Where Do We Go From Here?

Books have always been a part of my life. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been staying up late, trying to finish just one more chapter. Picturing the future of books, it’s hard for me to see anything but what we have now, having been so interwoven into my lifestyle.

And as much as I would love to see books stay the way they are, times are changing. The more technology advances, the more commonplace electronic books are becoming. There are very few titles that aren’t available on the Nook or Kindle. There’s no more waiting in line for a release or taking a trip to the library or the bookstore. With just a few clicks, a book can be signed, sealed, and delivered in just a few seconds.

The nostalgic in me wants to resist this change, to insist that by basing books in an online market, they lose a certain charm. But I can’t deny the eBook’s merits. With the onslaught of continuous forms of entertainment, the demand for books is decreasing. The book’s switch to cyberspace might be what saves the book’s spot in the ever-expanding market. But who can tell for sure the future of the book for certain? We'll just have to experience it for ourselves.

Books of the Future

I believe books made out of paper are becoming a thing of the past which makes me sad to say. Almost every book that was ever published along with every book that comes out is available for an e-reader. They are also very easy to use. Even my 84 year old grandmother has an e-reader and uses it daily. My brother and I read paper books more than our parents do.

Printing And All Of Its Intricacies

Printing back in the day must have been hard. It was time consuming, difficult, precise, and to put it bluntly, rather boring considering each individual had only piece of the process to perform.  Through every piece of the printing process, I had my own struggles.  It took multiple tries to get anything right, and even then, to understand the rate at which people used to perform these tasks was daunting knowledge.  Old printers could do any task I chose to do three, four or five times in the time it was taking me to do them. 

 

Regardless of my own inabilities, it was an exciting learning experience.  There isn't much that builds more character than doing something people before you had done for centuries to help you not take for granted the technology we have today.  The whole course this semester has been that way, in my opinion.  It has provided for me a much needed glimpse into the past and all that I would normally never experience.  It has probably been the class that has taught me the most, and it has definitely been the most hands on and interesting.

What's In Store For Books

It's impossible to ignore the decline of the paper book, what with the introduction of easily-accessed virtual copies of nearly every book to have ever been written and the constant increase in prevalence of portable e-readers.  Books will probably be printed less and less as time goes on; eventually there will be no use or need for physical copies of books, made entirely of resources that humanity has become more and more worried about losing.  Eventually, every physical book will be an antique and the book market will become populated entirely by collectors and individuals stuck in the past. People will stop printing books for the same reason that people have stopped widely using scrolls -- it's simply not practical anymore.

If there's anything we learned in this course though, it's that the medium and appearance of the book is not what makes the creation a book.  It is the idea, the permanence of the story, the exchange between reader and writer, that makes a book a book.  So, even though paper will soon be out of date, books will continue indefinitely.  There's no end to people willing to share their thoughts, and there's no end to people that are willing to absorb the ideas of others.  As long as that remains true, the future of books has no end.

The future of books?

I can't tell you how much this class has enlightened me on how books were made and what little things can be looked at to figure out the character that each book contains.  We were even able to experience the exact methods that people used before computers to make paper, carve images, and set type before printing and binding the books. 
Unfortunately, I think that the age of books is declining a little bit in the face of new technology in the form of Nooks, Kindles, and other Ebooks.  Even though these new forms of reading have drawn other people into reading the books that we all know and love, it seems like these same books are being pushed out as well.  So I guess my question is: are books a dying breed? or will they always have some place in today's society?  Personally, books will always have a special place in my heart, and be important to my sanity: a place that even my Kindle can't fill

Stories in the Making in a Nutshell

The process of making our books taught me so much about a subject that I had previously known very little about. We were able to go through the outdated process of making a book that the people in the 1700’s went through in order to publish books. We were taught the process of making paper, binding a book, setting type, and using a Benjamin press. All of these are things that I had previously known nothing about and never dreamed of being able to do. The reason I showed interest in this particular seminar is that I really love objects with history and a story behind them which made this class about historical books and the method to make them so interesting to me. 

