from the bindery: production, just like old times

today at work i mended, chopped, and glued up 10 adhesive bound books. i have 7 more waiting to go tomorrow. i was on my feet nearly the full 8 hours. i worked hard. i stayed focused. i had fun! in about one week or less, i will have these 17 books bound (and gagged). just like old times.

how is this possible, you ask?

finals and the semester break leave book repair all ghost town-y.

finals and the semester break leave me working hard and steady on my own, just like the good ol' days at north bennet. those were the days where i would stand all day, every day and then hobble back home across boston to brighton with swollen ankles, calloused fingers, and bleary eyes.

this is the best feeling--to feel tired from a good day's work for the brain and the body.

a brief pause for reflection

as i've suspected all along, it seems being a reluctant bookbinder will never be enough.

from the bindery: The Book of Irish Curses

just in time for st. patrick's day, a book about irish curses made its way into book repair. here are a few of the gems hidden inside it's acidic, brittle mid-20th-century pages. part of the humor in these curses comes because these are translations from the original gaelic, and therefore less poetic:

an exchange that might occur as part of a cursing contest:

Farmer Willis: May your hens take the disorder (the fowl-pest), your cows the crippen (phosphorosis), and your calves the white scour! May yourself go stoneblind so that you will not know your wife from a hay-stack!


To this sally [farmer] Murphy retorted in the following manner and defeated his opponent:

May the seven terriers of hell sit on the spool of your breast and bark in at your soul-case!

~

another exchange in another contest:

"The roasting of the salmon to the very end on you!"

"Six horse-loads of graveyard clay on top of you!"

~

an example of a ritual curse to curse a house

"If one wished to curse a house, one entered it backwards while cleaning a boot! In this case, presumably, the inhabitants of the house would need to be absent when the bearer of malediction was providing such an inviting target to anyone wishing to kick his rear as he entered."

~

informal cursing

"May the Lamb of God stick his hoof through the floor of heaven and kick you up in the arse below in hell!

Of a more rabelaisian kind is the following remark by a taxi-driver who was describing a journey at speed over a stony road: 'The stones were hopping off the car like the curses of Jesus Christ on the windows of a whore-house!"

!!!!!!

~

"There is the old saying addressed to hens who trespassed on the kitchen of a farmer's house: 'Glass legs to ye!', a neat way of expressing the wish that they might break their legs!"

~

"A child be within you, for ever unborn!

Or if be born, may he not be like a Christian!

A pig's snout on him and the mouth of a sheep,

A beak of a duck that could dredge in the sludge!

Lest he be a hangman that would hang the people!

~

"Whoever put me into impotent grief

And took my white tom-cat in secret from me,

May the mice come in waves as his company,

And the rats from the kiln give him the pursuit."

~

General curses

"Destruction to that mule!"

"May the cats eat the women!" (This misogyny was uttered by a beggar who was disappointed in his reception at a house where he sought food. He desires that the cats (household animals) may eat the women. He had been offered food which he considered fitter for a cat than a human being." !!!

"A fox on your fishing-hook!" (Instead of fox, hare or rabbit might also be substituted. This was a Galway curse on a fisherman. . . . Foxes, hares and rabbits were regarded with superstitious dread by the fishermen of the Claddagh.)

"May you be afflicted with the itch and have no nails to scratch with!"

"Confusion on the money!" (curse on a wealthy person)

"The anguished bankruptcy of the year to you!"

May he never have a day's luck!"

"No butter be on your milk, nor on your ducks a web; may your child not walk and your cow be flayed! And may the flame be bigger and wider, which will go through your soul, than the Connemara mountains if they were on fire!" (This extraordinary curse was pronounced by a blind man on a housewife when she had been less than generous with him!)

~

curses which concern illness or death (best for last)

"May you not see the cuckoo nor the corncrake!" (In other words, may you never see another spring!"

"My curse on you and ruin to you, you lying, thieving rascal! Let it not be long till you die, despite the son of God!" 

"The fate of Ned's cock to you!" (This is a reference to a cock who was so vain that he stood admiring himself in the water of a well and fell in and got drowned. This is a curse on a vain person!

"May God weaken you!"

"Choking to you!"

"May a stitch or convulsion strike you!"

"May you be mangled!"

