As a denizen of the digital age, I expect every question to have an answer, so I am nonplussed to discover absolutely no online history of page trimming. When Hugh asks, “How long has it been since a book was published in Canada with unopened pages?” I have to say, “I don’t know.” All I’ve managed to unearth among the debris of blogs, chat rooms, and Wikipedia entries is a 1918 treatise on paper-cutting machines that bemoans the “lack of information on the subject, either historical or technical.”
Hugh is stoked by the idea that it might have been a century, maybe two, since a book printed in English was produced with unopened pages. (Many French books are still published unopened.) Well after midnight on the day of our meeting, he sends Erik and me a message:
“I must fess up and tell you that I went to bed for a three-hour nap after Merilyn dropped me off. When I got up around nine, all the restaurants except Denny’s were closed. Good enough for a bowl of soup. After I had eaten, I asked the waitress for a napkin. She left me three, which I folded to create pages, numbering them and sketching out a plan. Eureka! It all works out like a dream.”
He has figured out how to cut each sheet of Salad paper into three strips, folding each strip into a W—eight printed pages, with one unopened fold in the centre.
“So the unopened edge is in! This will give an interesting touch to the book, in my opinion. We can include a knife and a little note explaining how to cut open the page and let the story out. In order to have two unopened edges in each signature, we should go up to sixty-four pages, which means that Merilyn will need to come up with an additional four-page story to be placed in the second, third, or fourth signature.”
There’s another wrinkle. He’ll save time and aggravation at the fold if he can print two-up: two pages at once. By shortening the column of text a hair, he discovers he can fit two columns in the chase, but there’s no room for a page number at the bottom and no bottom margin for the guide pins to grip. By the next day, Hugh has made new guide pins that extend beyond the platen so the page can hang below the chase, creating a bottom margin. And he has moved the page numbers to the outside margins, halfway up.
The final page size of the book will be five and a quarter by ten inches, the column of text 3.33 by 6.66 inches. Because he will be printing two-up, each eight-page fold of paper will go on the press four times: first, he’ll fold the paper in half, print a two-page spread, then turn it over and print another two pages. Then he’ll open the fold and refold it to show the blank side, and print both of these sides.
Convinced this will work, Hugh starts tearing each Saint-Armand sheet into three strips. He rips dozens before giving up. “I just spent Sunday morning trimming about fifty sheets. At that rate my back will be broken in two days, so I have decided to take the paper to a fellow who has a cutter and have him do the work.”
This gives him time to go over his plan. Sure enough, he comes up with one more problem to be solved:
“I must make you aware that each sheet of paper shrinks at a different rate, depending on the amount of fibre in that sheet. The width of the sheets can vary up to a half-inch. This means I have to adjust the position of each sheet on the platen in an effort to keep the pages centred. And this, of course, means I will have to run and feed the press completely by hand.”
Oh my god, I think. My suggestion has become anything but idle.
Open a book anywhere. The two side-by-side pages are called a reader’s spread. Page 2 is beside page 3. Page 36 is beside page 37. Take a book apart, however, and you’ll see that page 2 is actually connected through the binding to a page much further into the book. This is called a printer’s spread.
When a signature is unfolded to a flat sheet, some pages will appear upside down or backwards. I remember the IQ tests in grade eleven that instructed us to match shapes scattered in different positions across a page. “Just spin them around in your imagination,” the teacher said. I couldn’t do it. I can’t visualize what a dress cut from a pattern will look like, either.
Whatever I lack in spatial imagination, Hugh has in spades. Working from the numbered pages on Erik’s flatplan, Hugh figures out a printer’s plan, his map for printing words on paper so that when it is folded and stacked, the pages will read like book.
“You may be interested to know that I folded 220 sheets in an hour,” he writes in early March. “In total there are 2,880 sheets that require folding three times. All that folding will take forty hours of work not counting coffee breaks.”
A few minutes later, another email pings into my inbox. “I miscalculated the folding necessary to produce the unopened pages. I think it is around 14,000 folds but who’s counting and moreover who gives a damn.”
Here’s the math: Hugh intends to make 300 impressions of each of the 64 pages of type plus 300 impressions of each of the 15 images. That’s 64 pages of type to set and 47 makereadys and 47 press runs. 14,000 foldings of paper. 23,700 kisses of the platen to the press bed.
Hugh estimates it will take him 400 to 500 hours to print The Paradise Project in its entirety. Although I didn’t keep track, that strikes me as about the same amount of time it took to write these stories.
PRESS RUN
Hugh starts printing on March 20, the eve of the spring equinox. He aims to be finished by July 15, three weeks after the summer solstice. A quarter turn of the Earth to print a single book.