            On the last day of class, Dr. Samuelson gave us a parting speech that asked us to think about the future of books. With the growing popularity of Nooks and EBooks, paper books may one day be deemed obsolete, and bookstores will go out of business much like the movie rental business. I had previously thought about this topic and had even written about it earlier in the year on the seminar’s blog page, but I have thought about it much more now. In some ways, not having the traditional books could be useful such as not having to spend hundreds of dollars on college books and instead paying much less for online books. Online books would also never go out of stock like the traditional paper books do. After making our books from scratch though, I have come to respect paper books so much more and understand their significance. Books contain within them secrets of the past that EBooks could never have. If I wrote my name and the year I made it on my book I made and someone a hundred years from now picked it up, they would know who owned that book and around when it was made. Every mistake I had made in making the book would be evident, but these mistakes would give the book character. Uneven binding would help distinguish my book from my fellow classmate’s similar copies. These differences are what make books so important to history. We have studied again and again historical books in class that, through the seal stamped on the inside cover or the opinions of a past reader on the margins of the book, we can trace the history of the book and know its story. I have come to learn that if traditional paper books disappear then a large part of history might as well.

            In all, I greatly enjoyed this seminar. It not only taught me an amazingly awesome (if outdated) skill, but it also taught me how very important books are to our history.

                

Inking and Printing

Inking and printing was a hands-on activity that was so much fun.  Most of time I ended up doing the inking, which was interesting.  In order to get all of the letters sufficiently covered in ink, one must roll the roller over each section in a plethora of directions about a trillion times.  And then there's always that one corner at the very edge of the page that is lighter than the rest, because apparently in the Great Inking of the Letters, that one section was stubborn and refused to succumb to the great powers of my inking roller.

I also enjoyed the experience of making sure the words got onto the paper through the wonderful art of printing.  It's pretty interesting to learn that some people were so fast with those archaic machines at some point.  The swinging must have been intense, because I wasn't moving that quickly and the printer swayed whenever I pulled the bar to clamp the print down onto the paper.  However, I really enjoyed that part, and felt that if I were working in a book-making factory back in the Golden Ages, I should not so much mind just swinging from that bar clamp all day.  It took me leaning with all my weight to make sure everything was pressed down sufficiently.  So I could pretend that I was on a ship or something and it was swaying back and forth, and I was just holding onto the railing.  It's a highly metaphorical image, but if I was to do the same monotonous motion all day, I would attempt to add some creativity to an otherwise easily worn-out task.

The similarity between the two machines is striking.  Anyway, I very thoroughly enjoyed the overall process, and it is something I should be glad to have a chance to do again sometime in the future!

Mind your P's and Q's

Setting type has been an exciting, new experience for me. In a way, the repetitive motion of it is soothing. The hardest part was figuring out the spacing, especially when we were justifying the type. I was sure glad we had a practice run for printing our paragraphs. Luckily, I caught a couple of mistakes before it was time to make our final project. Something of interest to me was the 'Four Demons,' referring to the letters p, q, b and d, as they look really similar on the type. On our handouts there was a great trick to deciphering which letters are which. You simply look at the type (nick up) and slide the descender/ascender. This reveals what the actual letter is! This is very helpful for when you are returning to type to its spot in the case.

 It was exciting to finally do some inking and printing. I was surprised by how much work it was to surround the type with furniture and tighten it up before inking it. It is quite a process! Luckily, it was not terribly messy like I imagined it would be. Only three more classes to go; I can't wait to see the end product!

Type!

This week/last week we were able to set type, which is actually a really soothing activity.  I found that once I got to working on setting out my paragraph and finding the letters, my hands started to remember where the letters were and it became muscle memory to just go grab the letter I needed.  I wasn't sure how exactly the process worked at first, because I had never really seen the type itself or the method in which it was held.  But once I saw how everything was set up, it was pretty clear to me how it worked.

What amazed me, though, was thinking back to how people used to make entire newspapers by doing this.  And some newspapers were daily editions, so the type had to be set and changed every day.  Not only that, but there were stories that needed to be written before they were set in type, and then the type needed to be checked for errors.  That makes today's methods of printing newspapers seem SO much easier.  Seems to me that there shouldn't even be mistakes in today's newspaper, considering all we have to do is click on some letters and use spell check to correct things.  And mistakes can be removes supremely easily.  It's a wonder to me that people were able to make so much using movable type.

However, I really enjoyed the activity, and would like to do it again.  For me the fun was just in finding the letters and seeing how efficient I could become, how fast I could go without making a  mistake.  In all of my efforts, I only ended up making one mistake, which was an inverted period.  That's what I get for competing with myself!

