And soon it will be read
Now after that riot
Thee Hellbox is quiet
We’re putting the press to bed.
We raise a huzzah and toss back the scotch. We toast Hugh and the press and Erik’s images and my words and the typesetting skill of Richard and Mico and the keen proofreading eye of Faye and the gentleness of the golden retriever that wags around our knees.
As the bottle is passed around, I lift the last page off the press. It looks the same as all the others, nothing to declare its special place in these four and a half months of printing, this year-and-a-half marathon of production. Ironically, page 48 is the beginning of the story “Twig,” the last one I wrote for this collection. In it, Peter complains to a woman he meets in a park that his children and his children’s children have “no sense of history. No sense at all.”
I’m reading the story again, thinking how fine words sound when they are beautiful on the page, when I notice, in one corner, a faint smudge. I peer more closely. The smudge is clearly a fingerprint. The print of Hugh’s long, angled Peter Pointer.
“Oh dear,” I say, showing the page to Hugh. “Should we print another?”
“We should charge extra!” Hugh exclaims, dismissing my question with a wave of his hand. “We’re not striving for perfection here. That fingerprint—that’s what makes this copy distinct. Human. It says, ‘Somebody printed this.’ Imagine what it would be worth, a book with Gutenberg’s fingerprint!”
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Wayne has recited his poem and the scotch has been sampled. I assume the party’s about to adjourn to Hugh’s back garden for lunch.
“Just one more thing!” Hugh calls out.
For a little guy, he has a very big voice. Our chattering stops abruptly, a needle lifted from vinyl. We turn as one to the centre of the room, where Hugh is standing in front of his imposing glass. When he has our attention, he dips out of sight then bobs up again, a long, thick white envelope in his hand.
“This is for you!” he shouts, handing it to me. In case I had any doubt, three-inch cherry-red letters scream from the front: FOR M. I recognize the wooden type he keeps in his corner cabinet, lovely old shapes that seem carved from some ancient unknown species, worn smooth by ten thousand pressings.
“What is it?” I ask, thinking, Dammit, I should have brought him a gift.
“Open it if you want to find out,” he tosses over his shoulder. He is busy handing out similar white envelopes to Erik and Richard and Mico and Faye.
After a year of working with Hugh, I recognize the tooth of the paper in the handmade envelope. I stroke it appreciatively before dipping my fingers into one end and sliding out a book.
My book. Oh, and it is a beautiful thing, the cover an explosion of pale golden petals, the spine a tempest in a forest canopy. My name and the title of the book, The Paradise Project, are deeply embossed in a wonderfully footed font. I run my finger in the grooves left by the bite of the type, over the gloss of chocolate ink. The others are doing the same with their presentation copies, which Hugh has had bound in advance.
“This isn’t just another book,” he announces, and I’m thrown back to something I read last night in Life Notes, personal writings by contemporary black women. I was reading an excerpt from “The House That Jill Built” by Rita Dove, a woman of about my age, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was poet laureate of Virginia. In the memoir, she recounts her experience working with a printer who produced a handprinted book of her poems.
On first seeing her printed book, Rita Dove feels “abashed.” Embarrassment and puzzlement and a kind of wide-eyed, gaping astonishment mashed together with a sense of toppled composure, unseated confidence.
I know exactly what she means. The accumulation of Garamond words pressed into this thick, leafy Salad paper, pages upon pages of them, is overwhelming.
Did I really write this? Did I really have a hand in making it?
I have held a lot of books in my life. Thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. But never a book like this. The DNA of my garden is embedded in the endpapers. My own DNA is in the words. Hugh’s DNA and Erik’s are on the pages. I know every hand that has touched these words as they moved from the scribbled leaves of my notebook to this crisply printed page: the hand that chose the paper, cut and folded it, set the type, carved the image, stirred the ink, ran the press.
I look up at Hugh.
“This book is worth more than any price we can put on it,” he says simply.
