Both volumes of Suave Mechanicals received a strongly positive review by David Brock in The Book Club of California Quarterly News-Letterthis month. In general, he “…marveled at how unique it [Suave Mechanicals] is. This is not a survey of the history of bookbinding, nor is it a manual, yet it has a foot in each camp.” (p. 19) In particular, he mentioned my 2013 essay, “Beating, Pressing, and Rolling: The Compression of Signatures in Bookbinding Prior to Sewing”, in a complementary paragraph, reproduced below.
Both volumes are available at The Legacy Press. Get them before they are out of print!
Source: David Brock “A Review of Suave Mechanicals: Essays in the History of Bookbinding” The Book Club of California Quarterly News-Letter, Vol. LXXXI, No. 1, Winter 2016. (pp.18-21)
This Japanese style pull saw fits into an 18 mm Olfa-style snap off knife handle. The Razorsaw is well made and cuts quickly. Bookbinders may find it useful to make small cuts while shaping wooden boards, trimming trenails, etc. There is another saw blade which I haven’t tried, the S-1162 serrated blade, designed for plastics, which might work on ethafoam. An easy and inexpensive way to add a saw to your tool kit. And whose inner 13 year old boy can resist the appeal of a pocketable saw?
When I first read about the Alberto Manguel/ Robert Lepage collaboration “La bibliotheque, la nuit” at Bibliotheque et Archives Nationales du Quebec, in Montreal, Canada, it sounded nuts. A virtual reality exhibition of the interiors of libraries? Even for someone deeply involved with books, this sounded like a real bore. And it seemed desperate, libraries trying to reinvent themselves as entertainment? But I was curious enough to check it out.
Once I experienced the exhibition, I was floored. Ten libraries from around the world were virtually presented, with a short 2-3 minute narrative describing them. Paper-based books formed the background to many of the scenes and there was a constant subtext alluding to their importance. Overall, it was an oddly reflective and poetic. When experiencing a library, you were generally located in the center of a reading room, and could look in every direction. The Oculus Rift VR simulators were very impressive. The experience felt so real it was disconcerting to look down and not see my own body in the virtual space.
If one of the goals of this exhibition was to establish libraries as a third space, I left doubtful. But I can imagine some kind of “stack view” using virtual reality to help visually find books of interest on the shelves, which would be incredibly useful to those of us researching bindings (except for all the books in boxes…). Or, much like books are now digitized, will libraries themselves be “preserved” using virtual reality in the future, and this will be how we remember and experience this once culturally powerful dinosaur?
If you are attending the joint 2017 AIC/CAC Conference this May in Montreal, this exhibition will still be on. It is within walking distance of the conference site, reservations required.
You enter the exhibition through a reproduction of Manguel’s personal library. A gentle rains falls outside the stone framed windows. My Photo.
Peachey Conservation 