confrontation with the business end of an anteater.”

Now I had a mission: I could scour the globe for non-tree paper and bind it into books that had an entirely new form (my inspiration for a book’s spine isn’t the Victorian corsetry of the book-binder’s craft but the slender flexible cord of the Golden Gate Bridge, strung between two pieces of card).

Photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge by Deborah D. Lattimore  

 Making my own books had become necessary when the student’s notebooks from China became hard to find as small stationers began to shut their businesses. Technology made a sweeping change, analogue to digital, overnight in the early 1990’s. One day there were vinyl albums at Tower Records in Greenwich Village and literally, I think, the next day there were cd’s, and the few vinyl albums that hadn’t been made extinct had been herded down to the back of the store and dumped in a rack along the back wall. The personal computer was released, then the fax machine, then the plain paper fax machine, then photocopiers became fancier. This was paper’s Fast Food Nation moment. (Eric Schlosser, the writer of Fast Food Nation is one of my Heroes on Paper, I’ll come back to him in another post, and introduce you to some others.)

Paper was no longer produced for people to write on with pens or to wind into the carriage of a typewriter. Paper was now something to be fed into enormous machines, its surface calibrated to what would run smoothly through notoriously nervy printers and copiers without jamming, and hold the ink (generally a dust). And like a junk food french fry, all paper, everywhere, was uniformly the same. Fifteen years later it’s still the same: magnificent centuries old trees and sustainably grown saplings are all pulped into the same ugly copy paper. It also seemed that the larger the stationery stores became, warehouses like Staples and Office Works, the less choice they offered: I couldn’t find anything I liked enough to replace the student’s notebooks from China.

These things sadden me: That paper from Indonesia, Australia, Austria, Thailand all looks the same and indicates nothing of its origin. That all ‘interesting’ paper is luxury paper and has been made into a fetish material. That the paperless office keeps spawning more uses for paper.

I want paper to have labels on the box, like food does, describing what it’s made from, where it was made, what chemicals there are in it.

I don’t have a lot of answers at the moment. But I have many questions.

Photo by Younghee Jung who posts at Flickr as Jabberer  

I’d like to work with electronic paper too, but when it’s inexpensive and everywhere and casually sold by the signature and placed into a bag folded from an old newspaper, as paper sometimes is at corner stores in India. The e-ink corporation has patented the term radio paper for its flexible display materials. I want it to be organic (somehow) and biodegradable. I want electronic paper to bear some familial relationship to the plant world, to remind us that we talk about the leaves of books because books were, once, literally made from the leaves of plants and trees.

“I still believe the most beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese. The insect of ink curves into a shape that is almost sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt glass which betray no jaggedness. Sanskrit was governed by verticals, but its sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which people wrote on were too brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and so a curling alphabet was derived from its Indian cousin. Moon coconut. The bones of a lovers spine.”

Running in the Family. Michael Ondaatje

I’m not an architect. I’m not a designer. I’m not an engineer. I’m not a mathematician. I’m not a materials scientist. But I’m an admirer of all these activities. Some of my admiration is at close range, as a journalist. Some of it is a little more distanced and conceptual, cerebral: bits of buildings, algorithms, shards of typography, the yoga-supple flex of suspension bridges, and the recipes for (organic) chemical reactions group themselves together in my mind, like an intellectual still-life, as the inspiration for something I want to translate into the structure of a book I hope to be able to manufacture. 

I once read a review (that I didn’t clip for my scrapbooks so I can’t be sure if I’m recalling it accurately) that said that when the Talking Heads needed to assemble a large number of musicians around them to perform r&b songs like “Take Me To The River”, it meant they’d reached a point where their taste in music had surpassed their abilities as musicians. I don’t think it was a criticism. I took it to mean that at the beginning their music was exhilarating because it took traditions apart, and when the band matured, when their ideas became more complex, re-interpreting traditions in order to keep them alive rather than dismantling them to see what they were made of,  they needed some technical help. That’s where I’m at with book-binding. Let me give you an analogy from architecture: up until now I’ve been snapping together nifty dwellings from Lego. Now I want to build Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.

