Some raw materials
Like most
of the other good things in my life, my involvement with the “arts of the book”
was a serendipitous development. In the
early years of my teaching career at Princeton I found myself charged with the
leadership of an undergraduate residential college. We sponsored social events, visiting
lecturers and other gatherings that we advertised chiefly through broadside
posters. We had a modest budget, and
printing costs seemed very high to me. I
had the thought that if I went over to the undergraduate typography lab I might
find the equipment and the instruction that would allow us to make our own
posters. One thing led to another, and
by 1970 Joan and I were the proprietors of a private press and the new best
friends of several aspiring poets.
It is but a
short step from printing sheets for a book and binding them in a finished
form. Though I never aspired to be an
“art” binder, I did master the basic techniques tolerably well. I bound the hand-painted copies of one of my
own scholarly books, now a valuable rarity.
More friends appeared—little old church ladies with disbound family
Bibles, undergraduates with over-read copies of the favorites of their
childhood, Winnie the Pooh or Le petit
prince.
I took up the challenge of
odd-sized remnants of binder’s board, especially as that commodity kept
increasing in price. So I developed a
lively trade in coasters, religious votive images, and place mats. We have Chaucer place mats, Giotto place
mats. For my son Luke, an admirer of
Chagall, I made a set of Chagalls. Like
most other American boys of my generation I went through an early phase of
stamp-collecting. It went nowhere, and I
soon lost interest; but it meant that like most other boys of my generation I
continued through adolescence and early youth to have somewhere among my
stored possessions a few hundred worthless but panchromatic postage stamps from
the thirties and forties. I made a
particularly successful table decoration cum trivet covered in stamps; and it
is still usable, if barely, after twenty-five years. The idea behind this was originally
etymological. While living in Italy for
a while in the seventies I came to appreciate what I should have grasped in
English from the Stamp Act—namely the eventual identity of printing and stamping.
The original prototype after decades of bearing the weight of hot casseroles
About fifteen years before that we
had inherited a mighty if moldy antique dining table—total surface with all
leaves in about twenty-five square feet.
Eventually, in consultation with my granddaughter Sophia, then aged
about nine, it was agreed that what that table needed was a huge protective
cover made of triple sheets of heavy binder’s board and covered with lacquered postage
stamps. So I began buying up junk stamps
at yard sales and on eBay, where they used to sell by the pound. The stamps piled up, but the work of art
never quite did. "Ah, but
a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?” Sophia, who recently celebrated her
twenty-sixth birthday, is now a high tech exec resident in the trendiest part of
Brooklyn and Living the Life.
Twenty-five square feet of pasted stamps is no longer high on the
agenda for her either.
But it just so happens that at the moment Luke and Melanie,
accompanied by young John Henry and his even young sister Hazel, have been
visiting us from Montreal. We have had
many happy high jinks, including a brilliant stay at the beach alluded to in my
last non-post. Melanie has now had to
return north on pressing domestic business, but Luke and the kids are here for
a few days more. Casting his eye upon
the original and by now very well-worn postal “trivet,” Luke came up with a
brilliant idea. How would it be if, when
he takes off for Montreal on Friday, he were to have among his luggage a set of
six brand-new postal table mats—a surprise gift for Melanie? We have so many stamps that each individual
mat could be “thematic”, reflecting Melanie’s feminist, ornithological,
historical, and archaeological interests.
There is a lot of work involved in such a project, especially when undertaken
under time pressure; and we agreed there must be a division of labor. Luke generously volunteered to be the “ideas
man”. That is, he will identify the six
themes and select the roughly hundred stamps for each mat. Once the idea has been achieved, there is the
scut work. Funny thing, that. My job is to glue the cut boards to the
proper thickness, prepare the flour-and-water paste, apply the pasted cover
papers to the dried boards, and see to it that they dry under pressure so as to
remain absolutely flat. My genius son
will then tell me which stamps to affix (with a watery paste). I presume I shall also be responsible for
going to Home Depot to get some polyurethane and to Jo-Ann’s Fabrics for some
kind of spongeable backing. Remember,
these things are made to have food spilled on them.
That this can be achieved within three days seems unlikely. I have no photographs of the finished
articles to mount with this post. But
with a little luck I might be able to add one or two during the next week.
