bibliostructures

George and AIBO. Photograph by Fromform at Flickr.

 I began my custom book-binding business in the candy-coloured bioluminescent glow of the i-Mac era. Apple had made an internet-enabled computing device something as ordinary as a toaster or a coffee percolator, a part of everyday life. E-ink was printing electrically-charged pixels onto an opaque paper-like screen that could be read in daylight. Microsoft hinted at something similar, taking out ads in newspapers with a reproduction of the first page of Moby Dick, looking, on the screen, indistinguishable from a printed page in a book. I read Moby Dick for the first time towards the end of 1999, while I had a head cold and fever, imagining, in my delirium, Queequaig counting the many, connected, paper-thin flexible screens of an electronic book (on sale at Barnes and Noble for $25.99).

            Computers hadn’t and wouldn’t replace paper. Paper use had actually increased as offices made back-up ‘hard copies’ of data. But paper had ceased to be something manufactured for humans to write on with pens and pencils or to feed through typewriters. Paper now was now being manufactured with a smooth and dull and even surface that wouldn’t upset the delicate constitutions of photocopiers, plain paper fax machines and computer printers. A couple of years ago at an Office Works stationery superstore in Melbourne I compared paper from about eleven different countries: Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, Belgium, and France among them. It was all as uniform and bland as a McDonald’s French Fries. The rise of the superstore had also brought a flattening out in the character of notebooks and journals, they were now made in bulk and sold in bulk and diversity disappeared.

            In Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson’s quest to find the Tasmanian tiger, they quote a sign posted by Forestry Tasmania near a glorious, handsome four hundred year old Eucalpytus Regnans in the Styx Valley in Tasmania. It macabrely lists all of the uses a single 70 metre (230 foot) tree can be put to, generating timber for decorative veneers for a four storey hotel, solid wood for a full set of household furniture, the framing and roof trusses for an average family house, and, as an afterthought, enough pulp wood to “photocopy the entire works of Shakespeare more than 3,000 times over.” Read the rest of this entry »

Myrtis by Anslem Kiefer, from his Women of Antiquity series.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales owns this series of three sculptures. The notes on the wall say that Kiefer has depicted women from mythology “whose strength and intelligence have been seen as unruly or cause for demonisation, for example Pandora and Lilith.”

This is Myrtis who “came to a bad end for competing with men”. She was a Greek poet blamed for competing with Pindar and has a book instead of a head.

Close up the work is an astonishingly fine feat of bookbinding. The spine is strong and aligned, despite having been cracked open for millenia and the lead pages ripple like velvety bond.