We both have tears in our eyes.
CREDIT TO THE CODEX
Gutenberg may have invented the printing press and the movable metal type and oil-based ink that made printing possible, but he didn’t invent what we know as the book. In fact, it was the book—the codex—that made Gutenberg’s invention possible.
Imagine what would have happened if scribes were still copying their texts onto parchment scrolls when Gutenberg wandered into Strasbourg. Would he have made the leap from writing on a long roll of sheepskin to printing on a flat, discreet page? Not likely. It was because the shape of the book already existed—flat sheets stacked between covers—that Gutenberg could envision the transition from handwriting to mechanical printing.
Scrolls were the repositories for stories and essays and laws for at least 2,000 years of human history, a definite improvement over a stick in the sand or crumbling clay tablets. Fragments from Roman and Greek pottery show people reading scrolls, leisurely unrolling one side as they roll up the other, like the music roll in a player piano. Scrolls were used for everything from counting sheep to recording prayers, and they ranged in size from thumbnail small to thirty-foot-long scrolls that make our doorstop novels look puny.
When I was very young, I came down with an extended bout of measles just as my baby sister was born. I was sent to my grandmother’s house. In an upstairs closet, she kept toys for such occasions: a wooden cart and horse with tiny wooden bottles of milk that fit into miniature crates, sweet porcelain-faced dolls, and an educational toy that I think of as a very early version of a computer. About the size of a square suitcase, the top lifted like a laptop, its hinged arms connected to a base that was a chalkboard. The “screen” was a thick scroll moved by wooden knobs. I’d turn the knobs, and the scroll would move to reveal architectural drawings, a train in perfect perspective, songbirds and their eggs, flags of the world, the complete Morse Code, a lady with a hat that if you squinted became a Bengal tiger. Really, everything a girl needed to know. As I fix my cursor to scroll down my computer screen, I often think of that other scroll and of the Romans, especially the marble sculpture of a young girl, discovered in Pompeii, a small scroll held loosely in her hand.
From tablets and scrolls to scrolling tablets and, in between, the codex we call book.
The Romans designed podiums with top and bottom rollers to lighten the load of reading heavy scrolls. They stored the texts in what looks like a wine rack. They also developed wooden tablets smoothed with wax—an early version of Etch A Sketch—small enough to carry with them to scratch a few notes. The convenience of reading from a discreet “page” on a wax tablet led to the creation of personal notebooks made of parchment pages that could be washed or scraped and reused, the parchment pages known as palimpsests (from the Latin palimpsestus, to scrape again). Some historians suggest that Julius Caesar, in the first century BCE, was among the first to reduce scrolls to bound pages in the form of a notebook. His contemporary, Cicero, mentions recording his letters on a palimpsest.
The first codex book appears a hundred years later, in the first century CE. The word “codex” comes from the Latin caudex, which means the trunk of a tree, or a block of wood, perhaps because that’s what the stack of pages looked like. At the time, the pages of a codex would have been made from plants (papyrus) or the skins of sheep or goats (parchment) or lambs, calves, and kids (vellum). Instead of writin
g on an extended roll of papyrus or vellum, a codex allowed a person to record the world on individual pages that were piled up, one on top of the other. Sometimes the pages were held together with loose stitching down one side—usually on the left but not always.
The first reference to a codex is by the Roman poet Martial, who praised its virtues over the scroll. The codex was sturdier, more compact, and much easier to read. Because pages were written on on both sides, the codex held more words and therefore consumed fewer skins. And because pages were distinct, the codex paved the way for numbering that would allow a person to dive into a text at any point and reference bits to share with others.
Martial was an early adopter. Like most new forms, though, the codex was not generally enthusiastically embraced. Because it was descended from erasable palimpsests, it was dismissed as informal and transient, appropriate only for passing thoughts. Scrolls were held in much higher regard, the proper way to present important ideas.
