bibliostructures

Chanel Sign on Wooster Street, originally uploaded by estace.

The caption is “You know, the intersection used in the Chanel ad with Daria Werbowy.”

In Lawrence Lessig’s book Creative Commons, which spawned the website and sharing concept Creative Commons Org, I seem to remember that he writes about the difficulty young film-makers were having in New York, making their movies. If they shot a scene in Times Square and a billboard was clearly visible, they’d have to apply to the company who leased that billboard and seek permission to use the shot. Sometimes the company asked for money. The filmmakers faced the same problem with music: they’d record ambient sound, and if it included recognisable music (or sonic advertising) they’d be slugged again for fees for usage. A piece of iconic architecture or infamous location upon which a commercial enterprise stands might ask for financial recognition. So young film-makers started out wanting to reflect the streets around them, their world, and the only way that they could make movies about that world was by erasing the world itself, and erecting something artificial and bleached of commercial references.

Lawrence Lessig’s “creative commons” is an idea about sharing and inspiration, that artists aren’t appropriating something for gain (necessarily), that there’s a dialogue to be had by people being able to reference one another’s work, if it isn’t for commercial gain. I’ve covered my writing by the share and share alike concept developed by Lawrence Lessig. I always ask writers whose work I quote from at length for their permission and comments.

The photograph above is one from my “favourites” collection at Flickr. It has a “blog this” button next to it, and I don’t need to ask permission to publish the photographs that I use in my blog, but I do. I send a link to the post, ask the photographer if it’s okay, and what kind of credit they would like. I try to admire intelligently and not use anything out-of-context, or ironically. A couple of people have suggested that they’d rather that I asked for permission before I published. I agree, and that’s what I’d do in the real world, if I were publishing this as a book (or a pamphlet essay). But the blog button exists and technically, I could publish these photographs without asking. I attribute the photographs and I publish links that take the reader to the photographer’s site on Flickr. I will retract if asked to cease and desist. This gives me a philosophy that sounds something like a tabloid newspaper’s. Mostly it’s impatience. I’m writing a lot and quickly, I know, personally, that I’m not intending to be exploitative, so I’ve taken some kind of moral high-ground, personally, and assumed that others will trust me. They do. They have.

A few posts ago I drew attention to the ’synthetic paper’ created by Yupo, that’s used by Durabooks. I’ve made many references to the company, Melcher Media, that publishes the books, and to the authors of Cradle to Cradle, a Durabook published by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. I drew heavily from Yupo’s own descriptions on its website, and hoped I’d made it clear I was linking to, and quoting from its website. I want the information on this site to be not just informational but practical. I’ve had a lot of hits in the last few days on that post: some are from searches for “artisans synthetic papers” some are probably from people at Yupo, perhaps their legal team.

 I e-mailed Yupo and gave them the link to the story and asked questions, wanting to delve more deeply into the story of the development of the paper and its uses. The company’s representative that contacted me was concerned I’d reposted so much of their material that’s copyrighted and wanted to know if I stand to make any commercial gain from posting this material. It’s a fair question and I’m not offended. I replied in a conciliatory manner that has opened a dialogue. The company’s representative asked me to provide a link to the diagram of the manufacturing process rather than re-posting the diagram: I’ve done this. I’ve also made it clearer that the descriptions of the paper itself are from the company’s website, and made the link clearer. I do this in order to carefully represent the technical principles: I don’t want to make errors by erroneously paraphrasing something.

But this goes to the heart of what we’re dealing with when we try to consider using alternative sources of paper: that electronic and synthetic papers are invariably covered by a patent. It’s an enormous investement of time and money to develop an alternative to the fast-food wood-pulp paper that blights our world and there has to be some kind of a reward in it for people who make this investment (ethical as much as financial).

 When we talk about organic paper it’s the same kind of difference between folk music and commercial music. When Leonard Cohen adapts a section from the Bible, talking about King David in the song Hallelujah, there isn’t a set of heirs running an estate that he could pay divets or cubits or whatever the biblical currency was, to in royalties. When Bruce Springsteen records Pete Seeger’s We Shall Overcome (the most played song on the i-Tunes programme on my computer) he pays publishing royalties to Pete. (I bought Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions cd and loaded it into my computer.)

When I write of the paper’s that I’ve mentioned that Kate’s Paperie sells it’s folk music I’m referencing, a set of ancient techniques that belong to everybody and nobody. When I’m talking about electronic or synthetic paper’s I’m inevitably referring to a patented manufacturing process of a unique chemical compound. The companies themselves have a dilemma. Artists can freely associate on paper because they don’t have to financially associate themselves with a particular manufacturing technique associated with a material. They might have preferences for one company’s products over another but they’re not breaking a copyright by fooling around with a particular product. 

This site isn’t journalism or criticism or fandom. I don’t profit from it in the sense of advertising. If anything I want this site to be thought of as an informal, unaligned trade group, like the Plastiquarian site, operated by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. I hope that people meet and make exchanges, that this might be a place where people CAN fool around with different kinds of paper, and think out loud and experiment. One day there might be a set of Yupo luxury synthetic paper being sold at Kate’s Paperie, or a diary made of radio paper, but I’m not here to be a commercial matchmaker. What I care about are the collaborations, the experiments, the advances in techniques, the alternatives offered to water wasting, environment destroying fast-food paper manufacture, the projects themselves. I also want to help keep alive paper’s couture wing without making it a fetish, by respecting and understanding these ancient techniques.

This comment today, from Ann Althouse in the New York Times Select Column expresses something of what I’m trying to get at. (I can’t link to the post because it’s ‘premium content’ I’ve paid the privilege to read.)

Blogging is just writing, and there is no end to the things you can do with writing. When you read a political blog, you might be running into someone like me, a solo blogger who reacts casually to issues that surface on any given day, or you might be reading the work of a writer who is pursuing an intense, partisan agenda and pushing particular candidates.

If the blog is open to comments — as mine is — there is a mysterious additional layer of writing. Who are these people who tap into another person’s readership? Some of them must be there just to pass the time interacting with other people who have responded to the personal style of the blogger. Others are much more politically engaged, perhaps to the point where you wonder whether they are part of some candidate’s campaign.