The first runs go well. Erik makes the trip from Toronto to help Hugh pull the image pages, which have to be done first. That night Hugh writes: “We pulled a proof of each block, then we decided he would run the 300 copies of the ‘Tendril’ block while I straightened up the place. We went out for dinner and a beer and then came back and ran the 300 pages of the ‘Thorn’ block. Erik was running the press and could print them faster than I could refold. We finished around ten p.m. and Erik is heading back to Toronto now. He asked me if he should address me as master. I assured him that wasn’t necessary. Most Wonderful One would be quite acceptable. (<;)-
“This was the first day in a long time that I haven’t had a wee nap. I wasn’t pushing myself, I just didn’t want to miss anything. We now have six of the forty-seven press runs complete. We are making progress!”
Once The Paradise Project is on the press, emails fly fast and furious. For every run of the press, there’s a new makeready, which means a proof for me to check, then, when I give the okay on the text and Faye does, too, Hugh has to adjust the ink and the impression and print the 300-page run.
“I have attached a new scan. Oh! And I do know the image is upside down and it needs a wee bit more pressure on the petal side to firm up the weight of the impression. Don’t worry. All is well in typesettersville.
“I’m still holding up the press and type until you have a chance to proofread the last pages I sent the other day. I await your instructions.
“Attached are two more pages for you to cast your critical eyes upon. I’m sure you would agree that this suggests I’m not leaning on my oars. My printing plan has saved considerable time to fold and refold the pages and makes better use of the type we have. You see, Miss Barclay worries too much.”
His spinsterish alter ego may not worry, but I do. I am not prepared for the pace. I’m getting pages from Hugh every few days in the order they’re being printed, which is nothing at all like the order in which they’ll appear in the book. It is messing with my head.
By early April, he is signing his emails “The Whip.” He nags for the last images from Erik, the final story from me.
“I will be printing the table of contents Sunday. I need to know the length and placement of the new story so I can include it in the contents. Also relay that information to Erik so he can adjust the flatplan.”
On May 2, Hugh confirms the deadline we are working towards. “This is my latest thinking: I will be putting the press to bed in mid-July. You should be aware that I have been known to lie. (<;)-”<
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The deadline sounds reasonable enough, until Stupid Hugh shows up. He prints all 300 impressions of the image for “Petal” on a left-hand page instead of a right-hand page. He has not only wasted a day of printing, he has ruined 300 sheets of paper, each folded to become eight pages of the book. But Smart Hugh has an idea. The image was supposed to be on the right, on the second page of the story. If Erik agrees, he can fix his mistake by running the block print on the first page of the story instead. This changes how the deckle edges fall: now they will be on the left for the first eight pages of a signature and on the right for the next eight.
“I don’t see that as a problem so long as I carry the system through the book,” Hugh declares. “As a matter of fact, I like it better that way!”
Hugh has taken to writing long Sunday night reports to bring Erik and me up to date on the printing. I look forward to them with anticipation and more than a little trepidation. I have never had weekly reports from a publisher.
On April 16, almost a month into the printing, I receive another Sunday night report. He sounds tired.
“I finished printing the first sixteen pages tonight. This gave me the opportunity to fold all the pages into a signature. And it looks like a book. (<;)- For all intents and purposes, we have reached the twenty-five percent point. I must fess up and tell you that I took Sunday off, the first day off in the past month and a half. This signature was certainly a learning process that brought out some idiosyncratic flaws in the old press that I had not experienced until I started to use the full capacity of the bed and chase.”
Hugh discovered damage in the far corner of the press bed, where a previous printer must have dropped a metal tool into the running press. Until now, his columns of text had miraculously missed the crumpled area, but The Paradise Project uses the full width of the chase, and some of the type is collapsing into the depression.
“I moved the quoins to raise the block of text another three-quarter inch and this corrected the problem,” Hugh explains. “We are getting there, despite the Stupid Hughs, Stupid Eriks, and Stupid Merilyns.”
If it’s not one thing, it’s another. For Hugh, these problems are the stuff of bliss; me, they keep in a state of constant dread.
One of my stories, he says, is too long. How can that be? I adjusted the typeface in my computer files to 14-point Garamond, with Hugh’s chosen column width and length. By my tally, this story should fit easily within the designated pages, but apparently my computer’s Garamond and Hugh’s are different.
“I have been setting the final page of ‘Fern’ and, although I’m only at the second paragraph, the shingles are shaking on the roof. It looks as if the story will slip over onto a fourth page. That would normally be fine, but we didn’t plan for a fourth page. We need a reduction of three lines total. I feel bad that I’m restricting you, but that’s life in the big city. It is twelve thirty so I’m on my way to bed.”
I don’t mind cutting. I have worked as a magazine editor, so I understand the realities of having to make a story fit. No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.
I send in the cuts by nine the next morning. At noon, he writes back.
“I have made a big mistake that has caused us both a bunch of headaches. I thought we only allowed three pages for ‘Fern,’ however I have discovered after several hours of confusion that we allowed four. I will go back to the original manuscript and bring the story to its proper length. You can even add some if you wish. Of course this buggers up my plan to make proofs and send them today. How can I say I’m sorry for the mix-up other than to say I’m sorry? Mark it against Stupid Hugh.”
Our deadline is now set in stone. “Not that it changes the price of tea in China, but I have had a scientific paper on thinking outside the box accepted at a conference in Victoria on August 3. I have to be finished printing The Paradise Project on the 15th of July.”