The codex and the scroll co-existed for several hundred years, the codex slowly gaining popularity until, by 300 CE, the two were equally in use. After that, the scroll gradually fell from favour. By 1000 CE, scrolls were used only by governments and institutions for recording legislation and making decrees. By Gutenberg’s time at the end of the Middle Ages, scrolls were a niche market, in use only for religious purposes, a practice that continues today. The Torah, for instance, is still copied scroll to scroll by highly trained, learned, and pious scribes, and small scrolls inscribed with particular Bible verses are produced for the mezuzah that marks the door frames of many Jewish homes.
The codex evolved independently in the Americas, where its trajectory was more tragic. When the conquistadores arrived in Mexico in 1519, they found a civilization that was reading books written on paper made from the inner bark of the wild fig tree, a much more durable substrate than papyrus. Mayans coated their fig-tree paper with lime plaster, creating a smooth white surface that was perfect for their intricate, highly coloured glyphs. Some codices were also made from deer hide. The pages weren’t loose, as in European codices: they were folded accordion-style into “screen-fold” books. A reader opening the book could read several pages at once, like a scroll, but the pages were distinct and folded up to a flat stack, like a European codex. The Codex Borbonicus, an Aztec calendar, was made from a single folded sheet of fig-tree paper forty-seven feet long. Intent on stamping out Aztec and Mayan cultures, the Spanish burned almost all the Mexican codices. Among the few that were spared is the Dresden Codex, folded into thirty-nine leaves, written on both sides. It dates from the eleventh or twelfth century and is the oldest surviving book in the Americas.
Book-burning is a favourite tactic of conquering heroes and political megalomaniacs. In the early 1990s, I co-wrote a book called The Valour and the Horror that drew the wrath of Second World War veterans. A 500-million-dollar lawsuit was launched against us, the biggest class-action suit in Canadian history at the time. A senate hearing was also called, and within the solemn stone walls of Canada’s parliament, senators rose to recommend that the book be destroyed. The lawsuit went to the Supreme Court of Ontario, where the judge declared there were no grounds for legal action, quite the opposite, but the image of my own book being burned has never left me.
Paper books are too ubiquitous to be wiped off the face of the earth by burning. More likely, they will follow the survival curve of the scroll. Just as radio continued after the advent of television, and CDs are still produced even though most of us download our music directly onto our devices, printed books will likely be with us for a long time yet. The pace of change is accelerated but, even so, a hundred years from now printed books and some form of electronic reader may happily co-exist, text scrolling on a screen the usual way of reading, printed books reserved for special purposes, still held in the highest esteem.
RIDING THE ROCKET
Hugh and I set the book launch for August 26, six weeks after we pulled the last page of The Paradise Project from the press. Surely this will give Hugh plenty of time to get the pages bound. He has decided not to bind all 290 books at once. The binding alone costs $15 a copy, and he has pre-sold only fifty books. I’ll bind a hundred, he says, maybe 125.
Binding is the process of physically assembling printed pages into a book. The parchment notebooks of the Romans contained folded pages and sometimes they stitched a few wax tablets together along one side. These two concepts—folding and sewing—are the basis of all book binding.
Bookbinding hasn’t changed much in 500 years. A medieval bookbinder, a hand bookbinder today, and a contemporary commercial bindery all face the same three basic questions: how to hold the pages together, how to protect the pages and cover them securely, how to label and decorate the cover.
Early codices were sometimes stored with pieces of wood laid on top to keep the loose pages square and protected, but it wasn’t until the fifth century that pages were bound together and fitted between hard covers made from thin wooden boards covered with leather. Because vellum was notorious for swelling during hot, humid weather, the wooden covers of these first bound books were often secured by leather or metal straps and clasps known collectively as furniture. (The word “furniture” comes from “furnish,” to equip, so that clasps on a book and pieces of wood in a printer’s chase are all furniture—necessary equipment. When I do a substantive edit of my books, I often refer to the process as “moving the furniture.”)