The Smallest Beginnings

It's hard imagine that books that can be as big as a computer can come from such small beginnings. So many pages and so much writing comes from tiny little pieces of lead. Something as complex as, say, the bible was made up of tiny little letters individually placed. The amount of work required to make a book in the past is incredible.

One also has to consider the frustration that would come from messing up a sentence, or even just one word. It might mean you would have to redo the entire thing, and that would take forever. And if the entire phrase falls apart, that's even worse. It makes you appreciate how much work was put into books by the printers.

Also, I wonder if they ordered different style of letters for different books. If all of the books from a publisher were in the same style, I would wonder if people who wanted a specific style of text would go to a different printer. An interesting way to cause rivalry.

Setting Type

Last Monday, we finally got to set some of our type for our book up in the workshop, and once again, I was surprised at how hard it was to actually get the letters in the right spots without any major mishaps.  I'm one of those people who is constantly checking and overlooking her work to make sure that there's  nothing out of place, so I became really confused when I couldn't even read the words that I had spelled out so far.  Normally, I can read all kinds of words in any kind of direction; backwards, forwards, upside down, even mirrored words make sense to me.  However, It took a long time for me to get used to the words because not only were the letters mirrored, the letters were mirrored without flipping the location of the letters, making it backwards as well (from my perspective).  I can't even imagine how hard it must be to set type for an entire novel without at least a few mistakes sprinkled somewhere in the pages.

I also thought that just getting the letters in the right order was confusing.  Instead of being able to hand write everything or type everything on a computer (where we already have a basic understanding of where all the letters are located), we had to get used to an entire new position for all of the letters we needed, some of which were in really strange positions (You tend to notice these things when your last name starts with a "Z").  All in all, I've gained some healthy respect for anyone who used to set type before the age of computers and spell-check, not only is it confusing, but you also need to make sure that everything is set perfectly, or the pieces will literally fall around you.

We All Make Mistakes

I can bet that there was not one of us who didn't make some type of blunder on the wood carvings or our book bindings. Like I said in my earlier post, I was incredibly OCD in trying to make everything perfect and look flawless, but we all realized that that was just about impossible. It's kind of ironic though that a lot of the aspects of the books that we have looked at have been mistakes or had been added later after the book had been published. We saw an example of this in class when we were shown the famous wood carving against slavery.



The blunders near the face and the unfinished parts of the wood carving showed that this wood carving had not ever been used in publication. At the time, it must have been incredibly frustrating for the wood carvers to see all their hard work go to waste (and we all know how much work this would take!), but what they didn't know was that this wood carving could give it more value in the far future for being different with its mistakes.

The mistakes made in different publications of the same book also can give readers in the future an idea of what books were published first and then corrected for later publications of the book. These mistakes can give an ancient treasure even more value with it's difference. It also become the book's signature sign of uniqueness and distinguish it among other publications of the same book among collectors. Mistakes don't always have to be negative, but it's kind of funny how that mistake can sometimes be that book's trademark.

Color Me Impressed

I know I took illustrations in books for granted before this class. Even if nowadays they are much easier to make, their beginnings, as we have now seen, were much humbler. Instead of a scanner and a computer, illustrations were done using a block of wood and carving tools. Just hearing this you can understand that this is an impressive feat. 

Actually doing the woodcutting myself was a learning experience. First, I pulled the biggest derp move and carved out the actual illustration, instead of carving out the space around it. So instead of a colored icon and white around it, I had a white icon with ink around it. While some may prefer this and do it by choice, this is not at all what I meant to do, and it would've been easier to cut the other way anyways. But, I learned from my mistake and if I ever get the chance to do a woodcut I'll do it right and come across as an expert. Not.

An expert on the background of woodcuts I'm definitely not. However, my knowledge of them is much better than my skill in making them. Above is a crazy impressive woodcut. Look at the details in the shading! My illustration was blocks of ink and blocks of white. Nowhere on it did I even attempt to do any kind of shading. And it is in the actual skill that we, as people that have attempted it ourselves, can really appreciate woodblock illustrations.

