Books Are Beautiful: Japan Edition (a Rebecca post)

It's been a while, I know, and in my defense I can only say that I was busy preparing for my trip to Japan, travelling in Japan, and recovering from my trip to Japan. I loved (almost) every minute of said trip, but it was frustrating for me to be in a country so free and happy with the written word (happening Friday night=hanging out at a bookshop reading unpaid-for magazines!) and not be able to read any of those words. I took some pictures, though, at a random book fair in the square outside Shimbashi station in Tokyo (I say random because I'd been at Shimbashi the day before, and the square was occupied only by it's usual steam locamotive; then, a day later--books in tents!! And happy officefolk, ogling the books. And happy me, ogling the oglers!

Enjoy!












Too cool, eh? Sort of makes you want to learn Japanese. Apparently, it takes five years to even get borderline proficient.

Rebecca

Books Are Still Our Friends (a Rebecca post)

Despite my best efforts to encourage book-love and -kindness, it seems there are still a multitude of ways to wrong our lovely literature. Ever vigilant, I have captured on film (well, on memory card) some of the most egregious mis-endeavours I could find, and posted them here with some better ideas for those who wish, as I know all Thirsty readers do, to be true friends to books everywhere.

Books are not currency.

Incorrect: paying the tab with prose.

Correct: paying with some sort of paper that has limited text, but elegant illustrations of British monarchs.



Books are not delicious.

Incorrect: devouring the Journey anothology.



Correct: order the chocolate lava cake.



Books are not a prison.

Incorrect: book barricade.



Correct: smothering love.



Books will never love you back.

Incorrect: blowing kisses at CanLit.



Correct: blowing kisses at Canadian writers.


Life is difficult, and books can help...but in return, we have to make sure not to put our books in situations they don't belong, where they might be abused, clawed, or gnawed. Books do so much for us, and it is easy to return the favour--read them!

Rebecca

PS--Thanks awfully to the beautiful and bookish models: Claudia, Shannon, Mindy, Penny, Dani, Julie, Alice, the Journey gang, and the baffled but kindly staff at Circle Thai restaurant.

Why I Hate Hardcovers (a Rebecca post)

I didn't mean to be mysterious about this in my last post. It's a strictly personal disaffection, brought on by the boring physical limitations having small hands and reading a lot in transit. If you've ever played the piano, you'll know it's pretty mouselike to have a scant seventh span, and if you've ever ridden a TTC bus in rushhour, you know you often need one hand for pole-/strapping-holding. Which makes all but the slenderest hardcovers nearly impossible for me to read.

I also carry my books with me, and thus resent the added weight of hardcovers. If I'm really immersed in one, it is not unknown for me to sport a narrow horizontal bruise along the top of my left thigh; that's where the edge of a hardcover bangs as it bounces along in my shoulderbag.

Book are physical objects; often sexy, sometimes annoying. I respect hardcovers, but they don't suit my lifestyle.

Rebecca

Books Are Sexy (a Rebecca post)

Books exist to be read; their central joy is the stories and information they contain. But I don't think I'm crazy or fetishistic to insist that there a number of peripheral joys in the physical objectification of the container itself. If in the end, books go entirely virtual, whether to save the forests or space in one's shoulder bag, I'll lag to the back of the pack, but eventually I get a reader like everyone else. But it'll be a loss of the tactical and even some of the visual experience of reading; as a physical object, a book has a lot going on that the screen could never match. Just the diction alone is dreamy. Try

kerning is the spacing between letters in a horizontal line of type. You think you never notice that, but you do. When the kerning is too tight (not enough white between characters), it's crowded and hard to read and you start hating the book for no content-related reason; ditto when it's too loose. A good typesetter sets the overall kerning given the font and page specifications, but then checks and adjusts it pages where there's an illustration, a weird giant word, or something else throwing off the normal line. Readers pay attention to kerning when typesetters don't--in newspapers, where you'll often see a really long word (often an email address or URL) bumped down to the next line, leaving half a line blank above...or a single word stretched out to fill the fully justified space...l   i   k   e      t   h   i    s.

leading is like kerning but on the vertical; it is the space between lines. 0% ledding is the least you can do without the bottom of a p touching the top of an l. That's ghastly to read, though, as you might imagine; it's the sort of Gideon's Bible all-black page that makes you close the book. Most typesetters don't adjust leading page to page--a reader's eye will notice that, but leading can sometimes be tweaked very slightly to prevent widows and orphans.

widows and orphans are lonely words or partial lines. A widow is the last line of a paragraph that lands on the top of a page separated from the rest of its paragraph. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph that falls at the very bottom of a page, again separated from its brethren. The way to remember which is which is the decidedly unsexy line, "a widow has no future, but an orphan has no past." Sad and spooky, no?

laid paper has a far higher sexiness quotient. It is an old-fashioned way of making paper that involves setting it in a ribbed mold of crosshatching chains. When you take the paper out, the grooves of the chains remain. Some paper companies but there logo into the mold, also. This is rare now, but you do see it occasionally--especially in limited edition books meant to be enjoyed as objects as well as stories. In researching this article, I found out that laid paper is even rarer than I thought, because some that appears to be so is actually some other kind of paper with a laid-ish stamp pressed overtop. It's like those restaurants that paint the grill marks on the burgers--shocking!

