Beth Heller Conservation
Fixing paper so it lives longerArchive for June, 2009
Get Out Your Umbrellas
It’s going to be raining loose pages. The Espresso Book Machine, available for lease for a mere $1500/month to bookstores everywhere (according this Boston Globe article) prints, trims and perfect binds books on demand all in a machine about the size of an old-style copy machine. No fanning of pages, just milling on one pass and rollering glue on another.
I, for one, will be working on my dfa rebind skills. I predict a repeat of the early days of binding – people will buy an unbound book and bring it to US for fancifying for their shelves.
Or not. My library is about to embark on a book digitization project for which we do not have to pay, and I’m pretty sure the resulting POD books will be created in a manner similar to this. Do I have the ability to influence the way in which they are bound? Probably not. Will I reject the project? Nope.
Here is an interesting blog post from IF on the topic, the most intriguing aspect of which, to me, is the possibility of personal customization of book covers.
And here is what Gary Frost has to say.
Some Days I Do Stupid Things
Today I unfolded a jacket that was worn by a dead man for 40 years on the side of K2. I needed to see the label inside to make sure it was the jacket listed in the accession record and identified in a photograph.
It is battered and torn. And stained. Handling it was a very eerie feeling, as if there was something of his presence still attached to it. This feeling was especially emotional given the fact that the bodies of 2 climbers have just been discovered this week, and 1 is still missing. I have had conversations with 2 of those guys. I know other climbers who have lost partners in the mountains. It’s hard not to imagine their last experiences when holding the shredded remnants of the things they last touched.
That is something that cannot be communicated in a digital image. It is visceral.
And, it occured to me later, I should probably have used gloves. For my benefit, and for the good of the object. As it was, I’ve been compulsively washing my hands today.
