In the crisp chill of a 6pm darkness, I remember going to the Borders bookstore in my hometown. The lighting was the color of parchment, the smell of paper filled the air, and the little coffee shop had marshmallow s’mores bars that were delicious in a time before calories. I wouldn’t even read much in high school, but the aesthetics of the bookstore were undeniable, especially in the darkness, in the cold.
That bookstore closed when Amazon brought big bookstores to its knees. The building followed the path of many fallen stores, turning into a Spirit Halloween for a while. I left too, with the layout of the store burned into my mind. Like waves to a beach, the memory of that bookstore has been returning to me lately. I live thousands of miles away from a bookstore that I only went to occasionally a decade ago, yet the memory persists.
I’ve slowly been making gods out of the seasons and the weather. What was once simply the background to my way of life seems to define the shape of it. Sunny days and foggy days call for different forms of worship: laughing loudly with friends versus solitary contemplation. The changing daylight calls for the same, like how occasional California rains induce time indoors. The gods of these days—the early night & its associated season—are meant for knowledge.
I trace this association back to school, back to the warm glow of the lights in my childhood home, staying up doing homework, or reading novels, or whatever else. This time of year should sound like turning pages and scratching pencils. Studying was a love-hate relationship. It was a relentless chore to prepare for tests and do homework, but learning was revelatory, awe-striking.
At the same time, my time surfing Tumblr drew me to what I saw as the aesthetics of knowledge: immaculate sweaters, perhaps a tweed jacket, glasses with messy hair, scribbled notes, and an enormous stack of books. I sometimes wondered if I was more interested in the aesthetics of erudition than actually learning.
But this aesthetic is based on something real. Each of these tools is a signifier of a commitment towards some form of learning: whether it’s literature or physics or whatever other academic subject. Much of this aesthetic was simply the necessary tools for the action, made to represent the whole.
I took a letterpress and bookbinding class as a work event last week. We spent a couple of hours learning the history of letterpress printing, the method of printing invented by Johannes Gutenberg nearly 600 years ago, and the most common way to print up until the 1970s. Despite the fact that the craft has largely been replaced, the San Francisco Center for the Book and many institutions like it have sought to preserve it, keeping machines running that were created over a hundred years ago. It’s no longer a manufacturing process, but something more artisanal and craft-focused — a means to create art in new ways.
Learning about how printing evolved, how letterpress works, and then having the opportunity to print a little cover for a notebook that we bound together with simple stitching was illuminating. Sheets of paper turned into a folio, transformed by effort and focus and tools. How often did I get the chance to truly understand how something was made, to fully appreciate the effort that went into an object I held, not just as something to be used but as something to be admired?
I haven’t stopped thinking about the craftsmanship of it all. To create a singular letterpress print, there are the complexities of setting the type by individually putting metal letters one-by-one in the right order and place, followed by the process of applying ink, choosing the right type of paper, and safely operating the machinery to apply hundreds of pounds of force. There’s a learning curve to each of these steps, room for mistakes. Only through repetition does the curve smoothen and the mistakes become less common.
Before any of these innovations, how difficult was it to share words with one another? Books were once reserved for the wealthy, as scribes would spend an entire year on a single tome. Technology plodded along before Gutenberg. Ideas were local and saved in diaries and private conversations until suddenly they weren’t. Just as mass production clouded the sacredness of a notebook, mass media made each word less sacred — something to be forgotten as it was created.
What is craftsmanship for a modern writer? I write almost entirely digitally, tap tap tapping my keys over and over again until something like an essay appears. Craftsmanship must be something more, re-discovering the sacredness of each word and being more careful with each one used. Writing is an act of converting the hundreds of inputs that enter a brain into words that are coherent. It’s the ingredients and the preparation, the paints and the brushstrokes.
But what are these constituent tools if not knowledge? Knowledge to inspire thought, knowledge of words and how to use them, knowledge that it’s worth creating, knowledge that it’s worth pushing through the endless blocks, knowledge that each word holds power.
With respect to the season of knowledge, I paint myself as the bookish academic, piecing together a syllabus of classics that have brought people to awe. I sort through the piles of books on my bedside table each night and each morning, gathering words here and there as I can.
With my hair as messy as ever and my handwriting worse than ever and my cup of tea and sweaters ready, I read quotes about writing like James Baldwin’s “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone” and Louise Glück’s “Write anything you want, she told us. Just make sure it’s not dead.” I don’t know what they mean, not yet. If not this season, I’ll know more by the next one.
Programming note: Splash will on pause for a couple weeks until 12/07, since I’ll be traveling over the next couple of weeks! Talk soon.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Growing at the Edges by Mutual Benefit - folk album I’ve had on repeat lately.
POEM - “October” by James Schuyler - Books litter the bed
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love this one