perfect binding is when the book-block (all the pages in the book, folded together in signatures) has glue basted on the spine and then the cover pressed overtop. This is how your paperback book was made unless it is very fancy-schmancy indeed. This is a less expensive way of binding than case binding, but unless you are planning on throwing your book at someone, it makes little difference to the average reader (I believe it is a problem for book collectors to have glue in a book, but I don't know the details of that).

case binding is the fancier way, and what you generally get with hardcovers. Signatures of pages are stitched together and then stitched into the spine of the cover. Meh. (Note: I have a giant chip on my shoulder about hardcovers and can't be trusted to offer fair and balanced reporting on this subject).

signatures are sets of pages made by folding a single sheet of paper. For instance, if you were to print on both sides of an 8.5x11 inch sheet, you'd have to print pages 1 and 4 on the page, and 2 and 3 on the front, then fold to create a four-page signature of 8.5x5 pages. But 4-page signatures are rare; usually they are 16 pages, involving horizontal and vertical folds, and are very confusing. Some of my most humiliating arithmetical debacles involve signatures. Also, this was the only definition I couldn't find an online source to double-check myself, so let me know if I've erred (actually, on the others too; the Internet is rumoured not to be infallible, though I doubt this myself).

There--doesn't that make you want to embrace real books, or at least feel one up?

Rebecca

This is a call (still Rebecca)

Due to what I am choosing to interpret as public demand, there will be a sequel to Books Are Our Friends. I've taken about half the pictures for it already, but it occurs to me that Thirsty readers probably have some excellent ideas of their own on the topic of book friendship. If you'd like to send me a correct/incorrect concept, I'll try to make it happen on-camera (within reason; we all know that books are not marital aids). If you'd like to go it one better and actually take the correct/incorrect pictures for yourselves, I'd be happy to receive any sort of normal digital picture format. Ideas and pics can be sent to my email address, Rebeccabooks@excite.com

And if that's all a bit too much involvement for you but you still have a yen for a very insignificant shot at fame, let me know next time you see me. I'll more than likely have my camera, a book, and a strange idea for you to execute.

I live in hope!

Rebecca

Books Are Beautiful (a Rebecca post)

Sure, we all snicker at the apocryphal tales of dowagers ordering books by the colour to spruce up their drawing rooms and interior decorators organizing libraries entirely by size. But those of us who love books also often like to look at them, even when we aren't reading. And really, I think it's quite clear that books, like tulips, gold coins, and cheerleaders, are something that looks better in aggregate. 

I hate to be shallow, but I like to see books even when I know they can never be mine to read, even when I know I don't even want to read them. My favourite part of the tour of Parliament is the library, and I still enjoy gazing at the massive book mezzanines of the Thomas Fisher archives even though I never fully understood my borrowing privileges even when I had them.

And of course I'm a fan of Nigel Beale's intrepid bookstore photography, was thrilled with Dani Couture's showcase of shots from This Ain't the Rosedale Library a few weeks back, and with Kerry Clare's shot from Good Egg. But I've never seen photographic tribute to BMV North, a shop to which, on aesthetic and literary and sentimental grounds, I am often drawn. So this weekend I took a few shots while I was there. Sure are pretty. (Another thing I love about that place is that everyone ignored me while I ran around taking pictures, even if it was obvious they were in the frame. People at BMV are serious.)

Books Are Our Friends!!

Hey, I'm Rebecca Rosenblum, Biblioasis author and now occasional Thirsty guest-poster. Amazingly enough, my invitation to write some posts here came just a week after the only post on this blog that I have ever violently disagreed with. I scrolled through the Bibliorgy photos while peeking between the fingers of my non-scrolling hand, brain twitching.

Books don't go on the floor, yo--not if it can possibly be avoided. Books certainly don't go on a dirty warehouse floor in heaps that look dumped out of a truck and scattered so that they could be stepped on or... (gasp) kicked.

No. No no no no.

Books are our friends--we must treat them as well as we are able (and not kick them). You know this, I'm sure, since you're reading a publisher's blog after all. Just in case, though, I thought it might help if I offered a little refresher on the Dos and Don'ts of book-loving. Even if you know all this stuff, maybe you know someone who isn't quite sure...pass it on!!

Books Are Our Friends

Books are not a game.

Incorrect: Building a big messy stack of fiction, poetry and reference books for "fun."

Correct: Playing Jenga.

Books are not a fashion accessory.

Incorrect: Chekov hat.

Correct: Patent-leather clutch.

Books are not a step up.

Incorrect: Standing on style-guides.

Correct: Befriending the tall.

Books are not weapons.

Incorrect: Violent backhand motion with Russian classics.

Correct: Violent downward stabbing motion with fork and/or scissors.

All this is not to say that books are delicate, needing to be preserved carefully away from human hands. Books are friends, meant to be our companions, read, loved and embraced.

Sometimes a spine gets broken in the excitement.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, bad things happen to good books.

But that's ok--books are there to be read, and if we can help them fulfill that destiny, the occasional incident is, well...incidental. Following these simple tips will help you keep your books mainly free of dirt, bugs, hairspray and blood, but the only reason you'd want them that way is to read them. Read books!

Rebecca

PS--Megathanks to CanLit's Next Top Models: Scott, Wren, Jamie, Angela, Jane, Megan, David, Jordana, Ananda, Chuck, Michael, Anton and Leo.

Good Stuff: Books as Type

from Fubiz.