Photo credit: Dayna Bateman who posts as Suttonhoo at Flickr.

The outer layer of inspiration for me is the way that Mies took new materials, and new manufacturing techniques and used them so sweetly, applied them sparingly and with clarity so that they’re meditations on the emptiness of modernity (in a good sense, the Buddhist notion of letting go and clearing the mind to elevate the spirit). In the early 1990’s I was writing (and am again) for the British architecture, design and culture magazine, Blueprint. In 1991 I was in Chicago for a conference organised by one of my editors, Janet Abrams. She’d suggested I write a book length “biography” of the Sony Walkman. I was giving a lecture at the conference, outlining my research to date.

Sony was about to release its Data Discman, which it had tagged “The Walkman of Words”. In my mind it was supposed to complete a circle, begun with the private, portable, personal qualities Gutenberg had brought to reading with his books printed with movable type, properties that Sony applied to listening to music with their Walkman, and now, the Data Discman was supposed to blend them both into a perfect reading device: a regular book, but with electronic properties. Sony had loaned me a Data Discman, which I didn’t see until I got to Chicago, and it was such a disappointment it destroyed the whole idea of a book about the Walkman for me. The Data Discman was an ugly geiger-counter of a machine, with clunky buttons, ungainly functions and a mere handful of published titles. I didn’t mind that what it was trying to do was technically way ahead of its time, what mattered was that it was a conceptual failure, Sony had failed to understand what “reading” is, that a book (in whatever form, and I have an open mind about that) is something to savour rather than glance at to extract information (which is what computers and mobile phones are able to deliver much better than books these days).

 Jan took me to the new Sony superstore in Chicago and put the Data Discman in context for me. It was at the dawning of the superstore phenomenon, just about when Barnes and Noble turned bookshops into warehouse-sized coffee shops. Sony had “furnished” a house with every conceivable Sony appliance but it had a Jetsons-like cartoon-simple and simply unbelievable quality about it. It was a stage-set not a meditation on life.

My next lesson was at a cocktail party Jan had at her apartment, on one of the top floors of Mies van der Rohe’s apartment building on Lakeshore Drive. The layout and materials and furniture looked as coolly new as if the apartment had been built today, not in the 1940’s. And there was something complete and engaging about being in that space, it seemed designed to be lived in.

A couple of weeks ago I found a book at the City Library about Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, built near Chicago in 1946. The author, Maritz Vandenberg, wrote:

“And there was … a spiritual aspect. Throughout his life the apparently technology-driven Mies van der Rohe was actually an earnest searcher for after the deeper meanings behind everyday existence. Some time between 1924 and 1927 he moved to the view that ‘building art is always the spatial expression of spiritual decisions’ and began to gravitate away from the rather mechanistic functionalists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“new objectivity”) movement. … Though this period of spirituality seems to have faded somewhat after his Barcelona Pavilion, and he gradually returned to drier and more objective design attitudes … the dignified serenity of pavilions such as the Farnsworth House and the New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-8) bear witness to Mies’s abiding preoccupation with the creation of orderly, noble and indeed quasi-spiritual spaces in our turbulent world.”

Photo credit: Dayna Batemen who posts as Suttonhoo at Flickr.

What inspires me about the Farnsworth House, that I want to translate into the spine of a book, is that the elements seem held together casually, slid up against one another with no force or effort at all. The book suggests that Mies had to go to a great deal of trouble to get that effect, the surfaces of bolts being sanded away to look as if there were no bolts holding anything together at all. I’m aiming for a book that uses no glue: the signatures clip around a comb-brace that’s snapped onto a spine, that’s slid into a cover. I want it to look like the deck and house do in this detail, above, of the Farnsworth House, aligned but not forced together.

Photo credit: Dayna Bateman who posts as Suttonhoo at Flickr.

The second layer of inspiration for me is the intangible, inexpressible one. I wander around making notes on how different things are hinged together, mentally pulling them apart and manufacturing the components in my mind. But what’s almost more valuable to me is the re-inforcement of inspiration, seeing how someone else is inspired by something that’s inspired me. I can’t explain it, but the red rain shoes standing like a worshipper’s shoes at the door of a Buddhist temple, in front of a door at the Farnsworth House encapsulates exactly the quality I want my books to have.

