Bold Bibliostructures
This folio with a book and looseleaf plans and photographs of Australian architect Glenn Murcutt’s projects is on display at one of the public libraries I use. It’s the most exquisite piece of traditional, archival bookbinding I’ve ever been able to hold.
“Linen-covered solander box with hardcover book, eight folders with eight individual photographic essays, over seventy plans and drawings at full size….book and photo essays:148gsm Mohawk Superfine,an uncoated, archival paper from the USA. Loose-leaf drawings and sketches: printed on Kaskad, an acid-free paper from Sweden.”
01 Editions
Rare books make me nervous. I usually prefer to gaze at them through the protective glass of a display case. But I noticed this Glenn Murcutt book on display at the library so I casually pulled open some of the folios, turned over the box and whistled, admiringly, at the quality of the stitching and gluing. Then I looked up the publisher’s website on my iPhone and saw the price: $A1,600!!! And there’s only 1,000 in the edition. What if I’d bent a corner of the one of the folios as I shuffled them? What if there was a mark on the shelf when I put the book down again and now there’s stain on the rabbit grey linen that’s made the dollar value of the book spin backwards at a dizzying rate? The exquisite, expensive things that I feel comfortable with have a sturdy, industrial quality: a Barcelona chair rather than a Baccarat Crystal wine glass. I’m clumsy. Not goofy and endearingly clumsy. I’m nightmarishly unco-ordinated every now and then. Mostly I’m careful and over-compensate but now and then things slip through my fingers (and I’m constantly polka-dotted with bruises from walking into walls and furniture). Rare books are treasures I shouldn’t be trusted with. My bibliostructures are for klutzes. Even Wile E. Coyote couldn’t put a dent in one of my books. (The spiral bound ones have spines of zinc plated steel compression springs.)
YANN MARTEL’S FLIP BOOK
Theatre production of "Life of Pi"
Last Sunday I went to hear Yann Martel speak at GleeBooks in Sydney. Most of the conversation was about Life of Pi because his new book won’t be published until 2010. He’s a warm and generous speaker and it seems like he’s read every book in the world (and seen most of the movies made, too).
He mentioned his new novel briefly and talked about it in an interview with a local journalist.
“A 20th-Century Shirt is two books in one: read the novel then flip the book over and read a related essay, or vice versa.
The novel is “a non-literal representation of the Holocaust”, a conversation between a talking monkey and donkey that live like termites on a man’s shirt, which is also a country with provinces such as Left Pocket. The essay argues that the Holocaust is unusual among historical events because the stories we tell about it are all factual. World War II has inspired novels and movies that are comedies, romances and horrors. But reverence for the Holocaust has constrained writing to historical accounts and personal memoirs.
Victims of any tragedy naturally want the truth told, Martel says. “But we really absorb history when we can play with it; it becomes more digestible. My wish is to serve the victims. Most of us have to translate bulky history into more portable stories. We have to allow Holocaust comedies, Holocaust thrillers … Otherwise it becomes sacrosanct and eventually we would stop telling stories about the Holocaust and it would become hoary history covered in dust.”
JACK KEROUAC’S SCROLL
I walked through Borders to get to the library and there was a new edition of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road on display. It’s a regular paperback but publishes the text exactly as it’s typed on the scroll. It’s a sober and eggheadish paperback, with three scholarly essays. When I first picked it up I thought it might have been a collection of thoughts about The Dead Sea Scrolls.
Luc Sante talked about the scroll in The New York Times a couple of months ago:
“In 1951, Jack Kerouac feverishly pounded out the first draft of “On the Road” in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. This believe-it-or-not item earns a place on the heroic roster of spontaneous literary combustions – Stendhal writing “The Charterhouse of Parma” in 52 days, for example. It also stands alongside the image of Jackson Pollock – in the series of photographs taken of him by Hans Namuth just a few months before Kerouac’s siege of the typewriter – dripping and flinging and flecking paint on a horizontal canvas, fighting and dancing his work into being. Writing is not usually thought of as excessively physical, which is why some writers feel the need to compensate by racing bulls or whatever, but feeding that 120-foot roll through the typewriter seems like a feat of strength. Most writers merely produce effete works on paper, you might say, but Kerouac went and wrestled with the tree itself. Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated – merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel – the great novel of the Beat Generation – the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.”
