THE BLANK PAGE
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
