Book Binding

In Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer discuss a mother who recorded her daughter's "fits" with supreme dedication. It made me wonder what kind of a book the mother would choose in which to write. Would the journal start on loose paper that she would then envelop between the pages of a book? I like the idea that, eventually, she would bind her own book, finding other people's creations inappropriate vessels in which to record the rants of her own creation. I've started a short series of poems within the Charcot manuscript that explore this.



Books make things - words, objects, thoughts - precious. I opened my copy of Mrs. Dalloway to find a passage recently. Aaron had used the copy to study for his PhD exams. It is well-worn. We have both read it several times and it is bespeckled with lovely, combined marginalia. I turned to page 139 (something Aaron had marked with a post-it) and there he had layered in the single wing of a Luna Moth.

When I was a girl someone (my mother? my grand mother? Shandra and Michelle's mother? some book?) taught me to layer violets into the pages of books. I did so religiously. At that point though, really, all of the books were technically my parents'. There are still volumes I leaf through on visits to them - browned, flattened, dry former flowers flitting onto my lap. At a certain point, enamored with the local herb farm Caprilands, I began to layer in sprigs of herbs. The musty and earthy scents of those books are intoxicating.



Caprilands colored my imagination for some years. They had various gardens (one Shakespeare-themed!) surrounding the early 19th-century farmhouse in which they sold fresh and dried herbs, Victorian recipe books, flavored honeys. Cats and sheep and chickens wandered the grounds. We - I usually went with the twins - would end each visit with a cup of tea. I liked mine to have the petals of former flowers, some remnants of which would always drift free of the wire ball in which they steeped.



I worry about what will happen when electronic devices become more popular than books. Will we lose what is intimate, what is precious, about reading and writing? There's a potentially bright side to this, though. As gadgets begin to replace paper, we will start to see people celebrating that filtered, flattened, and dried pulp. At the Paper/New England opening I had a quick chat with the lovely Michael Shortell about book art. They plan to exhibit some soon. I will be there. My heart will flutter a bit higher in my chest when I look at it.