Social Change

Today we discussed the impact books can have on society; they have true shaping abilities. We touched on the topic of censorship too.  I was fascinated by the sort of stamp of approval provided by the censor in the book involving Herodotus. As soon as I saw the markings in the preface, I associated it with what I had seen before in Huckleberry Finn. Junior year we read Huck Finn in class and our copies provided by the school were all marked up. In a way, this brought more attention to what was being blotted out! What is your experience with censorship? Did your high school have certain banned books? Where the line should be drawn?

On a semi-related note:
This weekend I went home, and it just so happened to be the weekend of our local “Friends of the Library Book Sale.” This is an annual sale of thousands of used books. Looking back, I could easily say that it has been an influential piece in the development of my love for books. I can recall from years past spending hours there with my family exploring the books.  Being there this Saturday was even more fulfilling. I was able to look at the collections of books with a view shaped by my learning in Cushing. Seeing as these were used books, I noticed details of previous owners and various other features we have discussed in class. I am just certain among all those books were hidden gems waiting to be revealed!

The Power of Illustration

I think I can speak for everyone when I say that the illustrations on the side of books were really neat, and the fact that when you look at it from a different direction, the pages show a totally different picture. I do not know how the illustrator made the pictures on the side of the book so detailed. I wish publishers still did this today. It is interesting to see the correlation between the picture and the content of the book if there is even one at all.

I also found the books with illustration of plants versus the book with the actual specimens interesting. A horticulture book with only illustrations may last longer, but a horticulture book with real specimens are much more interesting. It would be very difficult  to make a book with specimens of plants because some plants are only alive at certain times of the year, and it would take a great amount of time to find the plants.

Hidden Meanings

Looking at all the different ways that images are used to convey meaning and worth last week was mind boggling to say the least. It was interesting to see how an image or the presentation of a book can provide so many glimpses into how the previous owner acted or what was in store beneath an elaborate binding. Just by looking at what was presented on the binding of a book, we were able to figure out that the book with elaborate and fragile designs on the cover held stories by Shakespeare and was thought to be both a cherished item and a great expense to the previous owner.

Not the same book, but similar design and style

I was also really interested by the pictures inside of the books, especially the horticulture books that we looked at. Seeing the two books over the almost the same plants presented in different ways was really cool. On one hand, Fuchs took great pains to have every plant he could get his hands on accurately etched onto a press so that each plant could have it's own large page, showing detail while giving the reader a chance to go exploring and fill in the color of the plants himself. However in the other book, although there were many pages with long-dead plants pressed into the book, there were a lot of blank pages that were still waiting to be filled with a specific plant. This book was past the point of bursting because of all the extra material added in, indicating that the book had started out blank, but had been filled in over time by the owner, whom we can only assume was the one who found each plant and pressed them into the book one by one. Just the thought that looking at the images and material that have been left behind by past owners can give us an idea of who they were and how they acted is a really cool concept!

I guess I've learned that an age-old saying is true: a picture really does say a thousand words

Book Looks

Yesterday, we got to take a look at some different bindings and illustrations.  One on my favorite parts was seeing the hidden illustrations in the gilded edges of a book.  It was an illustration within a gilding within a book.  Inception.  What was neat was seeing how the paintings were so intricate.  Watercolor is really not generally used for intricate work, and all the little people and scenes painted on the books' edges were amazing, and must have taken a good amount of time.

One of my favorite images was the one that portrayed the sea and a tiny little town right next to it.  It was so pretty, and it was similar to the one above.  The binding on the one book about Heaven was also really neat. If it had been done by hand, each copy, I theorize that making a mass amount of books would have been difficult.  However, the front cover said "1998."  We don't usually think of 1998 as being old for a book, but already that book is 14 years old! That surprised me, how quickly time passes, and it's interesting to see how well books in different places hold up over the years.

I also think that the hollowed-out books are really neat.  A lot of people use them as good places to hide guns or flasks, but as I was looking online, some people put their phones in them, their Nooks or random things like keys.  I even saw a person use a book to propose to a girl; he took her favorite book and gifted it to her, then she found a ring in the middle.  Books with surprises in the way that they're made are really awesome, like the book that had the playing cards.  Who knew a book could hold so many different things!