“Political Bloggers Fear Publicists Will Infiltrate Sites” was the headline for the column Alan Wirzbicki wrote in The Boston Globe last Friday. He tells us about a little incident on the Redstate blog, where a commenter seemed excessively supportive of John McCain (who is, apparently, not terribly popular on Redstate).

This moved Erick Erickson, who runs Redstate, to do a little research and discover that the commenter worked for a company with some connection to McCain’s political action committee.

“This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant,” Erickson told Wirzbicki.

Somehow I can’t work up much fear over this. How vigilant do I need to be? As long as no one is dropping unverifiable factual assertions in the comments — trying to stir up a scandal for a candidate? — why should I care if my commenters have their secrets, their ulterior motives and their as-yet-undiscovered manipulative ways? That’s the way life is in the real world.

It’s good to have a place where strangers can meet, and it’s fine if it takes you awhile to learn what other people are really up to. The blog is a coffeehouse, and if some new commenter is actually a political operative, I think it would be fun to see how well he can take on the sharp, individualistic commenters who have already set up here, carrying on a long conversation. I bet it wouldn’t take them long to unmask and embarrass him.

Let life on the blog unfold like off-blog life. 

Ann Althouse is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and writes the blog Althouse.

Director Preston Sturges talking to Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels (1941) in an owl wagon on Sunset Boulevard.

There’s a scene in Sullivan’s Travels where celebrated comedy film director Joel McCrea (Sullivan) is trying to get out of town on a fact-finding mission to research poverty to make his “deep dish” documentary O Brother Where Art Thou. Getting out of town is harder than he would have imagined and he makes several false starts. One time he ends up in an owl wagon on Hollywood Boulevard and a failed startlet ‘the Girl’, (Veronica Lake) buys him eggs. The camera pans along Hollywood Boulevard. There are hardly any buildings there. You can still see some farmland. If the shot had widened out a little I think it would have been possible to see Dandee Shoe Repair, around the corner on Vine Street.

Dandee looks like it’s been there since the 1920’s. It just fixes shoes and luggage, and there aren’t fancy displays, only shoe repair equipment and materials. Hollywood and Vine is a mythical location in movie business history, but Hollywood Boulevard is just a shopping centre these days, movie-themed. Cary Grant’s footsteps in the cement outside the Chinese Theatre, a few blocks away, have been worn thin. Walter Matthau’s handprints are so big and deep it looks like had shovels at the end of his wrists. The bus stop nearest to my friend Nanni’s house was near the foosteps of Eugene Pallet, a character actor (often an exasperated banker) in the 1930’s screwball comedy movies. I went in to Dandee one day to see about having a piece of luggage repaired, I’d been recommended by a shoe repair place in my neighbourhood. There were twelve pairs of enormous motorised dancing shoes that had been made for the Frankenstein’s Monster at Universal Studios in Japan. This presented me with a vision of everything I wanted my book-binding business to be: based around a traditional trade, with experimenting with new materials, and connection to a neighbourhood, a sense of belonging. Dandee isn’t in the movie business, but it’s historically, geographically connected with the movies and a few of its customers are in show business.

By a process of elimination, Calcutta is the place I’ve chosen to be my home of bookbinding.

THE PRACTICAL REASONS

Small presses making their own books still thrive in Calcutta.

A thriving literary scene … booksellers in Calcutta. Photograph: Piyal Adhikary From THE GUARDIAN 13.2.07

The Bookfair is the Asian equivalent of the Frankfurt bookfair and is attended by book business representatives from around the world.

 The Oxford Bookstore and Gallery, the glue that binds the literary community.

The local government is encouraging investments in technology projects.

THE IMPRACTICAL (REAL) REASONS I WANT TO MOVE TO CALCUTTA

The stillness and quietness of Amit Chaudhuri’s writing (the cover of his anthology of Indian writing is a painting by Jamini Roy).

“I believe in writing about localities as opposed to ideas, for instance, India to me is an idea whereas Bombay and Calcutta are locales where I grew up and experienced life. Regional writing is more sensuous. It suggests India by ellipsis….I’m always attracted to serenity and tranquility. I think the more the inner turmoil, the more there is a tendency towards or an attraction for the expression of something tranquil. Satyajit Ray once said confilct and drama is at the core of western music. For me, the equanimity of classical Indian music, or some of the poetry that came out of India, Japan, or China in which the most unimportant moment in time becomes important, is more attractive. In modern writing, this is connected to the urban world, the colonial city. Like Joyce who sets his ephiphanies in Dublin, the presence of a colonial city is important to me.”

interview with Amit Chaudhuri

The movies of Satyajit Ray.

Pather Panchali still 

“The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race, which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. …I feel that he is a “giant” of the movie industry.”
- Akira Kurosawa

Satyajit Ray, an Indian filmmaker and among the dozen or so great masters of world cinema, is known for his humanistic approach to cinema. He made his films in Bengali, a language spoken in the eastern state of India – West Bengal. And yet, his films are of universal interest. They are about things that make up the human race – relationships, emotions, struggle, conflicts, joys and sorrows. Satyajit Ray, the master storyteller, has left a cinematic heritage that belongs as much to India as to the world. His films demonstrate a remarkable humanism, elaborate observation and subtle handling of characters and situations. The cinema of Satyajit Ray is a rare blend of intellect and emotions. He is controlled, precise, meticulous, and yet, evokes deep emotional response from the audience. His films depict a fine sensitivity without using melodrama or dramatic excesses. He evolved a cinematic style that is almost invisible. He strongly believed – “The best technique is the one that’s not noticeable”. Though initially inspired by the neo-realist tradition, his cinema belongs not to a specific category or style but a timeless meta-genre of a style of story telling that touches the audience in some way. His films belong to a meta-genre that includes the works of Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Chaplin, David Lean, Federico Fellini, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, Luis Bunuel, Yasujiro Ozu, Ritwik Ghatak and Robert Bresson. All very different in style and content, and yet creators of cinema that is timeless and universal.

From Satyajit Ray.org 

 

 And his family’s tradition of experimenting with new printing equipment and techniques to publish many of their own books, some of which connected with ancient stories, including his father’s nonsense rhymes.

In 1961, Ray revived Sandesh, a children’s magazine founded by his grandfather, to which he continued to contribute illustrations, verses and stories throughout his life. Ray wrote numerous short stories, articles, and novels in Bengali. He made a significant contribution to children’s literature in Bengali. Most of his fiction was written for teen age children. His detective stories and novels were particularly popular with them. His stories are unpretentious and entertaining. The subjects included: adventure, detective stories, fantasy, science fiction and even horror.

