No. 5: Notes from the book press
It opened as a book. I did not expect that.
The book is finished. I have been avoiding saying so because I did not want to finish.
This week
On Monday I took it from the press and opened it. I had braced for something to go wrong: the hinge, the pastedown, a bubble in the cloth. None of it did. The covers lifted, the spine curved, the pages fell where a book’s pages fall. I stood in the workshop for a minute, holding it, feeling absurdly like someone who had passed an exam.
Then I found the faults. A thumbprint of paste on the back cloth. The fifth signature, a hair high at the head. The crease I hid in the gutter on the sixth. None of it matters to anyone else, and all of it matters to me.
The case for the thing you cannot unmake
It is easy to romanticise the permanent, and I try not to. Plenty of things in a workshop can be re-done. But the irreversible ones teach you how to pay attention. Paste does not forgive; thread does not give back. After a few weeks of this I find I read my emails more carefully, as though a sent message were a stitch.
I will not claim this is wisdom. It might simply be fear, repackaged. But it is a useful fear.
One thing to read
The label on the inside of something you own. Not the brand, the care instructions, or the small print about where it was made. People have been putting a few honest words on the things they sell for a very long time, and they are a quiet genre of writing, worth reading once in a while for the rhythm.
A small thing. The essay on casing in went up on Monday, the third and last of the series. It is longer than I intended, and is mostly about glue.
N.