Quality vs. Quantity

I have always been labeled a perfectionist throughout my life, and it has proved to be a blessing and a curse. With enough time I could create a beautifully bounded book with straight edges and even margins. A normal and less OCD person though could probably bind 4 decent books in the time it would take me to make my one. I seriously was the last one in the classroom because I couldn't get over the fact that my page edges were uneven and ragged. (Though that did mean that I got to spend a little more time in the "Forbidden Room of Cushing Library). For this reason, I would probably not have made a good book maker in the past. We were told in class that to be a good book maker you had to be efficient. That meant quantity could not be sacrificed for quality.



If I were a book maker though, I would not want to create just a decent book. Whoever wrote the contents of the book that was being published obviously spent time creating or compiling its contents. So much time and effort does not deserve being slapped together as quickly as possible into a book. In my opinion, a work  of art deserves a beautiful frame to match it and enhance its beauty. A beautifully written book deserves a binding and cover that will physically display that beauty to the human eye. Not only that, but a cover and binding must be of the quality that protects the contents of a book. A poorly done binding will most likely not withstand the test of time.

Of course, one has to take into consideration of what it costs to put a binding on a book that takes time and is of high quality. In some cases, the cost of putting the time and resources into a well bounded book was not worth the gain. If a certain publication was popular, then the demand for that book would be greater. Book makers would have benefited more from a production that favored quantity over quality. Keeping up with demand means that the workers had to create more book and could not take the time to make each and every one of them perfect. There were no machines back then that could cut a perfectly straight line, so it was up to those book makers of the past to cut a line that was more or less straight.



At the end of the day, I had come to really respect those who had made the paper and bound all those books. It's another part of life that I never appreciated until I took the time to really understand how it all works and how much work it really is.

You can read it, can't you?

Today we got to venture into the staff-only third floor of Cushing Library.  Luckily, none of us toppled over the low railing to our deaths.  I felt like Harry Potter sneaking into the restricted section. We walked into the book history laboratory to find a gentleman of the Dumbledore-type pouring over his work at a desk and we were surrounded by walls covered in various portraits and paintings. One of my favorite parts was seeing some of the University archives, including the jacket of Reveille I. 

I don't know about the rest of you, but today's hands-on activity proved rather challenging. I usually blame my lack of skill with crafts on the awkwardness associated with being left-handed, so maybe it was just me. (We truly live in a right-handed world!) We were doing simple tasks of folding papers, cutting the edges, and tying string. I may not be cut out for a career in paper-making because I could barely handle that! My edges were in tatters from my rough jabs with the envelope opener, the two holes I made in the whole packet didn't even include some of the folded pages, and then I couldn't even tie it all together because I managed to snip the string too short. For this reason, the library motto - You can read it, can't you? - resonated with me. This gets down to the fundamental purpose of a book. As discussed in last week's posts, the binding can certainly tell you a lot about a book, but the main point is what rests within the pages. 

Wrapping it Up

Christmas is my favorite holiday, always has been. There’s nothing better as a child than waking up and running over to the Christmas tree to see at the beautifully wrapped presents that Santa left the night before. While our class isn’t quite like Christmas, I know I experienced the same kind of feeling our last class when we looked at all the different packages books can come in.

The old saying goes “never judge a book by its cover,” but the truth is we do.  Just by looking at a book’s cover (without reading anything) our class was able to identify one book as a fantasy fiction novel and another as an important historical reference book. It turns out the medium of the book is just as important as its contents.  

How the book is constructed affects how we read it. For example, with a scroll, you can’t simply flip to a certain page. Instead, the entire thing must be unrolled in order to read from beginning to end. Likewise, a book cannot present the words, pictures, etc. as an entire entity all at once. Because of the pages, it is segmented and broken down.

How a book is constructed also affects how we perceive it. And just like the wrapping of a Christmas present, you never really know what you have until you open it. We looked at the ornately wrapped present-- the old French law book. This book had a cover made from wood and leather, its pages decorated with nice images and hand written words. There was a very elaborate dedication in the front, painting this image of grand importance and opulence. But then we opened the present. After a few pages, we discovered the book had actually been cut out to be used as a secret storage compartment. It was the gag gift, wrapped beautifully only to reveal the cheap (and probably inappropriate) gift that your brother bought for you.

Not all the “wrappings” on the books were deceiving though. There was the classic sentimental gift, the vellum-bound book, that wasn’t too expensive, but probably took a long time to make. Likewise, there was the well-intended gift, the scroll about the ancient Greeks, where the idea of it was nice, but in actual practice it isn’t too practical. Finally, there was also the what-on-Earth-is-this gift, the scroll about a boxing match, where the wrapping is just as strange or unique as the gift itself.