Satyajit Ray.org

Satyajit Ray’s essays on films from around the world, which he watched and studied, avidly, and his affection for the Marx Brothers.

Among the directors, Franck Capra, Leo McCarey, George Stevens, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder have all proved their mettle in comedies. If they had to share their contribution with some very efficient writers and some excellent casts of performers, they were still dominating enough to have left their hallmarks on their films. And this is no mean achievement, particularly in the context of Hollywood.

I hope I may be pardoned for forgetting thename of the gentlemen who directed the Marx Brothers, if there were any. If a director’s function is to marshall the forces and impose order and sanity on the proceedings then, obviously, he has no business to be within a mile of the Marxes. The relationship of art to inspired nonsense has never been very clearly defined. In any case, it would seem a little irrelevant to talk of art in connection with, say, A Night at the Opera. But I will say this, that if I were given the choice of one, and only one film, to take with me to that desert island, I would go for a Marx film without a moment’s hesitation.

Like so many other comedians, the Marx Brothers liked to lace their antics with music. Harpo played the harp, Chico the piano, and I think I remember Groucho once singing a song which rhymed Lydia with encyclopaedia.

Hollywood Then and Now. Satyajit Ray.

The music of Nitin Sawhney, particularly the songs sung in the Bengali language by Jayanta Bose.

Nitin Sawhney photograph by Cactusbones.

He’s organised a screening of Pather Panchali in London, composed music for a vintage Indian silent movie A Throw of the Dice, from 1929, and for Zero Degrees, a dance show at the recent Sydney Festival.

His 2005 album Philtre was fuelled by “everything from global warming to the Iraq war”, says Sawhney. “I was looking at the healing properties of music, going back to the basics of how I’ve always perceived it. As a child, if I felt down, I’d play the piano or guitar.” Fom an early age, Sawhney blended his musical passions, from Bach and Debussy to jazz, flamenco and classical Indian ragas. Yet he scorns the term “fusion”. It “presupposes that music exists in separate, independent strands, whereas I think all music is part of something bigger,” he says. “You wouldn’t say a painting is a ‘fusion’ of paint – it uses a palette. Well, I use a palette of influences to create musical images and ideas.”

The Guardian. April 1, 2006

I’ve just sent an e-mail to the artists Zatorski + Zatorski to see when they’ll have time to help me put together a story about the project that they’ve been working on for several years to turn the King James Bible into text messages. I’ll keep you posted.

The Bible is often associated with advances in the form of books: Gutenberg’s Bible, obviously, Sony’s disc of the King James Bible that accompanied the first model of the clunky (ugly and soon to become extinct) Data Discman in 1991. Jack Miles in his book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, points out that the New Testament was an advance in bookbinding, over the individual papyrus scrolls of the Hebrew Bible. But it fixed the Bible in format and order, whereas papyrus scrolls are more fluid.

 I’m interested in how the book-binding references go the other way, too, that advanced science fiction scenarios bring in books published in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the replicants are living on a barren mars reading contraband Jules Verne and H.G. Wells era books about Mars as a verdant, watery paradise. Captain Jean Luc Picard, in his quarters on the Enterprise had a few old hardback paper books. George Clooney, the psychologist in Solaris, had some books of poetry.

In 1945 in Nag Hammadi in Egypt, a couple of farmers found some ancient bibilical texts, on papyrus, buried in earthenware jars, that have come to be known as the Gnostic Gospels.

Shortly before he and his brothers avenged their father’s murder in a blood feud, they had saddled their camels and gone out to the Jabal to dig for sabakh, a soft soil they used to fertilise their crops. Diggin around a massive boulder, they hit a red earthenware jar, almost a meter high. Muhammad Ali hesitated to break the jar, considering that a jinn, or spirit, might live inside. But realising that it might also contain gold, he raised his mattock, smashed the jar, and discovered inside thirteen payrus books, bound in leather. Returning to his home in al-Qasr, Muhammad Ali dumped the books and loose papyrus leaves on the straw pield on the ground next to the oven. Muhammad’s mother, Umm-Ahmad admits that she burned much of the papyrus in the oven along with the straw she used to kindle the fire.

Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of the texts tell the origin of the human race in terms very different from the usual reading of Genesis: the Testimony of Truth for example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent! Here the serpent, long known to appear in gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while “the Lord” threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it. Another text, mysteriously entitled The Thunder, Perfect Mind, offers an extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

For I am the first and the last. I am the honoured one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin…

I am the barren one, and many are her sons….

I am the silence that is incomprehensible….

I am the utterance of my name.

Gnostic Gospels. Elaine Pagels

When I think of Ridley Scott I always think of Bladerunner and science fiction, maybe it’s the only Ridley Scott movie I’ve ever seen, not counting the Apple 1984 ad (which was based on a science fiction book, 1984 by George Orwell). So when I saw the Prada Perfume movie by Ridley Scott and his daughter, Jordan, I thought of science fiction even though there’s no basis for this connection. The woman, played by Daria Werbowy, carries an old cloth covered book around with her: she’s on a metaphorical journey through life, with several alternate readings: as mother, daughter, virgin and mistress, as The Thunder, Perfect Mind is recited.

 There’s an excellent perspective on this on a theologically-themed blog, Ralph the Sacred River, that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Monday, February 21, 2005

The Archon Wore Prada

This is from this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

Last week, the four-and-a-half minute “Thunder Perfect Mind” made its debut at the Berlin Film Festival. Directed by Ridley Scott, “Thunder Perfect Mind” is part of a burgeoning genre of cinema — the superlong commercial as short film, in this case created for the introduction of the new Prada fragrance.
…
There is no dialogue, just a poem read in a voice-over and set to a smooth, jazzy soundtrack. “The poem was too perfect,” says Jordan [Scott, co-director], who happened upon it nearly a decade ago and was saving it for the right project. A Gnostic text probably written around the first century, it prescribes a wisdom that cuts eerily to the quick on more than one level: I am shame and boldness … I am the substance and the one who has no substance.

