A Book of Magnitude

On Saturday, authors from all genres and categories gathered on the Mall in Washington, DC for the National Book Festival.

I'm a book nerd so I had to attend, especially since Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, was going to speak and sign books.

The event was thrown by The Library of Congress (and Laura Bush), so they had a tent set up with plenty of relevant resources and interactive displays. A big graffiti wall stretched across a whole side of the tent and volunteers stood before it offering sharpies to the masses. Said masses were guided by three questions (here paraphrased): What books have influenced you or shaped your life? What would you preserve at the Library of Congress? What will you write?


Hundreds of adults and children have signed the wall. For the question pictured above, I scribbled "books about books" and "hand-bound art books," because I was in an artsy mood.

A display at the other side of the tent contained a large, naked book. Its leaves were poster-sized sheets of foam covered with sharpie signatures from visitors of all ages. One folded sheet made a signature, although normally a signature is made up of several folded sheets. The signatures are sewn together at the fold to form the pages of the book. Along the spine, white rope represented the thread used to sew each signature together. Thick brown rope formed bands around which the "thread" was sewn, creating raised bands that, were the book to be given a cover, would show up as the thick raised bands of leather on the spine. The leather on books with that feature is actually fitted over the thicker thread that the thick rope represents.

Here you can see the scale of the book:


Here you can better see the stitching:


The top three signatures are not sewn into the rest of the book, yet.

The Library of Congress lugs this book around for demonstrations about books and book binding. It's nice to know that they save some of their attention for the restoration and preservation of books as well as the digitization of them.

Workshops

[Note: Please forgive the extensive exposition, but it is necessary for cleaner, livelier posts in future that they not be cluttered with explanations.]

The Print Shop is holding two workshops this semester, one called "Introduction to Letterpress" and the other "Advanced Letterpress and Book Arts." Mike Kaylor, our Master Printer, runs these workshops.

Introduction to Letterpress involves a number of excellent lectures on the history of printing, the history of paper, the history of fonts, as well as lectures on the technical terms and procedures for setting type and printing. The students are working on making their own postcards.

Advanced Letterpress and Book Arts is for anyone who has completed the introductory workshop. At this point, students work on real jobs in order to gain experience and keep up their skills. In between the real jobs, they learn to make and bind books in the Bindery.

I take the Advanced workshop as a separate activity from my work at the Print Shop, but I do end up helping Mike with jobs that extend beyond the time commitments of the workshop, especially because the jobs are real jobs required of the Print Shop.

This semester, we're focused on three major jobs.

The first is a run of 350 broadsides to be distributed in schools around Kent County in celebration of teachers and teachers of writing.

The second is a run of 350 broadsides that celebrate the re-dedication of the Literary House that is scheduled for February to cap off the completion of an extensive renovation.

The third is a design for a new bookmark or postcard, to be used for demonstrations to prospective students, and other interested visitors or students.

The deadline for the first job looms. The first workshop has only met twice. We have done extensive research into appropriate and striking quotes, we have reviewed samples from the archives for inspiration, and we have sketched out our design ideas and submitted them to the Master Printer for review.

The next step is to envision one or two final drafts digitally, with the help of Adobe InDesign, on our brand new 30" monitor.