While the wrapping of a Christmas doesn’t affect the gift itself too much, how we “wrap” or bind our books greatly influences them in the way of function and aesthetic appeal. There are so many ways to construct a book, some of them being equally unique and important as the stories within them. When it comes to books, you can’t just rip the wrapping paper off as fast as your little kid hands can move. Instead, we must take time to appreciate just how important it is as the gift itself.

Happy 3/4ths Christmas everyone!

-Amy

The Material that Binds or Judging a book by it's cover

There is an old saying that everyone knows, "You can't judge a book by it's cover." While that may be true for humans, for books it's not entirely true. You can tell many things from the cover and binding of a book, like what the book is going to be about, the expected quality of the book (not necessarily the story but the quality of pages and writing), and who might have bought the book.

Even in Ancient times you could judge some things. Let's look at a scroll for example. If it were held together by two pieces of wood, you could guess that it was important or had some value. If it wasn't held together by anything, it might be something completely unimportant (to them), like a note or list. However, for some forms of writing material, it would be hard to determine what they were for. One example would be stone or clay tablets. Since they don't have any form of binding or cover, it's hard to determine. However, the size of the table might help determine what it was used for.

When books started to be used, then this became much easier. The quality of the binding used on a book allows for people to make early judgements about a book. If the book has tons of detail with high quality material used to bind it, you could assume these things. It either belongs/belonged to a very rich person and might be very old. It would probably be a serious book, possibly a scientific book or a great work of literature. If the binding is like the multiple sci-fi and fantasy books that are on shelves today, then you would expect it to be of lesser quality then the former. However, this is where the problem comes in.

Like we saw last Monday, one book that appeared to be of very high quality turned out to have half of the pages missing, torn out for a safe hiding spot. Also, some modern books, despite being in the smaller portable format, may still contain high quality work. One example I can think of would be the "Game of Thrones" series, which many people consider to be one the greatest pieces of fantasy of all time. So while it's true you can't judge a book by it's cover, you can still make good judgements from it's binding.

More Than Words

When I was little I knew that scrolls were used in ancient times. To me, scrolls were used because they looked cool and sophisticated, and they held the notes of Aristotle and Galileo. I never actually realized that they were only used because they were all that were available, or at least because they were the most readily available.

Of course, I had learned better before this class, but it was still interesting to think and talk about the disadvantages of scrolls that I never thought about as a kid. However, in this class, I've already gotten used to looking at the advantages and disadvantages of all types of record-keeping. It wasn't until the scrolls that I again looked at the materials we handled with a kid-like wonder.

The modern scroll we looked at, the artist's "book" (still not sure if we call it a book or not), was legitimately beautiful. For some reason I loved how tightly it was rolled and the color of the paper. Obviously as an artist the writer knows quite a bit about aesthetics. It made me wonder if the ancient scrolls once looked like that. They didn't have anything like the machines we have today for producing things like that, and I can't remember if that book was hand-made or not, but I like to think that some of their literature looked very similar. I think it's cool to imagine kings' decrees written in calligraphy on beautiful, long scrolls that wound up tightly and hopefully had two spool-things for convenience. Even the boxing match illustration, though much older, was pretty. Maybe, in the future, if paper books aren't even used except in private collections, they'll look at our books in the same way.

More than Parchment

The history of literature and the idea that a story is so much more than just some paper and binding has always fascinated me. What I enjoy most about our class is how we go so much deeper than just the outer surface. What is a book? What makes a novel a novel? Is this piece of clay considered a book? It is questions like these that make an individual rethink all he has ever known about literature and perhaps even change the way they look at books today. Everything we touch has a story so much more than just what is engraved or written. Ironically, when you look at a 16th century piece of literature, often times one truly has no intention of gathering information the way the book was intended. Rather, one touches, feels, smells the piece; delving into a whole new world of mystery and creativity. What was the man doing while writing this? How long did it take to carve this? Who was it for? It is a mindset such as this that keeps me optimistic and excited for future explorations into the fascinating world of ancient literature.