As every schoolboy knows, “Thunder, Perfect Mind” (and, yes, that is a really cool title) is one of the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi. The Dead Sea Scrolls are probably more famous, but I’m pretty sure none of them are going to be used to sell Prada. (Although …. 4Q184, “The Wiles of the Wicked Woman” … quick, call Ridley Scott!)

Wrapped, Photograph by Andreas Reinhold.

Yamazaki was deep, Rydell told himself. He’d never actually figured out what it was that Yamazaki did. Sort of a freelance Japanese anthropologist who studied Americans.

William Gibson. Idoru.

I named my online business magazine Yamazaki’s Notebook for Shinya Yamazaki, the existential sociologist from William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties)

The apartment is in a tall Victorian house, built of wood and very elaborately painted, in a district where the names of streets honour nineteenth-century American politicians: Clay, Scott, Pierce, Jackson. This morning, Tuesday, leaving the apartment, I noticed, on the side of the topmost newel, indications of a vanished hinge. I suspect that this must once have supported an infant-gate. Going along Scott in search of a cab, I came upon a sodden postcard, face up on the sidewalk. The narrow features of the martyr Shapely, the AIDS saint, blistered with rain. Very melancholy.

passage from Shinya Yamazaki’s notebook

Virtual Light. William Gibson

Yamazaki collected up observations in his electronic notebook, recorded and transcribed people’s voices, tucked images into it, like postcards nestled between the pages of a book. His thoughts and observations of the texture of the technological world of William Gibson’s novels are composed of simple, everyday objects as if they were still life’s, and paused long enough to allow us to reflect on them. Maybe the technological equivalent of the still life is the freeze-frame.

I think that there’s some kind of middle ground between wholly electronic forms of communication, as we know them now, and the letters and journal entries on paper (that have been so evocatively written about by the people leaving comments on my site).

The writer’s responsibility is care, caring about the message sent to someone: that it’s thoughtfully composed, beautifully expressed, and in the choice of materials, handwriting, perhaps a card or clipping tucked into an envelope conveys some sense of place.

 The maker of stationery’s responsibility is a different kind of carefulness, a surface to write on and read from that encourages stillness and reflectiveness. The electronic “paper” I’m interested in runs at a speed somewhere between a computer and regular paper and is frequently paused. Something that holds the words and images until the reader chooses to erase them (so that they don’t have to be loaded in, in order to be read), and some kind of format that’s blank and clear, like a notebook or a piece of paper. I think we’re getting closer to that kind of material that has its own power source (renewable, solar) and isn’t bedevilled by format changes in software that renders the whole thing inscrutable in a year or two.

There are bits of electronic communication that I treat like letters: text messages that I’d like to keep tucked in my pocket, like fortune cookie messages. E-mail messages that ARE as beautiful as short letters.

I’d like to keep electronic images (some of my Flickr favourite photo montages) in my notebook to look at…

Siesta, Photograph by The Pack.  

And sequences from Tiffany Shlain’s collage movies and the list of the books that Tiffany recommends in the newsletter she sends to her friends and colleagues.

Postal Age, The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America by David Henkin
Americans commonly recognize television, e-mail, and instant messaging as agents of pervasive cultural change. But many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary. As Henkin argues, a burgeoning postal network initiated major cultural shifts during the nineteenth century, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications. From the mid-1800s, with cheaper postage, mass literacy, and migration, through the Civil War and the gold rush, Henkin draws on original letters and diaries, as well as public discussions, to tell the story of how a broad range of Americans adjusted to a new world of long-distance correspondence, crowded post offices, junk mail, valentines, and dead letters.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/204564.ctl

Some phrases from a radio interview with my favourite author, Pankaj Mishra, as sound, and this quote from an interview that he conducted, by e-mail, with Loggernaut .

 I do think that most people live in unawareness of where they and their society stands in the world, both historically and in the present. This is not to be pitied and scorned, but to be understood in the light of the pressures the society built around work and consumption exerts in its citizens, where a kind of amnesia and ignorance is essential if you want to move from day to day without feeling unduly stressed-out. I am a writer, and I spend most of my day thinking about writing, history, the present, I have this kind of leisure, but this is not what other people do or can do. So it is important to be aware of the larger organized systems of meaning we inhabit very differently, and to not blame individuals for aggressiveness and violence of their societies.

Four or five articles at a time from the New York Times (some I’ve kept for a long time).

What Rubin still responds to is the elegance of this type of high-pressure decision-making, based on calculations made in his early Wall Street days with a slide rule. He once described this approach to me as trying to function as a kind of ”mental yellow pad.” The trick, he says, is to separate your emotions from the analysis. It’s a bit of Wall Street Zen: don’t invest in your investments.

Robert Rubin by Jacob Weisberg. New York Times Magazine. July 19. 1998

and the sometimes deeply soulful editorials from The Calcutta Telegraph.

The German poet, Goethe, is said to have cried out for more light as he was dying. He thus equated light to life, death to darkness. Many centuries earlier, the Upanishads had seen light as synonymous with knowledge, ignorance with darkness. The mystery surrounding darkness disappeared with the discovery of the electric bulb, which ended mankind’s dependence on sunlight. Darkness could be lit up with the help of a switch that turned on an incandescent lamp. It is impossible to list the number of ways modern life is dependent on the electric lamp which Thomas Alva Edison first introduced in the 1870s. By the 20th century, the electric bulb had become the commonest source of light after sunset or in places where sunlight could not penetrate. This monopoly seems about to end. The Australian government has announced that it will soon introduce a legislation to phase out the sale and use of incandescent light bulbs and to replace them with compact fluoroscent lights that are more energy-efficient. The momentous decision grows out of environmental concerns. The incandescent light bulb uses electricity that flows through a filament to create light, but much of the energy used is wasted heat.

Editorial. Calcutta Telegraph Opinion Page. 25.2.07

and the daily reports on the fortunes and tribulations of Sourav Ganguly who has become, in my mind, a mythical figure: both humanly flawed and a little god-like.

THE THINKER! Sourav Ganguly at a promotional in the city on Saturday.( A Calcutta Telegraph Picture published today on the front page of the paper.)

