Making books, old-school

Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance - Leila Avrin (American Library Association, 1991)

Sometimes I read books for school. Mostly I read PDFs of journal articles, but there are books too. And I just read this one for my course on the history of the book. (Technically it's the history of books and libraries, but apparently with this instructor, just the book.)

This book is pretty cool. It's laid out like a textbook. Lots and lots of graphics -plates, figures, maps. It averaged over 1 per page. So you could see examples of the evolution of pictograms into letters, and of scrolls and writing tools. Plus, it makes the text (8 1/2 x 11 pages) seem a little less daunting.

Avrin starts with writing and the alphabet and then moves on to ancient books/scroll/manuscripts through various eras and geographic locations. We get the Greek book, the Hebrew book, the Islamic book, plus lots of handwritten codices, manuscript and papyrus making, illumination, and bookbinding. What I suppose I most enjoyed was thinking about how much the transmission of information has both changed and stayed the same over thousands of years. And how much information we've be able to glean from the objects that made it through history.

And again, lots of cool illustrations. I can't really see this book being of much use to someone who isn't, say, studying the topic, but if that happens to be you, then I'd recommend the book. :)

The Journal of Dora Damage

I can't decide whether or not author Belinda Starling's tale outshines her heroine's. A young mother, Starling had just finished The Journal of Dora Damage when a routine operation went awry and she died from septic shock. Her brother wrote an afterword to eulogize her, an author who did not live to see her book bound.

But for over 400 pages, Dora succeeds in taking the reader's attention away from Starling's tragic death. Dora is a London housewife in 1860 whose family faces ruin, and takes salvation upon her shoulders by manning her husband's bookbindery. Except it's a bitch to keep the creditors at bay, deal with a sick husband and daughter, and have time to ply a trade that women weren't supposed to do. Until she gets in with a crowd of aristocratic men with porno- and ethnographic tastes, whose secrets she keeps in exchange for them keeping her own.

And then things get more heated, in all sorts of senses of the term. But throughout it, Dora exudes a pretty impressive sense of calm. This is what (lower)middle-class women did; they shouldered what came at them, and kept households and communities afloat.

It's a bit embarrassing to be an avid reader who has never really thought about how books are made. Once you move past Book of Kells inscriptions and the tedium of typesetting, I'm entirely out of my realm. How do the pages all stick together? Dunno. Which provided another bright point in Dora Damage - the descriptions of the workshop, and of the binding process, were illuminating. And the individual attention taken, to match leather and border design with text.... Now, if only I knew how they made those trade paperbacks I love so much.