bibliostructures

I taught myself bookbinding by reverse engineering what I now know to be a very poorly made hardcover book I bought for a dollar at the Los Feliz Public Library’s monthly book sale. About a month into making books (heavily influenced by the structure of the Golden Gate Bridge and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House) I decided I’d like to do something deluxe, an embossed spine. I called up an embosser and had what I think of as a “Harpo Marx moment”: not only weren’t my books being made in any form that would make it possible for him to emboss the spine, he couldn’t imagine how they were made at all, and wanted me to bring one in for him to look at.

When Harpo Marx’s mother, Minnie, bought a Harp for Harpo she just sent it along on the road, with no instructions. Harpo had to figure it out for himself. He did pretty well but one day he was walking past the window of a Woolworths store and saw a greeting card that featured an angel playing a harp and she was resting it on the other shoulder. Harpo realised he had the technique all wrong and went to a teacher to try and straighten things out: it turns out that this teacher (not Mildred Dilling, who came later, who would truly appreciate his growing artistry with the instrument) wanted to figure out how Harpo was playing and didn’t want to teach him anything.

I didn’t want to learn bookbinding as a handmade craft: where books are corseted in fabric and laced tight, and their weak glues have to sit under weights for a long time. I have a great respect for the craft of bookbinding, but I wanted to be in the manufacturing business, to make something not mass produced, but machine made. I wanted to use fast drying strong glues. I wanted to be the Santiago Calatrava of bookbinding.

There were plenty of books in the library about the craft of bookbinding but very little information that I could find about the manufacturing of books. And then I found the Acme Bookbinding website. I’ve often referred to the site and I almost feel as if I went to Acme University.

 What was most useful to me, and luckily I printed it out, because it doesn’t seem to be on the website any more, is an essay called The Making of the Modern Book, where Paul Parisi, President of Acme Bookbinding points out the drawbacks of contemporary high volume book production. From this essay I learned why the library book that I’d pulled apart to teach myself bookbinding was so poorly made.

I have explained why trade books will inevitably be of a lower quality than libraries require. They will have fragile bones, perfect bound rather than Smyth sewn through-the-fold. They will have weak muscles, reinforced with skimpy spine linings. They will have thin skin, covered in paper rather than in durable cloth. The economics of mass production is the culprit not the unscrupulous publisher. It is possible to manufacture books that will meet library needs. The problem is that the publisher produces books for the average consumer not for the library. Even if the book is intended for the library market, use patterns vary and books invariably get caught up in the routine production stream that the publisher is familiar with. There is no advocate for the economics of better quality that has sufficient clout with the publisher to get any results.

As I recall the title of my talk was the making of the modern book. It seems to me that the mass production techniques of past years were built around a paradigm that books are produced in the greatest quantity possible in order to get unit costs down. The problem is that these books have to be stored in a warehouse, shipped to the point of sale when orders are placed and often discounted or destroyed if they do not sell. Remember that publishers are truly risk takers since they allow book stores to send books back for full credit if they do not sell.

This essay was the transcript of a talk given in 1991, which predated the mania for print-on-demand books that would erupt seven or eight years later and become enveloped in the illogical hopes for digital technologies. I always heard print-on-demand technologies (where an individual book is made instantly, onsite at a bookstore) described as if they were like the replicator from Star Trek the Next Generation. The final print-on-demand document was more like something printed on an ink-jet printer and comb-bound like a business document. I happen to admire this kind of process: it’s what my books are close to (as if Mies van der Rohe had developed a comb bound document, that is) but these ‘books’ were uniformly ugly and ignoble. The concept quietly fell by the wayside.

It was as though all of the variety and beauty and unusual colours and typefaces and paper stocks and illustrations and covers were being put through a grinder and coming out as the same kind fast-food sausage. Something similar is happening with the print services offered by Apple and online photo sharing services: anything is possible online with manipulation of the image and its size and putting text around it, but to print it out there are five colours, landscape or portrait, three sizes, text in two or three styles and placements, and none of these have ever struck me as being particularly interesting.  

Acme was ahead of its time and Paul Parisi’s suggestion of small binderies being uniquely placed to handle special, small runs would apply to the paper by-product of online image collections.

As this new model emerges, it seems clear to me that the logical industry to bind these small orders of single sheet books is the library binding industry. We should re-christen ourselves as On-Demand binders or Custom binders. Library binders are uniquely organised to manage a production line where every book on the line is different. Whatever quality, service or specification the customer requires is possible. Our production facilities are continuously assimilating new technology that streamlines our process without restricting our flexiblity regarding quality. In envision a bright future for tomorrow’s morphed library binders and for libraries that will be able to purchase books books made to their specifications, capable of meeting their use requirements.

This lecture is almost fifteen years old, and was delivered at about the time that Sony introduced the howlingly awful electronic book reader, the Data Discman, and when computers and screen technologies were far less fine and user friendly than they are now. But he made an interesting suggestion about a possible new business model that still seems workable and logical today: that books be available on download, the publisher gets their revenue from the download and the consumer decides whether it’s something they want bound up (by a specialist like Acme) or kept as a digital file.

My optimism about the viability of the printed book is mostly driven by the four young children that I have at home. I sincerely hope that they and their children can look forward to a lifetime of reading — exploring the wide world, nurturing their imaginations and sharing the experiences and dreams of generations past.

A great part of that experience is in the design of the book, the tactile connection to the feel of the paper, the richness of the printing and the structure of the binding. Yes, now I praise structure because good book structure, like good design, is important and valuable. You may not see it,but you know when it is absent. It adds to the experience and joy of reading. Quality is possible in a world of custom manufacturing, becuse you will not have to settle for the product that the mass-market average-consumer will accept. Strong bones, firm muscle and vibrant skin will be possible for the books of the future. Basic values never change, they simply must be reinvented now and then.