THE BOOK OF DISQUIET
The false vintage styled photography of Alex Prager welded into a reversible board book with the drawings of Mercedes Helnwein. Title by Fernando Pessoa.
DEVIL’S PORCHLIGHT PRESS
Black and white, high contrast; heavily simplified and pixellated; blocky changes.
Throughout American Medical Botany: Being a Collection of the Native Medicinal Plants of the United States, v. 1, pt. 1, by Jacob Bigelow (1817). Original from Oxford University. Digitized June 1, 2006.
SMALLTALK-80 THE LANGUAGE AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION
Another pleasing vintage computer science text. Smalltalk, developed in Xerox’s experimental design laboratory, was underpinned by a constructivist educational philosophy. Though remembered now as shorthand for a technology obsolescent on par with the Polaroid and fax machine, Xerox pioneered in its think tanks and design labs much of the desktop computing we take for granted.
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Bookselling in the Clinton years
I remember the first Barnes and Nobel I visited. The year was 1993 and I was in Chicago attending a program at Northwestern University. The BN was downtown and it was unlike anything I’d every seen before. Floor after floor of books, organized by every subject imaginable. The periodical section alone seemed larger than the little bookstore I’d shop in back in San Antonio. Magazines and newspapers from around the world, with the papers restocked daily. It was amazing.
Within another year Barnes and Nobel came to San Antonio. Though not on the same scale as the big downtown Chicago store, it nonetheless brought titles that had probably never before been offered in that sleepy south Texas city. Soon a Borders came too and established a reputation for an even deeper dip into the back catalog; small press and university press titles, right there on the shelf for the browser to discover.
These stores, in their moment, seemed to represent the best of the 1990’s. Information was spreading fast, available in places it had never been before. There was an optimism to this capitalism, and optimism that an enormous bookstore, dropped into a mall, a downtown area, an urban renewal project or even as the very anchor of a big box shopping center could sell books to everyone.
Before this era, bookstores were small affairs, often specialized and inward looking places. Or they were the property of universities, serving an institution first, the public second. These stores came with a new perspective; bookstores were not quaint nooks and crannies in the retail landscape, bookstores could be anchors, top bill destinations for the masses of people who might not otherwise even think of spending an afternoon browsing books.
But of course these big box stores were also the worst of the 90s in America. For all their depth, they were also generic, tasteless and corporate in tone. Through a massive supply chain, exclusive deals with publishers and the ability to price bestsellers and loss leaders, BN and Borders drove smaller independent stores out of business just as the official BN cafe, Starbucks, was eliminating local coffee shops.
Those smaller affairs, the indie stores, often had long standing ties with cities and neighborhoods; the chains were just chains, corporate enterprises answering to stockholders far away from the communities. And these faceless stockholders might have exactly the same interest in BN as they would for the Bed Bath and Beyond next door or the Starbucks inside. With attractive locations in abandoned sheds such as Baltimore’s “Power Plant,” or San Antonio’s decommissioned ”Quarry” BN was a post industrial creation, books sold and consumed in the style of the service and leisure economy.
Like the 90’s, it would not last.
I’ve written before about the pleasure you get from how Nancy’s childhood rage radiates off the page, but this panel is one of my absolute favorites.
That classic moment of realization that grown ups are hypocrites and that it’s all well and good for a little girl to play in the mud on television, but when I do it, oh, suddenly we have a big problem!
-Dorothy BerryThe truth, via Bushmiller.
tactile atlas for the blind, c. 1837
“The Atlas of the United States Printed for the Use of the Blind was published in 1837 for children at the New England Institute for the Education of the Blind in Boston. Without a drop of ink in the book, the text and maps in this extraordinary atlas were embossed heavy paper with letters, lines, and symbols. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first atlas produced for the blind to read without the assistance of a sighted person. Braille was invented by 1825, but was not widely used until later. It represented letters well, but could not represent shapes and cartographic features. Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876) was the founder and president of the New England Institute (later known as the Perkins Institute) and produced the atlas with the assistance of John C. Cray and Samuel P. Ruggles. Howe was the husband of Julia Ward Howe, the American abolitionist and author of the U.S. Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He was a champion of people with disabilities and believed that blind youth could be taught geography through maps created with his special paper embossing process. In his introduction to the atlas Howe notes that crude attempts had been made to create maps for the blind, but they used primitive methods of creating relief and required the assistance of a sighted person. He claimed that his new embossing method was superior in all respects…”
—David Rumsey Historical Map ColletionThe David Rumsey Map collection is an incredible resource and includes large scans of this rare atlas, including the marbleized cover & title page.
(full spread and details on above embossed map of Florida)
The Big Book of Hiding Places
One of the many fringe types I came to recognize when first working at a bookstore was the Loompanics special order customer. Except these customers were not really much of customers as most mainstream bookstores refused to order from the anchro/libertarian publisher.
At “BookStop,” a Texas chain bought out by BN that continued to operate under its own name well into the 2000’s, we were instructed to provide these customers with Loompanics’ address and instructions. Someone even xeroxed a little stack of them to speed up the ritual. The script was simple and bland: just write to the address, request the catalog and order directly.
One guy, trying to order a book about disappearing, explained that this was not prudent as to do so would be to put yourself on the Loompanics mailing list which was probably already subpoenaed by the FBI. Better to have it “dropped” here and then paid for with cash. Which all seemed to have the perfect clarity of paranoia. Except the part of course where he revealed such dizzying paranoia, which was as flamboyantly conspicuous as his bizarre gothy/paramilitary outfit.
Meanwhile an actual Loompanics catalog is mirror of just such a state of mind. It is an anti-Whole Earth catalog, a place where self sufficiency is not a joyful communal activity, but an intensely private and dangerous practice. With titles such as “The Greatest Uninhabited Islands in the World,” “Documents Fraud and Other Crimes of Deception,” and “Running on Emptiness,” Loompanics was a small window into a world suggesting the dark place where 70’s counter culture bled into criminality and mental illness.
In the end, it was probably the internet that brought down Loompanics’ particular brand of psychotic libertarianism. Though early on, sites such as Amazon, Google and Ebay all suppressed or outright banned their content, the core Loompanics content and spirit is everywhere, from anonymous hacker boards to Craigslist to the trollish tone familiar to anyhow who’s ever glanced at a comment thread.
And in the end, Loompanics did end up on Amazon. In a grand irony, this particular title is even on Kindle, possibly the absolute worst hiding place for subversive reading.
ISBN 1893626091