" A poisonous pain in you!"

"Death and smothering on you!"

"Dysentery on you!"

"A death without a priest to him in a town without a clergyman!"

"The death of the kittens to you!" (This, of course, means simply 'drowning', the fate of so many unwanted kittens in Ireland.)

from the bindery: odds and ends (emphasis on the odds)

For six months i've been photographing some of the odd things i come across at work. for six months i've been meaning to post these photos. now that it's nearly march, how about i just get it over with.

here goes.

EXHIBIT A

this german beauty surfaced back in the early fall (biblio info soon to come)

noteworthy for it's interesting ribbon-thru-metal-loops style of binding

here's a closer look

and along the top, where the linen tie is broken.

 

EXHIBIT B

 

what i like to call the Green Cow book: a Danish-Norwegian dictionary (i think)

another view without the contrast of the flash. moo.

EXHIBIT C

a sneak peek at some binders' tricks. notice where the leather is torn, you can see the actual laced in thong, as opposed to the sorry-excuses-for-false-raised bands lining the spine

EXHIBIT D

after 15 years, this book has earned its way back to book repair. 

 

amazingly, this is an adhesive binding repaired in 1995. even more amazing is that the actually adhesive binding is still totally in tact. it's just the case that's seen better days. here you can see the interior joint is still holding together.

 

and see how the pages are still holding strong? even without any sort of spine lining beside crash? somebody did their double-fan adhesive binding right. 

EXHIBIT E

solomon's temple? an "exact replication"? love it.

 

this little beauty of an engraving comes from this book. i've enlarged it so you can get a nice look at this spectacularly victorian title page. this is a fantastic example of a printer's use of multiple type faces on a title page. this became less common as the 19th century went on because it wasn't conducive to production printing.

stay tuned...more to come

from the bindery: the devil's bindery, or, if you were a book cover, which would you be?

as part of my quest to pay more attention to the 50-100 books that might pass through my hands per week, i've been keeping a list of bizarre and humorous book titles and setting bindings aside for scanning and photographing. below is an assortment of titles from the 1880s to the 1940s that came from a librarian for consideration to be commercially bound. this librarian is trying to aid me in my quest to keep my bindery prep students busy, but i looked at much of what he sent down and thought--what a loss to lose these original bindings. and all in the name of keeping me busy. i won't rebind most of the ones shown below because they are in too much disrepair to go to the commercial binder.

so. i love these covers and i love the titles. i wish you could see the tables of contents inside some of them or read these funny, mystifying stories. there is something charming and amusing and so odd about American and British culture at the turn of the last century and into those first decades. it is a quality that seems totally lacking in our world now. i don't know what it is. all i know is that i absorb a little bit of it each week at work as i dive back into the book culture of the time in search of sympathetic methods of repairing these little buddies. and in search of tidbits about book manufacturing of the time that fascinate me.

while the practical demands of my workplace cannot be met by approaching the zillions of books that come our way with a strict, conservation/restoration approach, it's a shame to me to lose these covers: these books in their whole, original form--and especially through their cover designs and materials--preserve and communicate so much about the world that created them.

so, take a look. thanks to the call number stickers, you can see the publication date on most these titles. any titles without a date in the call number are first editions. the last few titles come from the tale-end of the last awesome and ever-so-eclectic phase of the victorian publisher's binding-o-rama. i like these the best of the lot, but i'll wait to say which is my favorite until i hear from some of you which are your faves....

the following are identical editions but with very different covers.

from the lab: more than a ghost from my past

Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. this, i thought, would be a fine read for october. mysterious, romantic, eerie and full of suspense. a book i had read only once before about 14 years ago.

so i pull up the Lee Library catalog, jot down the call number on a scrap of paper, and take myself down the hall and up a couple flights of stairs to the southwest section of the 5th floor.

there are several copies to choose from. i begin to pull each one down from its place on the top shelf and flip through its pages and wiggle its covers, checking for overall structural soundness, seeing if i like the feel of the pages, the look of the type, the thickness of the book. (yeah, my usual ritual. nice to have so many copies to choose from).

oh, but what do we have here? one of the copies has been re-bound by book repair. you can always tell book repair books by their solid-colored cotton and rayon cloth cases and new labels (done on indesign and printed on moriki paper--for those of you binders interested in these details).