The mind is a place of its own. It can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven. In a layman’s jargon, these immortal lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost say that attitude is everything. No matter how adverse conditions may be, man has the capacity to turn things around by his determination, perseverance and hard work. Sourav Ganguly proved it with his stirring comeback in South Africa and then again here, in the one-dayers. The Man of the Series award against Sri Lanka is an indication of how far Dada has travelled. Just a couple of months back, he was a desperate man fighting with his back to the wall. Down in the dumps, the southpaw had nothing to cling to but his self-belief. This he held on to, even when no one was willing to give him a chance of making a comeback, as if his whole life depended on it. And he returned in style. Like Ozymandias of old, Sourav was the lord of all that he surveyed.

Times of India. 17.2.07

World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, Photograph by speric.

When I finally get my bookbinding workshop re-located to Calcutta I have an idea for a display. I want to make a papier mache globe, something like the Worlds Fair Globe in New York, but smaller, obviously, and stick pieces of paper on it, from around the world, on their locations. It seems a good way to keep track of the paper and where it’s from, a good way to display it and remember where it’s all from, after I’ve been out on the Paper Trail (which in my mind is modelled on the Fruit Detective’s expeditions) and bring it all back to Calcutta.

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.

He began amassing “dossiers” on different fruits, which contained the names of thousands of fruit growers, breeders, marketers, wholesalers, and retailers. Ten years later, he is a unique source of information on the fruit industry–a vital link between the “knowers” who love obscure fruit and the “growers” who cultivate it.

Karp moved to California in 1999, because that’s where so much of the nation’s fruit comes from. When he isn’t searching for fruit, he collects books about fruit, compiles songs about fruit, and corresponds with fruit lovers all over the world–chefs, specialty stores, and amateur fruit enthusiasts who simply want to know the difference between a Pluot, an Aprium, and a plumcot.

The Fruit Detective. By John Seabrook

As the person who puts the stories of paper onto the website at Kate’s Paperie, Nancy Fremont does something like I imagine myself doing. She gave me these few pieces of paper (and their stories) to pin to my globe, metaphorically speaking. The photographs are by Kate Norberg.

FRANCE

Under the vaulted ceiling of an old French paper mill, the papermaking craft is still being practiced today as it was in the 15th century. Richard de Bas paper is made painstakingly by hand from cotton rags and pure water. With a wonderfully textured surface and a deckle on every side, this 100% cotton paper begs to be touched! When the paper mill’s garden blooms in spring, the flowers are gathered and added to the rag pulp, creating a slightly different mix of petals and ferns each year. The perfect paper for poetry, calligraphed or letter pressed invitations, and hand bound books.
Size: 22.5″ x 31″ sheet 

THAILAND

Sekkazome means “snowflake dyeing” in Japanese and refers to the repeating pattern achieved through a method traditionally used to hand-dye fabric. Skilled artisans carefully fold paper and apply pure color, then unfold to reveal soft-edged designs in striking colors. These strong, yet delicate papers will enhance art, crafts projects, home decor and wrap gifts in style. Papers have a deckle on two sides.

NEPAL

The sun acts as the catalyst for creating the lighter-toned leaf silhouettes on this gorgeous paper. Using Nepalese leaves shaped like ferns, the paper is first bathed in dye and then dried in the sun, creating a repeating leaf pattern. Handmade from fiber of the Lokta bush, which grows high in the Himalayas and completely regenerates in about 4 years after being cut to about 6″ from the ground. The cultivation of this “tree free” paper is an eco friendly resource and a reliable revenue stream for the village artisans of Nepal’s rural and urban areas. With a deckle edge on all sides, this striking paper is ideal for book covers, fine art collage and more.

I’ve been writing a few posts about Durabooks, the fully recyclable books inspired by the wish of Charles Melcher of Melcher Media to have a book that he could take to the beach and read in the bath. The “paper” used for these books is actually a plastic, a polymer (Large organic molecule formed by combining many smaller molecules (monomers) in a regular pattern). Melcher Media has patented the binding technique which looks to me like a variant of perfect binding, with different materials. The pages are held together, notched, glue seeps into the notches, a cover is clamped on, and voila, a paperback book!

The only Durabook I’ve seen is Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, which uses this plastic/paper and binding technique because it makes the book completely upcyclable, that it can be stripped apart and returned to components that can make something else, without the demolition process destroying the environment.

I would have been wary of this if I hadn’t held and read and enjoyed the visual and tactile experience of a Durabook before reading its chemical specifications. The pages have the feeling of a stretch woollen Comme des Garcons jacket I bought once. It was woven from a superfine wool with 12%, perhaps a little more, maybe a little less, of polyurethane introduced into the blend during manufacturing. It still felt like wool and stretched like lycra. It was sensual in a mind-bending way. I got used to it and learned to like the feeling of the movement.

Something about my copy of Cradle to Cradle that I almost worship is that the margins are straight. Whatever they do in the notching of the pages to make up the spine keeps the book perfectly in alignment. There’s something deeply depressing to me about margins that creep and sink into the spine cavity (like the unstable foundations of an old house) so that it’s hard to make out the words as I read down the page. And the pages themselves feel incredible, weird and ordinary at the same time, the paper equivalent of that Comme des Garcons jacket.

 The Durabooks website links to a company called YUPO ®, which makes the plastic/paper. The following information is from the Yupo ® website. I’ve been in touch with the company which has given me an Australian distributor for the paper, and will follow it up and provide a more detailed post later.

YUPO® is a synthetic paper made mostly from polypropylene film to which inorganic fillers and small amounts of additives are added. In principle, the film is formed while creating microvoids by stretching it biaxially. The most distinguishing feature is its multilayer construction, which consists of a base layer and paper-like layers laminated on either side, whose thickness can be adjusted to provide products ranging from thin to thick. This manufacturing process is shown in the flow sheet in Figure 1. The specific YUPO® manufacturing process is a proprietary technology unique to our company, and numerous patents have been established for it in Japan, Europe and the USA, as well as for the composition. For a visual guide to the Yupo manufacturing process, please follow this link: http://japan.yupo.com/english/product/yupo/formula.htmlplease note this information is copyright and used, with permission, from the Yupo (R) website

Synthetic paper, from its early development and historical evolution, has typically been manufactured using synthetic resin derived from petroleum as its primary material. Naturally, this has given it characteristics similar to those of plastic film, but its appearance is remarkably similar to that of regular paper made from wood pulp. In addition, many synthetic papers have properties similar to those of regular paper.