My Tears Are Vatman Tears

Probably the best part about completely forgetting about the assignment for this course was that it has provided me with an opportunity to not only talk about the process of the paper making, but also the result of our work. You've already heard that the work required to make the paper like we did was significantly harder than it seemed. While the steps seemed simple enough, there numerous instances where it could have, and did in my case, gone wrong. It was a wonder any of my sheets turned out halfway decent. I don't know what it was, but how anyone is able to create paper without "vatman's tears" is completely beyond my realm of understanding. Also, I became a master of ripping the paper as I tried to stick it to the lambskin -- I'm not much cut out for labor-heavy papercraft, clearly.
Regardless of my anxiety of the turnout though, the pages were, in my opinion, impressive. Mine were satisfactory -- they actually looked like paper, which is more than I could have hoped for a week ago. Mine were all very lopsided, and one could only arguably be considered half a page, but still, I had created paper, and it had not been impossible. Rather, it had been a lot of fun.

Pictured: What my paper doesn't look like.

I can't imagine this is a particularly economical process. A person has to be paid to work all day, and the resulting product may or may not form a complete book's worth of paper, but it sure is an exciting learning opportunity. Undergoing the process made me really appreciate the meaning of the rarity of books when this was the only process available to make paper. So, even though I learned it's not something I'll ever master, I'm glad we got to make paper.

Nana nana nana nana nana nana nana nana VATMAN!

     I think I can speak for everyone when I say that I had a blast making paper and wished we could do it all semester. I can also speak for everyone when I say that it was much more difficult than we all expected. It seemed like a simple process just watching it. One just dips the mould and deckle into the vat of water and cotton pulp, removes the deckle, and then just takes the paper off. Simple right? Wrong. There were numerous possibilities of error. One could get too much or little cotton pulp on the mould, drip water onto the mould while removing the deckle, or tear your sheet in half while removing the paper from the mould. I can see how it could take many years of practice (and some luck) to master the process. The whole paper making process was a very fun experience. It was fun to do something hands on in a class instead of listening to a professor lecture.

     The texture of the cotton pulp was very different. It was nothing like I have ever experienced. It cling to anything and everything including my arm hair. I kept picking off pieces of cotton the remainder of the day. It's interesting how all the strands of cotton just come together to form a piece of paper. I am excited to see the results after the paper dries. It amazes me that this paper making process has been used for so long and is still being used today.

Problems of a Vat Man (Erin Zebrowski)

          The paper making workshop that we did on Monday was awesome!  It was so cool that we were able to make out own paper out of nothing more than a sieve, a wooden frame, and a lot of stuff.  I was very interested in how complicated the whole process actually is.  Originally I thought that making paper would be a breeze, all you need to do is dip the mold in the vat of stuff, shake it a bit, then remove the paper that had formed.  (Seriously, children were doing it!)  

 

          Unfortunately, actually making a perfect piece of paper is a lot harder than that because of the infinite things that could go wrong.  Personally, I had a few sheets of paper that were less than perfect because when I removed the deckle from the mold, some drops fell on the still wet paper.  Even before I tried to remove the deckle, my paper was sometimes uneven and patchy in places, forcing me to scrap the unmade paper and try again.  The few times when I was able to remove the deckle without causing drops to fall on the paper,  something would go wrong when I went to remove the paper from the mold and the outside of the paper would get pushed in when I tried to separate them, causing the edges to be ragged and lumpy.  Bottom line is, I was never able to create the perfect paper.  Although the experience was amazing, I can now understand why people apprenticed to be a vat man for four years before they actually go to work: getting the perfect piece of paper every time is hard!  

           The stuff that clung to my arms was also a weird experience, I can't even imagine how strange it must be to go to work every day knowing that your arms were going to get covered with little bits of cotton pulp.  One thing confused me though.  I noticed that the stuff seemed to stick on everything, except when it was in water.  Once I stuck my arms in the water, the stuff practically floated off without any encouragement from me.  It even dissipated from my woven bandana bracelet, which surprised me because the bracelet was made of cotton or some other woven fabric.  I still can't figure out why the stuff was so ready to stick to anything it touched, but as soon as it was submerged in water it was so ready to release us from its cottony grip.  Anyone have any suggestions?  Although the experience was amazing, I can now understand why people apprenticed to be a vat man for four years before they actually go to work: getting the perfect piece of paper every time is hard!