It’s occurred to me that I keep hearing the same alarm bells: “the tomato is doomed?” are the cries when there are developments in the genetic modification of foodstuffs (which I’m against). And “the book is dead?” is the wail that goes up around discussions of electronic publishing (which I’m for, but I’m against the complete extinction of books).

My business newspaper is named Yamazaki’s Notebook for the device used by Shinya Yamazaki, the existential sociologist from William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light / Idoru / All Tomorrow’s Parties). Gibson’s description of the notebook is tantalisingly oblique: it’s a screen-based device, with sound recording, translation, and transcription features. It seems to have what must be a slide-out or fold-away keyboard. Mostly Yamazaki talks to his notebook or writes on its screen with a stylus. There’s a heartbreakingly sweet description of a postcard “being blistered by rain” in a gutter, which leads me to think there’s a camera in the notebook. There’s a reference to some kind of advanced Japanese material covering it. But in my mind Yamazaki’s notebook has become the dream of everything I want a hybrid paper /electronic book to be: everything I worshipped about the Sony Walkman  crossed with a Moleskine notebook. My bookbinding business works with real paper (non-tree and I’d like to be able to experiment with microbial cellulose pages) but I’m configuring electronic books, really simple ones based around electronic components that can be “printed” onto paper, or made from paper. My point of reference is the old disposable camera-in-a-cardboard-box. When I’m thinking of sound in books my point of reference isn’t Sony any more (or the Sony Ericsson Walkman phones) it’s the development of surprisingly hi-fi sound in record-your-own greeting cards with sound chips embedded in them that are being manufactured in Malaysia.

 Today in The Sunday Times from London is a report of the Unbound Conference at the New York Public Library.

The world’s libraries are heading for the internet, says Bryan Appleyard. If this means we lose touch with real books and treat their content as ‘information’, civilisation is the loser. “The majority of information,” said Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, “lies outside the internet.” Redmer was speaking last week at Unbound, an invitation-only conference at the New York Public Library (NYPL). It was a groovy, bleeding-edge-of-the-internet kind of affair. There was Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, a book about the new business economics of the net. There was Arianna Huffington, grand panjandrum of both the blogosphere and smart east coast society. But this wasn’t just another jolly. There were also publishers and Google execs, two groups of people who might one day soon be fighting for their professional lives before the Supreme Court. For Unbound was another move in a strange, complex and frequently obscure war tht is being fought over the digitisation of the great libraries of the world. The details of this war may seem baffling, but there is nothing baffling about what is at stake. Intellectual property — intangibles like ideas, knowledge and information — is, in the globalised world, the most valuable of all assets.

The area of copyright and digital rights is outside my sphere of knowledge. My book-binding projects are for people who’ve created and own the rights to what they’re publishing, or the books are for private use (blank notebooks or archives). The writing published by Yamazaki’s Notebook is under a Creative Commons licence, and I’m using the “fair quote” ratios for quoting from books and making an effort to contact anyone whose work I’m quoting to seek formal permission.

What’s difficult to bear is how much is never transferred every time a new technological format takes hold. Up until the development of the computer, innovations in book materials and binding techniques didn’t matter at all. The Gospel of Thomas on papyrus remains as readable as when it was etched in Biblical times.

I love libraries, and I love the New York Public Library above all others. It’s a glorious place to be to read and write (although the bookshop no longer sells legal pads embossed with New York Public Library at the top of each page, which I used to favour for my correspondence). I’m mesmerised by the reverent junk shop quality of the manuscripts division, seeing bits of John Donne’s poems scratched onto the back of laundry lists, and great novels begun on sheets of hotel stationery. But it isn’t just flotsam and jetsam. These bits of paper (and also sound recordings, home movies, drawings, etc.) are the impressions of the life of any time.  A New York Times article I clipped in 2005 talked about the usefulness of the menu collection at the New York Public Library.

