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.

Oak Knoll

Oak Knoll Fest is an annual Fine-Press Exhibition in New Castle, Delaware organized by Oak Knoll Bookstore and Press, and it is currently the largest held in North America. The festival is organized by Oak Knoll Bookstore and Press, purveyors and publishers of books about book arts, calligraphy, printing history, publishing, typography, papermaking and more. So it's not a surprise that the festival attracts book designers and Master Printers who bring their wares to showcase and sell.

The Master Printer at the Literary House Print Shop usually attends every year and invites students from his workshops to join him. I was one of those students when I was a Freshman, and in a week, I'll be going back.

The exhibition occupies the basement of St. Peter's School, which is cozy when full of vendors, despite the institutional ceilings with panes of fluorescent lights. When it's full of book lovers browsing art books and fine broadsides, the space warms right up. The vendors are open and eager to engage browsers in long conversations about paper, or their choices in designing a certain broadside.

This year, the Literary House Press has decided to participate formally in this community. We'll be displaying our fine broadsides, and a fine letterpress edition of a book by John Barth, Browsing.

I'll be better at holding up my end of conversation with other exhibitors, now that I have some experience. I can talk more intelligently about printing – the smile-and-nod technique shall rust in storage.

This year, I can point to our table and say, "I'm a part of this tradition. Look at what I helped create."