Even after the fifth century, books didn’t always have covers. As late as the nineteenth century, books were often sold in plain paper wrappers, the pages temporarily sewn together by the printer. Books without covers were cheaper to transport, and publishers weren’t willing to go to the expense of binding a book if it wasn’t going to sell. Often as not, especially for expensive books, the buyer was expected to take the book to his own binder to have it bound to match his personal library. The 1854 edition of Walden by Henry David Thoreau is an early example of a book bound by its publisher. It is a half-bound leather book, which means it has a leather spine but cloth sides, which made it relatively cheap to produce.
Hugh has produced some interesting covers. When he published The Last Paradise, Odetta, Antonino Mazza lent him a bronze medal that had been cast in honour of Pasolini after his murder. Hugh made a polypropylene mould of each side of the medal and created 115 paper facsimiles using raw fibre from Saint-Armand. The binder inset the paper disks into the front and back covers, the medal split by the pages of the book to reflect the violence of the poet’s death.
For the Christmas keepsake he made in honour of Verla the year she died, Hugh built a number of hand looms and invited her friends to weave strips of cloth that he glued to the spines, a unique handwoven spine for each book.
The Paradise Project will be a more traditional hardcover, casebound book, which means the pages will be bound into a “textblock” attached to a “case” made of matte board covered with paper. (It could also be covered in leather or cloth, hence the term “cloth binding.”) With casebound books, pages are typically glued or sewn.
Open a book. If the pages lie flat, the pages are sewn. The Paradise Project will be Smyth-sewn, a hallmark of library quality or archival books because pages are physically stitched into the book using binder’s thread, then further reinforced with fabric backing and adhesive at the spine. Case bindings are both secure and tamperproof. Individual pages won’t come loose, and a page can’t be removed without compromising the entire binding.
David Smyth patented his book-sewing machine in 1879. “Perfect” binding—gluing instead of stitching—was invented twenty years later, but it was rarely used until 1931, when Germany’s Albatross Books introduced the first paperback. These inexpensive books were greeted with enthusiasm by impoverished readers craving escape from the reality of the Depression. Four years later, Penguin Books adopted the format, and in 1939, Pocket Books in America started producing its most popular titles
in paperback versions.
Early paperbacks were bound with cold glues that grew brittle over time. We’ve all tossed out dozens of those books, spines cracked, pages fluttering to the floor. (I admit I have a few favourites still held together with rubber bands.) In the 1940s, the DuPont company developed a hot-melt adhesive that made for longer-lasting paperbacks with more integrity, but no glue can ever solve the inherent problem with perfect binding: open the book flat, and the pages are likely to pop out.
The Paradise Project will be bound at Smiths Falls Book Binding, which operates in a small town an hour’s drive north of Kingston. In 1739, Leipzig, Germany—a town with a population of only about 35,000—boasted twenty-two book binderies, but such enterprises are rare birds now. The one in Smiths Falls survives by servicing libraries in need of archival binding, individuals looking to conserve and restore their old books, and self-published writers wanting print-on-demand and bind-on-demand books.
When Hugh started his press, he was adamant that his books be handmade down to the last detail. He commissioned a local book artist to hand-bind the pages and covers of the first two Hellbox editions.
“The books cost $50 each to bind—and that was twenty years ago!” Hugh exclaims. “I had to find a less expensive way. I decided I would do it myself. How hard could it be?”
For the next decade, he sewed pages himself, using linen thread and one of Verla’s needles. Being Hugh, he didn’t just use a simple knot to tie off the thread that bound the pages together.
“If the book was a bit brash and earthy, I tied the knot on the outside. It was my way of saying, ‘This author has balls.’ Otherwise, I tied it on the inside.” Phil Hall’s poetry collection X has the double knot on the outside, as does The Truth About Rabbits, a debut collection by spoken-word artist Winona Lynn. The knots on several others are discreetly hidden inside.
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