February 2009 – Page 3 – Green Chair Press Blog

CPSIA Update

Pile of books In this post, I wrote about the new law in the US that required, after Feb 10, 2009, that all children’s products sold in the US must be certified they meet specific lead levels. As written, the law includes books, and is retroactive, so existing and used books would also need to be tested and certified. There was lots of confusion and concern from libraries, thrift stores, publishers and non-profits about how exactly the law effects them (would libraries need to close their childrens’ rooms?)
Since I wrote that post, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC, which administers the law) has said they would “not impose penalties against anyone for making, importing, distributing or selling” a list of specified products, including “an ordinary children’s book printed after 1985.” That’s good news for me — my flip books are new. However most libraries have lots of books printed before 1985 in their children’s section and it’s not unusual for small independent booksellers to have old children’s books as well. In the extreme, there are reports on Etsy of thrift stores just throwing away their older children’s books. Publishers and booksellers submitted enough evidence to convince the CPSC that “ordinary children’s books” printed before 1985 don’t contain lead, and I hope they are able to further persuade them to exempt pre-1985 too — it would be a shame not to be able to buy children’s books that are now out of print.

Pictorial Webster’s

I had a wonderful time exploring all the books on offer at the Codex Foundation Book Fair in Berkeley the other day. My favorite book (although it’s hard to choose just one) is Quercus Press’ Pictorial Webster’s — a 400+ page leather-bound book printed using the original wood engravings and copper electrotypes of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries of the 19th Century — the 1859 & 1864 editions of the American Dictionary of the English Language (the 1st illustrated dictionary in America) and the 1890 International Dictionary. I think I first saw this as a work-in-progress when I had a table at a book fair in Seattle, about 5 years ago. It was wonderful to see the printing finished and the book bound, and even better to hold it in my hands and page though it.
The Quercus Press website has a lot of information about how they obtained the images (borrowed from Yale), how they selected the order, and how they were printed (using a linotype and letterpress). There are also lots of photos of page spreads. Here’s a page from the finished book:

Storetry

This 30″x42″ broadside is an original poem by Kevin Bradley, hand-set from antique wood typography. They were printed by Yee-Haw Industries.
There are quite a few different ones in the series, with names like “Window Shopping”, “State of the Union” and “The New Me.”

Adhesives: Double-Fan Binding

Quick and easy, the double-fan adhesive or millennial binding is a great solution for turning single sheets into an extremely durable paperback book that opens flat and stays open. Its strength comes from the way the pages are glued, using a double-fanning technique that brings glue just a millimeter or so into the textblock. And its “openability” comes from a pop-off spine that moves independently of the textblock.
I learned this method from notes by Dominic Reilly, who learned it from Gary Frost. Currently conservator for the libraries at the University of Iowa and author of the Future of the Book blog, Frost is renowned for devising conservation bindings based on enduring mechanical features of historic bindings that he has “deconstructed” and reproduced. In this particular structure, he sought not only to protect a book’s contents and ensure that it opened flat for easy reading but also to incorporate such modern materials as transfer tape and Tyvek and accommodate laser-printed copies and production editioning methods.
I’ve adapted this structure for my food & exercise diary and Sherlock Holmes notebooks. It’s good for anything that needs to open flat—like a calendar or day planner. It’s also can be used to rebind a favorite paperback book. While it’s an easy book to make, please note that you’ll need access to a guillotine (stack paper cutter) to give the book a final trim.
Full directions and pictures are available here.

Calligrams & Word Clouds

There was a post the other day on the Book Arts email list about David Esslemont’s book My Fellow Citizens, a series of calligrams — a printed text where the typeface or the layout has a special significance — to illustrate President Obama’s inaugural address. Esslemont analyzed the word frequency in the speech, then used various ink colors and text sizes to weight the words — words used most often (nation — 11 times, new — 11 times, America — 10 times ) are large and red, the next frequency groupings are drawn in smaller blue letters and finally black ink is used for all the rest. To the left is a detail of one calligram.
This got me thinking about word clouds — a computer generated visual depiction of a text — that use font size and color to depict the frequency of words in a given text. I’ve seen “tag clouds” on lots of blogs, the idea is to give a quick summary of that particular blog. As luck would have it, that same day I visited the blog of a friend of my Mom’s, with a link to Wordle — a site that generates a word cloud from text you provide. I found the text of Obama’s speech and got this cloud:

Apparently word clouds have been used a lot to look at speeches — this blog has a post called “Word Cloud Analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln’s.” (My most glaring observation looking at them is that Bush used the word “Freedom” in his speech an enormous number of times!)
I wonder if the clouds would be useful to understand poetry? On Wordle, someone made and posted a cloud of e.e. cummings “anyone lived in a pretty how town” — cloud below followed by text of the poem. Doesn’t help me, maybe because cummings’ word play is lost (“he sang his didn’t he danced his did”) but then again it’s only one example… Let me know what you discover with them!

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
with by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

— e. e. cummings

Calendar Planning, part II

My current plan for 2010 is to make a less traditionally calendar-like calendar. My first “calendar” (from 2004) was a reading diary, a journal for keeping track of books read during the year — certainly not traditional.
In poking around the web the other day, here’s what I found to get me going on figuring out what I might do. One I quite like is the “weather calendar” to the right. The tree has a branch for each month, and enough empty leaves on each for the days in a particular month. As the year winds along, leaves are colored each day — green for good weather and blue for rainy weather — to produce a colorful tree that follows the seasons.
Then there’s PockMod… I think my friend Steve Woodall was the first person to tell me about this site, and the post on the Weather Tree Calendar also mentions it. The site lets you construct a one sheet organizer that you fold into a tiny booklet that fits in your pocket. There are templates for a large range of pages — calendars, shopping lists, reference and conversion charts…
Finally, this one by Jill at Beau Ideal is traditional in the sense that it has a monthly gridded calendar. But the typography of the names of people born in a particular month is really fun. Below is June. You can see all the months here.