hmm. i wonder who repaired this? i'll just flip to the back and check.

lo and behold! there my initials were, staring right back at me, with the date 10/2002 written to the side. seven years ago, to this very October month, i had disbound this book, stab sewn on new endsheets, recased it in this teal green cloth, and lightly signed my initials in pencil on the bottom lefthand corner of the back cover!

naturally, i became the 19th person in 7 years to check this copy out. this 1941-er has held up quite well over the years, despite needing a little more tlc.

a missing or uber-damaged page i had photocopied and replaced. it's still stuck in there nice and tight. (the textblock is stab sewn all the way through, ps.)

hmm. some taped pages (among many) i chose to ignore. the tape doesn't appear to have evolved much, which is good. the paper overall is quite fragile. reminds me of the way a well-loved and used baby blanket feels over the years: thinning as it begins to fade.

i finished reading this book Sunday, on my flight home from the Guild of Book Worker's conference. tho it has withstood yet one more reading, there are numerous tears along edges of many pages, and some graffiti here and there, along with evidence of pencil marks i had erased in my former life as a book repair employee who didn't want to be a bookbinder. while reading it, i enjoyed not only the mystery in the words of the story, but the tactile story of the book object, itself. i reflected on the importance for me of working on circulating books--books that are used, books we are keeping functional and usable. i loved being able to feel how this book had been used and held and read by others. likely i am the only person to have returned to this 1941 Sun Dial Press copy of Rebecca more than once. it's come back to me: a ghostly remnant of my 2002 self going through the motions of a job, earning money meeting my solid 2009 self, striding with purpose through each day as a bookbinder and repairer of books.

from the wilderness: life outside of bookbinding

while i continue procrastinating my book-related posts, here's how i've been spending time the past few weeks.

september and october are some of the best times of year for wilderness excursions in utah. leaves are changing color, it's dry, and temperatures are cooler.

all summer, pear, sue, and i have completed a series of planned hikes. summitting mount baldy, on the face of Timpanogos, was our last for the season. the hike began in Pleasant Grove's Battle Creek Canyon where we discovered little paradises of waterfalls, meadows, and forests of firs.

even the top of Baldy was intriguing. we discovered that the north side is wetter and covered in firs, while the south side supports a much dryer climate, boasting only ankle-to-waste-high scrub oak. pear called it "mountain patterned baldness" or something like that.

while hiking across meadows on the face of Timpanogos and getting these views was my favorite part....

....the hike down became the hike from hell. thanks to some woefully misguided trail information, we ended up hiking/sliding/tumbling down the south face of baldy. it was by far the steepest descent i've ever done, and i spent a good deal of it crouched down and sliding on my feet. 2 hours of straight down left the three of us totally physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. we felt triumphant for making it, but i look up at baldy now and glare in its general direction.

Nebo Loop: views behind Mount Nebo.

since returning home from Boston, i've been trying to do things here I've never done my whole life growing up here. Driving the Nebo Loop and exploring Payson Canyon is one of those things. The terrain is much different than that behind Timpanogos along the Alpine Loop.

For one thing, the dirt is red! This is "The Devil's Kitchen". It's the Nebo Loop's own tiny Bryce Canyon.

The aspens were changing color right along with the maples. Mixed in with the evergreens they were amazing!!

back slope of Nebo.

Capitol Reef National Park

This was the perfect day to visit this park! Pear and i left provo at 7 am, and 2 hours and 45 minutes later we arrived at one of my favorite places on earth. Temperatures below seventy, dry, sunny, limited crowds. perfect.

View of the waterpocket fold geologic formation from our hike to the Golden Throne.

the Golden Throne. it was perfectly silent here. and along the way we found places that echoed so well off the slot canyon walls that you could hear your whole echo come back to you.

our second trail was the 3.5-mile loop around Chimney Rock.

nope. the camera isn't tilted. it's the natural slant caused thousands of years ago by a ripple and fold in the land.

just one example of the rainbow of colors at capital reef. the strata alternates from red to green to purple to white to yellow. a camera will never, ever do this justice, so just imagine it. or better yet. go there!

(so stay tuned. books will be back as soon as the outdoors is no longer available.)