|
It is week forty-three of 2023. How’s the writing going these days? Have you stopped to take a breath recently? As we tumble through the last nine (!!) weeks of the year, remember to pace yourself. Know when your pockets of rest are coming—a lazy weekend, a Thanksgiving break, the laggy, draggy week after Christmas?—and guard them jealously. In your writing time, see if you can plug into the fall harvest energy (or spring flourishing energy, for my southern hemisphere readers) to give yourself an extra boost. Here at the garret, I plunged happily back into editing work this week, copyediting a cozy mystery set in a wintry Canadian town and doing a first read of a delicious manuscript set in Portugal that made me want to scour San Francisco for pastéis de nata. My editing life is happiest when I can get my schedule to align just like this, working on a developmental edit in the morning and then shifting gears to do some detail-oriented copyediting in the afternoon. Last week I put all of my editing work aside to spend a week learning to make books at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Over the course of five days, I made four books from stacks of paper, a few pieces of binding board, needle and thread, glue, and various little odds and ends, using tools and techniques from the nineteenth century and earlier. These bookbinding ‘core’ classes are also offered individually on weekends, but I knew I wanted to be able to spend a week doing the intensive version, being able to sink into the experience. It took me almost five years to make my schedule align with the workshop, but it was worth the wait! When I step back and look at my zig-zagging career, I can see that the through thread has always been books—trying to understand what they are and how they work from various angles. When I was an academic, my research focused on publishing history, specifically the period when novels made the leap from hand-made luxury item to mass-produced entertainment in the nineteenth century. My editing work was inspired in part by my curiosity about the publishing process and my desire to understand and then harness the mysterious alchemy that turns a pile of words into a story. This bookbinding course was another angle on the same obsession. On the first day, our smart and patient instructor tossed off an aside that had me scrambling for my pencil to write it down: “Bookbinding is about teaching individual components that they are now part of a whole.” She said this as she taught us for the first time how to make a punching guide that would determine where we’d punch the sewing holes for our folded pages. As the hours ticked by on that first day, I began to understand what she meant. Groups of four sheets of paper were folded into signatures, then creased down with a tool called a bone folder and pressed together in a heavy machine to flatten them further. One by one, these signatures were stitched together, getting another compression from the bone folder at the end of each row of stitches. The cover, also stitched into the signatures, was finished with decorated endpapers, and then the finished conglomeration, now a book!, was placed under weighted pressboards to reinforce the lesson that it was now a single unit rather than a collection of individual parts.
|