In 1899, the New York Public Library received a query from a Miss Frank E. Buttolph, who wanted to know if it would add restaurant menus to its growing collections. The answer was yes, and Miss Buttolph, then 49, began spending 25 years visiting restaurants in the city and writing hoteliers and other correspondents abroad, eventually amassing more than 25,000. They have periodically been dusted off and put on display, providing visitors with a view of the changing tastes and spending habits of everyone from Park Avenue power brokers to South Street stevedores. Now, those menus, and thousands of others in collections around the country, are being sifted by oceanographers seeking hints of changes in fish and shellfish populations and popularity before good records were kept. ”A menu was a piece of ephemera, it wasn’t meant to be saved, but thankfully some people collected them,” said Glenn A. Jones, an oceanographer at the Galveston campus of Texas A&M University and a leader of the research. Only by knowing how bountiful the ocean was can one determine the potential for restoring important marine fisheries, he said. Before fisheries agencies routinely collected data on landings and prices, he added, there was not a lot of information to go on. Menus also are one of the only tools for tracking shifting consumer demand for various species.

The life around the library is just as important. Charles Addams sketched my definition of happiness; the cartoon where Morticia and Gomez Addams, with Pugsley and Wednesday, are standing sweetly, dreamily, the very definition of family togetherness, by a picture window while a blizzard rages outside. Morticia says serenly, “Just the kind of day that makes you feel glad to be alive.” Charles Addams took great care with the architectural details in his drawings and did a lot of his research at the New York Public Library. When he died some of his original cartoons were donated to the Library and line the walls of a couple of passageways upstairs. His wake was held there, too.

About 250 of his friends gathered for the party yesterday at the New York Public Library. Candles twinkled in the Cecile Barthos Forum, which was set up to resemble the genteel cocktail parties Mr. Addams enjoyed at his home in Sagaponack, L.I., where he lived when he was not in Manhattan. Food was served, a Dixieland band played and people danced. Mrs. Addams wore white for the memorial; she wore black when she married Mr. Addams eight years ago in a pet cemetery on Long Island.

New York Times. November 19, 1988

Maira Kalman has illustrated a version of E.B. White and Strunk’s The Elements of Style, Nico Muhly adapted it as an opera and it was staged at the New York Public Library.

Photograph of The Elements of Style performance by Emily Davidow.

Mr. Muhly, 24, is a talented and audacious graduate of the Juilliard School who has worked with Philip Glass and Bjork. His Strunk and White songs are eloquently scored for soprano, tenor, viola, banjo and percussion. They also include parts for Ms. Kalman’s friends and family, who will make ”little gentle noises” through amplified kitchen utensils (vintage eggbeaters and meat grinders) and a set of dice shaken in a bowl. But even with this lineup, the humor of the piece lies more in its straight-faced seriousness. The vocal writing is cast in a distinctly early-music style, the textures as pure and pared down as Strunk and White liked their sentences. There are frequent moments of disarming beauty, as if Mr. Muhly were tempting the listener to forget the jokes and simply listen. At a rehearsal last week, the tenor Matt Hensrud stood on the elevated catwalk of the library’s reading room and sang mellifluously of punctuation and orthography. ”Do not use a hyphen between words that can better be written as one word: ‘water-fowl, waterfowl,”’ he intoned, his voice echoing in the churchlike acoustics. He was joined by the soprano Abby Fischer for some tenderly turned philology: ”The steady evolution of the language seems to favor union: two words eventually become one.” … ”I decided early on that there was going to be this melancholy,” Mr. Muhly said. ”It’s already so absurdist, I didn’t want too much laughing during the music.”

New York Times. October 19.2005

Maira Kalman’s dear dog poet Max, who dresses like Chico Marx and has the pure golden heart of Harpo Marx, visited Paris and saw poetry everywhere, literally. “As I left the museum, I saw a scene that made my heart stand still,” Max said. “A man had written poems all over the sidewalk and the buildings and the cars and the trees. As the cars left, parts of his poems went whizzing around the city, and as the leaves fell from the trees, words fluttered down to the ground.” I think of this as a metaphor for appreciating life in the city. I believe that these poems (or an eye for the sweet sad details that become poetic) are as much a structure of the city as its buildings. I have a hunch that when these details are written onto scraps of paper, or published in books, they become anchors, holding information to a place, and when all information is digitised and hovers and isn’t brought to ground anywhere in particular, maybe stories will lose some of their weight and resonance. Would George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn go to the New York Public Library (as they did in Breakfast at Tiffanys) to look up his book’s listing on Amazon.com? Would the Ghostbusters go running through the basement stacks in pursuit of an otherworldly computer virus? In a wholly digital world would the Pirate Lemur want to visit the lions, Patience and Fortitude?