We are in good shape until early June, when he makes a mistake that can’t be fixed.
“I confused two pages and printed one in the wrong place. I can save half of the 300 run by cutting the page where the unopened section would normally be. That would save me reprinting one page, but I have to reprint the other, and this means I have to buy more paper. I have just spoken with Saint-Armand and they are not sure they have enough left to supply the 60 sheets we need. This will slow the process down but I still think I can make the deadline. I’m tempted to say ‘shit’ but I’ll save that for a more devastating blow.”
Hugh is not a horse, he’s a bear. Determined. Intelligent. Curious. When I lived up north, the trailer down the road was broken into by a bear that sniffed at every window, then smashed one, and when he couldn’t get through, he moved on to the next until he found a way into the trailer with its stash of food. I shouldn’t be astonished by Hugh’s energy and perseverance, but I am. He is clearly exhausted, but he’s exhilarated, too, and never discouraged despite the endless irritations and obstacles in this process. The only time I ever see him down in the dumps is when he’s between projects, with no trailer to figure out how to break into. What’s his secret?
“I go by the Alice in Wonderland Plan. Start at the beginning and go to the end. We proceed line by line and make it all work. I had a good rest this afternoon and my tank is refuelled, so I will start again in the morning.”
Hugh’s print shop is weighed down under Paradise. In the front room—his former orthotics office—a table that spans the entire length is stacked at one end with folded paper ready for the press, and at the other with towers of freshly printed signatures. The print shop itself is awash in proofs and linoblocks, an island cleared at the work table where Hugh bends over the chase on his imposing glass.
“I wrote a poem,” Hugh says. When? I think. He must have found the eighth day. “I’m performing it at the open mic tonight.”
He is hedging, an entirely new look for Hugh.
“I’d love to hear it,” I say. “That is, if you want a trial run.”
“Sure. Sure. I call it ‘The Mentality Poem.’”
Hugh starts waving his arms around even more wildly than usual. He is lurching in the sea of proofs, cursing I think, although the words are slurred. He points straight at me.
So, ain’t you seen nobody who’s crazy before?
You there! Rich lady!
You just want to pay someone to keep me out of your face.
You there! Doc, what are you doin’ to help me, pushing some new pill?
You there, cop! You taser me and knock me down!
And you there, Rev, what are you doing in your million-dollar church,
Prayin’ for the poor?
By the time he is done, I am shaking and so is he. If his bladder is too close to his eyes, then so is mine.
By mid-June, Hugh has forty pages printed. He is six days behind schedule. To help make up the time lost to Stupid Hugh’s mistakes, he hires a neighbour to help with the typesetting, a young man named Richard who has just graduated from university. Between the two of them, he says, they can set and proof eight pages in fifteen hours.
I have to keep reminding myself that Hugh is seventy-seven. I don’t know how he keeps this up. The printing occupies every waking hour and some of his sleeping ones, too.
“Just before waking this morning I could see page 37 in my mind’s eye, and it had excessive negative word space. I had a look at it first thing and decided to make some changes, but I should have all the art work printed for the fourth signature in a few hours. Oh, and the sample endpapers just arrived from Emily. There are two that have some possibilities but even they don’t do too much for me. I know you have nothing to do and it’s raining. (<;)- If you are planning to come to Kingston, drop by.”
For such a flexible man, Hugh is oddly rigid about the endpapers. We don’t need them until near the end of the publishing process,
so Emily has been producing samples while Hugh prints. From the beginning, he’s wanted leaves and petals embedded in the handmade paper, and he is determined to have his way. If Emily can’t do it, he’ll find someone who can. He writes to Emily: “We have decided to cancel the endpaper project and seek out more conventional commercial options.”
He uses the royal “we,” but I’m not ready to cut Emily loose. She begs for another chance. Meanwhile, he is scattering emails like buckshot, trying to find a papermaker with experience in embedded plants. Someone mentions surfactants and mordants, and Hugh careens down that blind alley.
“We could all work together to design experiments to determine which petal and leaf varieties are viable.”
I am horrified. I remind him that we rejected commercial papers with floating flowers a year ago. I tell him that the garden is not a static thing to be harvested whenever it suits us. Nature has her own timeline, and at the moment she’s not serving up the kind of plants he envisions.
“Keep Emily on the project,” I urge. “We need to give her more direction.”
I write to Emily and describe my vision for the book. “It’s about human striving towards paradise and the various ways we attempt to make it.” When I discover she hasn’t read the stories, I send her a manuscript. I know the albinism affects her eyesight; I ask if she can find someone to read it to her. The boy with the ukulele?
“Hugh is reticent to be too prescriptive,” I explain. Until now, I’ve taken a back seat in the production, but the horse is galloping towards the cliff; someone has to grab the reins. “The endpapers should be an artistic statement, in the same way that the illustrations are, and the typesetting, the printing. These artistic statements are all in response to the text, so you can see how important it is to read the book and bring your own vision to it.”
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