Although there is no precise definition of synthetic paper, it is generally understood to be a product manufactured using synthetic resin derived from petroleum as its primary material, which while maintaining the characteristics of the material, offers several qualities similar to that of paper made primarily from wood pulp, most typically its white and opaque appearance as well as its printing and processing capabilities.

In recent years, however, synthetic papers that surpass the above definition have emerged. For example, products that combine regular paper and plastic film are known as synthetic paper within the printing industry, and the definition of synthetic paper has become extremely imprecise. As a result, it has become common to refer to individual product names rather than to use the catch-all term synthetic paper. 

Japan’s high-level economic growth led to a rapid increase for the demand for paper. Uneasiness about the future availability of pulp resources combined with the optimism regarding the future of petrochemical industry led to the May 1968 publication of Recommendations Regarding the Fostering of the Synthetic-Paper Industry by the Resources Council of the then Science and Technology Agency of Japan. This paper led to a major synthetic paper boom among related companies. Several dozen companies devoted resources to research and development, designing a variety of production methods. As a result of these endeavors, six companies began commercial production of film synthetic paper.

However, the synthetic papers of the early days had weaknesses in their printing and processing capabilities. With synthetic papers still being tested for various applications and not yet having an important place in the market, the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 immediately changed market conditions. The cost of petrol and petrochemical products increased considerably and the demand for paper failed to grow due to economic stagnation. It was a serious blow to synthetic paper and many companies retreated from the market.

Having survived such dramatic changes, the synthetic paper market developed as a few manufacturers in Japan and the world focused on the development of niche markets for synthetic paper of greater application and with unique qualities. Synthetic paper with the properties of both paper and resin-film material matured as a product with multiple applications as it gained new functions, and it came to be known as a material that could take on some of the roles of high-quality paper. In recent years it has also been used for applications that do not involve printing, and it has expanded into the area of special resin film that does not fit into the definition of synthetic paper. With the arrival of new manufacturers into the market, the further development of synthetic paper is expected.

Resin-based synthetic papers are generally divided according to their manufacturing method into two broad categories: film synthetic paper and fiber synthetic paper. Currently, film synthetic paper is more commonly used. Several different methods have been devised to produce a paper that is similar in appearance to regular paper.

Film Synthetic Paper

(1) Internal Paper-manufacturing Method
Filling material and additives are added to synthetic resin, and following fusion and kneading in an extruder, a film is formed by extruding the material through a die slit. With this method, the relatively thin fused resin pushed through the die slit can be treated in one of two ways. In the non-oriented film method, the output resin is simply hardened by cooling and prepared for commercialization. In the biaxial oriented film method, the fused resin is cooled temporarily, and then heat is added to re-soften it. It is then stretched in the longitudinal and cross directions, forming a film. As part of the biaxial orienting film method process, during stretching, tiny holes (micro-voids) may or may not be encouraged to form, producing two different kinds of products.
Yupo Corporation’s YUPO^® is a leading example of synthetic paper with micro-voids produced by the biaxial stretching film method.

(2) Surface Coating Method
Just as with ordinary coated paper, by adding a layer of pigment coating to a plastic film (including synthetic paper produced by the internal paper-manufacturing method above), this method can add properties such as whiteness, opacity, and suitability for writing and printing to the product.

(3) Surface Treatment Method
By chemically or physically treating the synthetic resin film surface, qualities such as suitability for writing and printing or opacity can be added with this method.

Fiber Synthetic Paper

(1) Synthetic Pulp Paper
Replacing pulp with resin fibers made primarily from synthetic resin, this is a synthetic paper made with an ordinary paper machine with binder added.

(2) Spunbond Paper
In this method, synthetic resin is dissolved and injected through a nozzle, randomly lining up endless fibers formed as like synthetic fabrics. The fibers are then fused thermally in some areas, creating interfiber bonding. The whiteness and opacity of paper is achieved through the light-scattering properties of the fibers themselves and the irregular reflection caused by gaps that form between the fibers during production. This kind of paper is characterized by its superior strength, but it is not as smooth and is of somewhat lower suitability for writing and printing.
This kind of paper is generally placed in the category of “unwoven fabrics,” but depending on the product it can be accepted as a synthetic paper in the market.

Film Laminate Synthetic Paper

By laminating film on the surface of conventional paper, this method adds mechanical strength and water-resistance to the paper. By including tiny holes (micro-voids) in the film, the paper can be made to be nearly as fit for printing as conventional paper. Since the inner layer is paper, its water-resistance and strength is inferior to that of film synthetic paper.

Please note: all indented paragraphs describing the construction and manufacturing process are from the Yupo Corporation website and used with permission. Yupo ® is a registered trademark of the Yupo Corporation of Japan.

Ann Hamilton Installation “At Hand”. Photograph by Fergus Kelly whose photographs can be seen at this location on Flickr: roomtemperature.org

The last chapter in the first volume of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoir, Living To Tell The Tale, has him driving past the house of Mercedes Barcha, the woman he would marry as he’s going off to Geneva and seeing her sitting on the porch.

At that time there was a fine custom of putting on the back of the seat in front of you something that in plain language was still called writing materials. A sheet of notepaper with gold edges and a matching pink, cream, or blue envelope of the same linen paper, sometimes perfumed. In my few previous trips I had used them to write farewell poems that I turned into little paper doves and sent flying when I got off the plane. I chose sky blue and wrote my first formal letter to Mercedes seated in the doorway of her house at seven in the morning with the green dress of a bride without a beloved and the hair of an uncertain swallow, not even suspecting for whom she had dressed at dawn. I had written her other playful notes that I improvised at random and had received only verbal and always elusive responses when we happened to run into each other. This was not meant to be more than five lines to give her official notice of my trip. But at the end I added a postscript that blinded me like a flash of lightning at midday at the very instant I signed it: “If I do not receive an answer to this letter within a month, I will stay and live in Europe forever.” I did not allow myself the time to think about it again before I put the letter in the mailbox at the desolate airport in Montego Bay at two in the morning. It was already Friday. On Thursday of the following week, when I walked into the Hotel Geneva at the end of another useless day of international disagreements, I found her letter of reply.

