bibliostructures

Anselm Keifer lead books

“A writer sufficiently attuned to an idea can find all the materials required for its fulfillment lying around in the street,” Luc Sante.

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.”

Sydney Morning Herald

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.”

Darwin, taking his first steps over the line between tradition and evolution, found himself occupying ground near those battle lines of class and religious warfare. He moved carefully. Didn’t announce his apostasy. Still, it’s possible to approximate the timing of this intellectual conversion: March of 1837, soon after his talks with Gould and Owen. Species changed, one into another. He knew it. He just didn’t know how.

On the cover he labeled it simply “B.” Notebook “A,” begun about the same time was devoted to geology. As a heading on the first page of “B” he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genufelction to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.

Months afterward he made another note, regarding the curious characteristics of his South American fossils and the Galapagos species he’d seen: “These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views.” But for new, he was keeping those views to himself.

He didn’t use the word “evolution,” not until later, not for decades. In July of that year he began what he called his notebooks on the “transmutation” of species. The first of them was a pocket-size booklet bound in brown leather with a metal clasp, small enough to be carried in a jacket, private enough to hold wild ideas and heretical doubts.

From a new book on Charles Darwin by David Quammen. “The Kiwi’s Egg. Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. A Fresh Look at Darwin’s Most Radical Idea and the Mysteriously Slow Process by Which He Revealed It.”

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 »