Walk Empty-handed

Walk Empty-handed
I designed this new broadside, Walk Empty-handed, after talking to my friend Cathy about quilting and patterns and words. (I wrote about that conversation in this post.) Since then I’ve been playing around with maps and their white spaces. This is a limited edition 8″x10″ letterpress print, 25 in all.

The quote is from José Saramago: “Walk empty-handed, for wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world.”

Books on Books: The Craftsman

Richard Sennett’s The CraftsmanSociologist Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman isn’t about books or bookmaking but the larger issue of craftsmanship. It’s a flawed book in many ways, but I kept reading as it was full of thought-provoking ideas. He argues that our sense of well-being is rooted in craftsmanship and that the rewards of craftsmanship — rather than the promise of monetary gain — motivates us to work. Unfortunately our work culture isn’t hospitable to craft — the machine & money rules.
For Sennett, “craftsmanship” is the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake. It’s certainly not unskilled manual labor, it requires the hand & head to work together (To quote Immanuel Kant: “The hand is the window on to the mind”). He also says a lot about risk: A good craftsperson “exuberant and excited, is willing to risk losing control over his or her work, machines break down when they lose control, whereas people make discoveries, stumble on happy accidents.”
To me crafts are marginalized activities — such as bookbinding — but Sennett updates this and makes the case that such professions as doctor, nurse, chiropractor, musician, and computer programmer engage in craftsmanship. All of the skills for these professions are learned and practiced today in much the same way as they were in a medieval workshop: through apprenticeships (or internships or mentors on the job), repetition, access to authority with knowledge, communities of same-skilled craftsmen.
Sennett makes a passionate argument that craftsmanship needs to be recognized and prized. In the current (American) culture, we seem to have bifurcated into the elites (head only) and the unskilled (hand only) — the middle-class is forgotten or ignored. Sennett deplores this, and contends that “nearly anyone can become a good craftsman” and that “learning to work well enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.” It’s a timely argument, given the recent financial and economic melt-down and president-elect Obama’s plans for an economic recovery program that includes rebuilding roads and infrastructure (all involving craft/hand work).
The book is full of stories and anecdotes about the history of one craft or another. While interesting and enjoyable in themselves — they often read like a letter or blog post by a really well read guy — they too often digress from the main point. I was forever having to reorient myself as I read. And either Sennett is a horrible writer or Yale Press (who published the book) doesn’t have an editor. Not only are there typos and punctuation problems, but the language is often quite choppy and awkward. (My biggest peeve though is actually with the binding and page layout. The book is thick, the binding sewn. The gutter is so small that I had to constantly press hard on the open pages to read the rightmost words on the left page, eventually breaking the spine. Lousy craft.)
Despite these flaws, I’ve been discussing the ideas and historical anecdotes with everyone I know. But I suspect a more condensed book would have gotten his ideas across just as well. The Yale Press website has several interviews with Sennett that might be a better introduction to his ideas than wading through the bad prose.

Expanding Bookshelf

Platzhalter

Seems like a good idea for small spaces. According to this website:

Bookshelves often seem to burst. You always try to squeeze in another book into the last gap which is far too narrow. “Platzhalter” gives in to force and makes space for more books by literally bursting. An initially hidden board stretches between the split halves and widens the usable surface. The more books you add to the shelf, the wider it opens. The classical rectangular shape turns into a V-shaped outline until the shelf reaches its defined limit.

Book Collecting: Another Letterpress Chapbook

Earlier this month, I wrote about my fledgling artist’s book collection. This post is about my latest addition: a letterpress chapbook, printed by SF-based printer Megan Adie, with a story called “The Pool Cleaner’s Rite of Spring in Phoenix, Arizona” by Scott Buros.
I bought it originally to add to several other letterpress printed chapbooks I acquired this year, because Megan did the printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book and because she printed blue behind the text of all the pages. What I was pleased to discover, as I read Buros’ bittersweet story of loss and swimming pools, is that the shade of blue varies with the mood and content of the text.
Click on the photo below to see a larger picture and read some of the story. The chapbook is for sale through Megan’s Etsy shop.
In the upcoming months, I’ll be writing more about my collection. Turns out I’ve written about a few things already, click here to see the posts.

The Pool Cleaner’s Rite of Spring in Phoenix, Arizona

Pied Type Weight

In a print shop, when metal gets jumbled, it’s been “pied.” Usually that happens when a form (type that’s been assembled for printing) comes apart and the pieces of metal fall over into a mess. It’s a pain to clean up and set right again, as Benjamin Franklin describes:

“But so determin’d I was to continue doing a sheet a day of the folio, that one night, when, having impos’d my forms, I thought my day’s work over, one of them by accident was broken, and two pages reduced to pi, I immediately distributed and compos’d it over again before I went to bed.”

Pied Type WeightRecently I discovered these little 2-1/2″ wide weights made from discarded metal type. They look like pies and are made by Carolee Campbell (Ninja Press). Type bodies can be seen emerging from the surface and to add to their perfection they are type high (.918 inches or the height of a piece of metal type). Gerald Lange is selling them. I bought one as a gift for a bookbinding friend who loves all things type.

Adhesives: Gluing-up

I have a love-hate relationship with glue. It’s wet, it gets everywhere (although I’ve learned how to keep it out of my hair), and I have trouble getting my brushes really clean. When I’m at my most frustrated I try to reorient myself by remembering a gluing-up demonstration I saw years ago by Dominic Riley — he held the brush and applied the glue with so much confidence and calm. Much like this youtube demo with Peter Goodwin….

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