Living to Tell the Tale. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 The phrase, “taken to heart” is something I associate with paper. I think of a letter folded up and put in a breast pocket. It would be a dark day indeed if paper became only a fetish item, available only to people with vast financial resources, as genuine animals were in Bladerunner. Paper, like fashion, has a couture branch. People who are keeping ancient traditions and techniques alive: perhaps they’re a little rareified, perhaps they’re a little expensive. The two levels that I’m dealing with on the Paper Forager is the completely utilitarian paper, student’s notebooks, and the traditional techniques, bordering on the sacred, that produced the fine arts of paper-making in Asia centuries ago.

For me, New York is a city unfolded from paper. My first association with New York, the first thing that made me want to live there, was jazz. As a child I lived in rural South Australia, listening to jazz on a transistor radio at night and heard Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” (and taking the A train in New York was always thrilling for me and always made me think of Duke Ellington). But paper became the most important part of my connection to New York. Going there for the first time felt like walking into a pop up book: I’d read so much about New York in books, and I kept so much of my life in New York in books, in Chinese student’s notebooks I bought at a business stationer’s somewhere around 34th Street, in the shadow of the Empire State Building, and on notes I made from books in the New York Public Libary, on yellow legal pads stamped with “New York Public Library” in green, on the header of each page. I visited Kate’s Paperie as if I were going to a museum or gallery. There was a collection of Japanese papers from the exceptionally expensive and exquisite, to the simple and inexpensive and I was mesmerised by them.

One of the books I value most, now, is the cookbook Becasse: Inspirations and Flavours by Justin North. He’s a fine chef, and he and his wife, Georgia North, run a restaurant whose excellent service as well as food, has gained them the award from the Sydney Morning Herald for the city’s restaurant of the year for 2007. But what inspires me about the book is that Justin spent his days off travelling all over the country and meeting the farmers and suppliers and purveyors of the produce he uses at the restaurant and it’s their stories he highlights in the cookbook. I’ve written about this in a story at my Yamazaki’s Notebook site. It’s been my hope that this site might do the same for makers and suppliers of paper. So it was with great delight that I read the comment Melanie Nerenberg from Kate’s Paperie left on my Valentine’s Day post and I asked for her comments about the ritual quality and sentimental value of paper.

 My favorite paper is the kind you see in elementary school classrooms. It
comes in sheets and also in long rolls and features  two widely spaced blue
lines and a dotted line bisecting the space that is used to teaching cursive
writing so your j’s and g’s and l’s and q’s all ascend and descend with
grace.

Life should always give us those parameters to strive for.

I have been at Kate’s for almost ten years. It has never been a place for
the faint of heart, paper-wise. Individual greeting cards can cost $24 and
stationery and notecards $2 or $4 per card and envelope set. But it seems,
when writing a proper letter, that the medium is as important as the
message.

One night I got a telephone call from a man in Florida who had no access to
our internet site- no computer at all. He just wanted a recommendation for
paper that would respond well to his 30 year old Mont Blanc fountain pen
which he filled only with blue/black ink. He only wanted letter sheets, no
envelopes and he piqued my curiosity. I asked why. “I only write for myself”
he said. And left no room for further questioning. We spoke about paper
finishes, kid and laid and deckled edges, cotton vs. wood pulp but
eventually we settled on my sending him carefully labeled sheets of several
kinds of paper so he could test them with his beloved pen.

It’s just that kind of store. The men who began it were infused with a
passion for paper and though it attracts the same girls in junior high who
shopped for cool pencils to fill their bookbag and display proudly on the
desk (but never actually be used for writing) it also attracts the man – or
woman who writes only for themselves, and occasionally puts a stamp on it
and mails it. The phenomena of e-mail and electronic cards has made almost
any handwritten effort more than mere ballpoint pen and yellow sticky note-
it does not say- I sat at my desk and e-mailed- but  says I was HERE, fully
present, and applied myself (and the pen or pencil) to write this to you. I
did not BCC anyone- this is not some piece of e-mail flotsam that has made
its way from Boston to Bankok on the fears of those too superstitious to
break a link. It’s for you. From me.

So in essence each handwritten note is luxurious in that time and effort
beyond the basic has been taken. And if you are to apply yourself in this
way, then the paper should be soft and a little splintery (the way handmade
wood-pulp paper feels) or soft and almost fabric-like (like fine cotton rag
paper) And the pen should be a wonderful facile rollerball or a fountain pen
with a nib worn to just the way you hold your pen, the weight of the brass
lining the barrel adding weight to your simplest words. And if you are
writing something for your child to keep, it would be on a paper that did
its very best by being at least conscious of the planet and the impact that
even a small piece of paper can have. And it would say something to your
child by passing on your values, without saying a word.

I guess you can see why I work at Kate’s.

We sell a great deal of paper, all kinds. We sell more every year. As
evidenced by the card sales for this Valentine’s Day. I like to think that
those folks who sent e-Valentines this year might not have sent ANY card
had they not had this convenient way to connect. And hopefully they got a
loving response, and next year, might want to ramp up to a paper card and a
stamp. Because getting and giving love- even by mail- never gets old.

 I asked Melanie about the role of eco-friendly and recycled papers in the luxury paper market.

Our catalog was green this year- totally by accident. Our catalog printer
had developed an ecological conscience in the year since we had used them
and their director of environmental responsibility was proud to tell us that
the paper was made from certified sustainable forests. The inks soy based
and the offsets purchased for the energy used to produce the book. And it
was not thin-looking or gray at all… and according to the czar of
sustainablity at the printers- 100% recyclable (though I wonder about the
staples….)But truth be told, we didn’t even think about it. We were just really glad
it happened. More and more of our vendors are jumping onto the
ecological/environmentally conscious bandwagon, choosing bamboo based
products and earth friendly inks. I have a friend who rails against these
companies who are coming to the party just in time to capitalize on the
trend towards green living- calling them hypocrites- Quite honestly I do not
care WHY they come to this but I am very glad indeed they are here. What a
wonderful thing if corporate responsibility for the impact they have on the
environment becomes profitable. They are here to make money- it would be a
shame if they destroyed the planet before they had a chance to spend it.
Ultimately I think that we will become more and more environmentally
conscious, probably for the reason listed above- its profitable. But for me
and a lot of the folks I work with, that will also make selling paper, and
using it more palatable. And allow future generations to have paper, and a
desk and a planet to lean on while they write.
Melanie

Origami_Tiger, Photograph by tranakboo.

