bibliostructures

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.