Patience or Fortitude, New York Public Library Lion with the Pirate Lemur.

From the New York Times yesterday I clipped this essay by Joe Queenan on why he only buys books that are described as “astonishing.”

I think of my scrapbooks of newspaper articles as compilation tapes, things that grab me right now, songs I’ll want to hear again sometime. And I do re-read them, there are phrases I find myself humming. I signed up for an e-mail address to capture the newspaper articles that grab my attention, the ones I can’t clip because they’re online, and there are thousands of files in it but I almost never refer to it. What I come back to again and again are the articles that seemed valuable enough to print out, very quiet small stories generally, hardly news at all. I paste these into scrapbooks loosely based around themes and concepts so goofily oblique that they’d make a reference librarian squirm. But it makes sense to me.

 In Joe Queenan I’ve found a kindred spirit.

“No one was more excited than I was when Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” described Alice McDermott’s new novel as “astonishing.” Several years ago, overwhelmed by the flood of material unleashed annually by the publishing industry, I decided to establish a screening program by purchasing only books that at least one reviewer had described as “astonishing.” Previously, I had limited my purchases to merchandise deemed “luminous” or “incandescent,” but this meant I ended up with an awful lot of novels about bees, Provence or Vermeer. The problem with incandescent or luminous books is that they veer toward the introspective, the arcane or the wise, while I prefer books that go off like a Roman candle. When I buy a book, I don’t want to come away wiser or happier or even better informed. I want to get blown right out of the water by the author’s breathtaking pyrotechnics. I want to come away astonished.”

I have an entire business that began with scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. When the paper and printing industry went into its “fast food nation” phase, the modest students notebooks I’d been buying from a business stationer somewhere around 34th street, in the shadow of the Empire State Building, became unavailable. (I don’t know for sure but I guess the place is probably out of business now.) When I started to my make my own books I inadvertently invented a binding method through a combination of reverse engineering what I now know to be a poorly made hardcover book (bought for $1 at the Los Feliz Public Library sale in Los Angeles, where I started my business), and my deep admiration for the concept of being able to  ‘unbind’ (the comb-bound business document). And friends saw my scrapbooks and began asking me to make books for them and voila!, a business. At the moment I’m making prototypes of new books and working out how to manufacture them and the business is going to move to Calcutta in India, sometime this year.

Photograph by Sleeping Bear (modified with the museum template at dumpr.net)

 When I started to sell my books I wanted my samples to be coherent, to have some organising principle. Printers samples have an alphabet soup of nonsense syllables or  generically bland illustrations that hit every colour and tone in the spectrum. I wanted my samples to be complete: albums of real photos, scrapbooks of actual newspaper clippings, reconfigured bindings of genuine novels. I wanted an astonishing theme and the fox terrier proved to be that, and broadly adaptable.

 It was 1996. At the time I was deeply charmed by the fox terrier actor, Skippy, star of the thirties movies Bringing Up Baby, Topper Takes a Trip, and the Awful Truth, and the Thin Man series. (It’s said that Skippy taught Cary Grant how to be a comedian.) I was also re-reading the adventures of Tintin and Snowy. In fractured French, with the help of my friend Sarah translating, I called the Herge foundation to ask if the cartoonist had modelled Snowy on a real fox terrier. “No,” the answer came. “Herge preferred cats but a cat was too ’sauvage’”…wild, I think is a close translation… and independent to be Tintin’s travelling companion, so he chose a dog. And there was also an ornery real fox terrier (now deceased) named Bix who was an unbelievable source of amusement and frustration.