At the time, Lang was in his thirties. He had been doing origami—that is, shaping sheets of paper into figures, using no cutting and no glue—for twenty-five years and designing his own models for twenty. He has always considered himself very much a bug person, but his earliest designs were not insects; in the nineteen-seventies, he invented an origami Jimmy Carter, a Darth Vader, a nun, an inflatable bunny, and an Arnold the Pig. He would have liked to have folded insects, but, in those years, bugs, as well as crustaceans, were still an origami impossibility. This was because no one had yet solved the problem of how to fold paper into figures with fat bodies and skinny appendages, so that most origami figures, even television characters and heads of state, still had the same basic shape as the paper cranes of nineteenth-century Japan. Then a few people around the globe had the idea that paper folding, besides being a pleasant diversion, might also have properties that could be analyzed and codified. Some started to study paper folding mathematically; others, including Lang, began devising mathematical tools to help with designing, all of which enabled the development of increasingly complex folding techniques. In 1970, no one could figure out how to make a credible-looking origami spider, but soon folders could make not just spiders but spiders of any species, with any length of leg, and cicadas with wings, and sawyer beetles with horns. For centuries, origami patterns had at most thirty steps; now they could have hundreds. And as origami became more complex it also became more practical. Scientists began applying these folding techniques to anything—medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA—that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way. By the end of the Bug Wars, origami had completely changed, and so had Robert Lang. In 2001, he left his job—he was then at the fibre-optics company JDS Uniphase, in San Jose—to fold paper full time…

Lang believes that there is still much more to do in origami. “It’s like math,” he said to me one day, as we were having lunch at a burger joint near his studio. “It’s just out there waiting to be discovered. The exciting stuff is the stuff where you don’t even know how to begin.” He wants to improve his human figures, work with curved folding, and keep refining his insects. He wants to fold a better mousetrap and a better mouse. His primary interest is in the art of origami, but he has great faith in its expanding practical potential—solar sails, air bags, containers, shelters, medical implants. He had a recent message on his voice mail from someone who wanted to discuss using origami in the manufacture of plastics. We were about to leave the restaurant and head back to his studio. Before we left, I couldn’t help but ask him to do something pretty with his placemat. It was just a flimsy rectangle and had a few grease spots from his sandwich, but he flipped it and folded it and did some magic, and left the waitress with a perfect white boat.

The New Yorker. 2/19/2007

Sierra. Photograph by soffia Gisladottir.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the Philip K. Dick book that the movie Bladerunner is based on, the omen that announced that the world was becoming uninhabitable was that owls, the symbol of wisdom, began dying and dropping from the sky.

I often think of this eradication of wisdom when I’m trying to decide if I should give up making organic books altogether and move into the making of electronic (biorenewable) books. The durabooks that I’ve written a little about, and will be posting a lengthier profile of are “cradle to cradle” books, built around materials and processes that regenerate and can be used over and over.

In Cradle to Cradle the authors, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, write that while recycled paper might be chosen with perfectly good intentions, it might not be the best option for the environment.

It has the usual book shape and format, but the paper — a dull beige — is thin and porous. It has no jacket, and the cover, like the inside, is printed in a single shade of ink. It may seem a little drab, but it has a humble, “earth-friendly” look that is instantly recognisable to the environmentally minded. And indeed the book is the product of a concerted attempt to be eco-efficient. It is printed on recycled paper — hence the beige — with soy-based inks. In addition, its designers strove to “dematerialise”, to use less of everything, witness the thin, uncoated text stock and the absence of a jacket. Unfortunately, the ink shows through the flimsy paper, and the lack of contrast between ink and page strains the eyes. The skimpy binding is a little weak to boot. The book isn’t exactly reader-friendly — good thing it’s eco-friendly.

Or is it?

Its designers thought long and hard about what kind of paper to use; every choice had drawbacks. Initially they thought chlorine free paper might be a good way to go, because they know that chlorine represents a serious problem for ecosystems and human health (by creating dioxins, for example). But they discovered that totally chlorine free paper required virgin pulp, because any recycled paper in the mix would already have been bleached. In fact, paper made from any kind of wood pulp probably contains some chlorine, because chlorinated salt occurs naturally in trees. What a quandary: pollute rivers or chew up forests. They ended up choosing apper with the greatest recycled content, avoiding what to their minds would be a greater offense. Soy-based inks posed another dilemma, because they might include halogenated hydrocarbons or other toxins that become more bioavailable in these water-soluble eco-friendly inks than they would be in conventional solvent based inks. For acceptable durability, the cover was coated, so it isn’t recyclable with the rest of the book, and because of its already high recycled content, the paper’s fibres have about reached the limits of further use. Once again, being less bad proves to be a fairly unappealing option, practically, aesthetically, and environmentally.

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. William McDonough and Michael Braungart.

Their book is a durabook, something completely renewable.

 Maciek Kobielski

Miranda July, 33, has ideas for so many media, she has to organize her notebooks accordingly. “On the corner of every page,” she says, “I’ll put a letter: M for movie, P for performance, S for story, I for idea.” Currently writing the script for another M (her first film, “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” in which she also starred, won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2005), she will have a multimedia P at the Kitchen in New York March 1 to 4; in May, her short S’s will be published by Scribner; and her I’s can be seen on her Web site. “I’m always running from the constrictions of one world,” she says. “It’s like having three boyfriends, and together they make the perfect mate.”July wears a Yohji Yamamoto gray wool tail coat, $2,340. At Yohji Yamamoto, 103 Grand Street

A NOTEBOOK FOR MIRANDA JULY

This page from this slideshow, published in the New York Times Magazine today goes to the heart of what my custom book-binding business is about. The way that some people think and create and observe just can’t be shoe-horned into traditional notebooks.

There must be notebooks for people who bounce between disciplines and states of mind and different media: one format, one size, one kind of book can’t contain a wild and fascinated mind, and these people need hybrids of different kinds of paper, and pockets and clips embedded in notebooks that can be taken apart and recombined, at will.

Miranda July’s website is amusing and wonderful. The front page prompts for a secret password. It will probably be the first word that comes into your head, the banner says. I typed in the Marx Brothers favourite password “swordfish” and that was exactly right. The website told me “you obviously know what I was talking about”.