Happy Book, Happy Feet
Two thinks.
1. Last week I was on the train, greenery flashing by, with a book from 1913 held up to my face, reading. Then it hit me, I have a job where I can order up a 100 year old book and read it on a train as if it were a David Baldacci paperback.
I put the cool interior of the book nearer my nose and breathed deeply the ineffable melange that is an old book, and sighed. The sections of the book are sewn in (you can see the string in places) and it was printed with rollers, so you can see in places where the inker got sloppy and the block at the edge of the letters shows like a dark ghostly frame. It's the ghost of the dead man who inked it. On some page corners there are also small letters in a wholly different typeface set off by themselves, a P or a Q, some indicator to the assemblers of the book of something in the craft of book creation. I felt so lucky to be employed in a place that allows this, and I stopped reading for a minute to wallow around in the sensory experience of a beautiful little read cloth-bound book. Bliss.
2. This morning I was trying to read something more mundane when a kid who was in a stroller in front of me said some nonsense syllables loudly until I stopped. The baby had a pacifier and M&D next to her and was so bubbling over with happiness, it would seize her like a fit from time to time, so her back arched and she laughed out loud at nothing, and clapped her bare feet together. Sole - to -sole, like a pair of hands, she clapped her feet. It was very funny, and to add to it, her tiny tiny toes had tiny tiny applications of pink nail polish. How her mother got her to hold still long enough to put on and dry toenail polish I can't imagine. But that baby was the happiest person I saw all day, and I got to tickle her feet. Not quite the same pleasure as a century-old book, but it was a happy thing.
1. Last week I was on the train, greenery flashing by, with a book from 1913 held up to my face, reading. Then it hit me, I have a job where I can order up a 100 year old book and read it on a train as if it were a David Baldacci paperback.
I put the cool interior of the book nearer my nose and breathed deeply the ineffable melange that is an old book, and sighed. The sections of the book are sewn in (you can see the string in places) and it was printed with rollers, so you can see in places where the inker got sloppy and the block at the edge of the letters shows like a dark ghostly frame. It's the ghost of the dead man who inked it. On some page corners there are also small letters in a wholly different typeface set off by themselves, a P or a Q, some indicator to the assemblers of the book of something in the craft of book creation. I felt so lucky to be employed in a place that allows this, and I stopped reading for a minute to wallow around in the sensory experience of a beautiful little read cloth-bound book. Bliss.
2. This morning I was trying to read something more mundane when a kid who was in a stroller in front of me said some nonsense syllables loudly until I stopped. The baby had a pacifier and M&D next to her and was so bubbling over with happiness, it would seize her like a fit from time to time, so her back arched and she laughed out loud at nothing, and clapped her bare feet together. Sole - to -sole, like a pair of hands, she clapped her feet. It was very funny, and to add to it, her tiny tiny toes had tiny tiny applications of pink nail polish. How her mother got her to hold still long enough to put on and dry toenail polish I can't imagine. But that baby was the happiest person I saw all day, and I got to tickle her feet. Not quite the same pleasure as a century-old book, but it was a happy thing.