Who Owns the Internet? You and i Do at the NYT looks at Joseph Turow’s campaign to encourage journalists to, er, decapitate the word “Internet” when used in copy.

Much to my frowniness, the article educated me on the widespread misuse of the capitalization of the word. That’s thanks in part, as the story notes, to Word’s insistent auto-capitalization of “Internet”. That usage reflects dictionary-based references to the word.

This reminds me of a quibble I have with AP style, the basis of the Cinescape style guide, which insists that “website” is more properly written “web site.”

Both judgments are based on reasonable analytic examinations of the meanings, derivations, and uses of the words: “the Internet” is something like a country; it’s not a naturally-occurring environment (like the forest or the ocean), and so forth.

“Web site” is best justified on the grounds that “web page” is the preferred usage, and furthermore, that similar digital constructs such as an “ftp site” are best rendered as two words.

Unfortunately, the capitalization of “internet” strikes me as just wrong, and I can’t recall ever thinking differently. In fact, I still recoil from the usage, which seems to me to broadcast, in big red blinking neon letters, “It is the editorial policy of this publication to promote ignorance and poor usage.”

I think that this is probably because I learned my usage of these words in the context of digital rather than print culture. Digitally oriented writing has long lower-cased even clearly derived acronyms, such as “ftp”, following the unix practice of coining words from acronyms (in this case, ‘file transfer protocol’) and treating the words as verbs or common nouns within the context of a programming command.

That is, an ftp program will perform ftp and may also be named ftp (pronounced “eff-tee-pee”). Similarly, but distinct, a gif is neither a Gif nor a GIF.

Thus, taking a step back, we can see that I’m a linguistic relativist who certainly prefers that definition and grammatical application follow usage, and in this case I prefer the usage of the coining dialect.

Of course, marketing in the computer industry has also employed goofy capitalization (iMac, CorelDRAW!) in ways that are intended to emulate this, but, (ahem) IMHO don’t.

I suspect that the idea of common property is the underlying assumption which drives the practice of coining common nouns and verbs from the acronym-derived names of a given program. Not Xerox but ftp.

As I recall, it’s common on Wintel to use ImpactedCaptalization in the context of crafting a program (naming variables and handlers and so forth); and of course DOS eschewed lower-case altogether for a time. Is it possible that the lower-case world of the unix progeny and the UPPPERCASE or UpperCase world of Wintel are direct expressions of ideology?

That’s a start to understanding what provides my certainty that the internet is L/C; but why do I think “website” is more correct than “web site”?

Propaganda and ‘Lord of the Rings’

"I don’t think that ‘The Two Towers’ or Tolkien’s writing or our work has anything to do with the United States’ foreign ventures," he told Mr. Rose, "and it upsets me to hear that."

–Viggo Mortensen in an appearance on Charlie Rose

And, less than two days after my prediction we’d see debates concerning the political meaning of The Lord of the Rings, here’s exhibit A.

Mortensen is described in the article as wearing a “No Blood For Oil” tee in reaction to the interpretation of the film “as both an allegory and an endorsement of the invasion,” so perhaps this is really Exhibit B.

By the way, revenue totals for the film through the weekend including internationally are in the $189 million dollar range – that’s about $37 million a day.

While this week’s series of entries has thus far deliberately excluded the experience of seeing the films for the most part, and may do so for the balance of the week, I’ve admitted their role as catalyst in prompting my renewed acquaintance with the books.

In the weeks leading up to the release of last year’s The Fellowship of the Ring, as each new trailer flashed before me, I was excited and pleased to note how the filmmakers and trailer editors had cut the previews to appeal both to general audience and knowledgeable fans. My wife began to express a great deal of interest in the film, something I was also happy about, as my canonically intellectual-geek tastes exclude, oh, lots of things that she finds rewarding, and not just chick flicks.

I think Speed is a drag. Although the scale of the film and Will Smith’s charm were not lost on me, I felt Independence Day was some sort of direct physical attack on my person. SUV Dependence Day is a better title. In other words, dear reader, if you’re a statistically representative member of the United States’ movie going populace, I hate every movie you love, give or take 80%. My wife, bless her, sees the worth in the vast majority of our great nation’s entertainment while I can’t get over the failure of Gummo at the box office. On our first date, I asked my wife to attend a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, and Viv didn’t know who she was.

Not one of you is unfortunate to not have had the experience of attempting to explain who the filmmaker is and why I wanted to see the film to a person you barely know but wish to court. Rule of thumb: documentaries about Nazis are a poor choice for a first date.

So. It’s a rare and pleasing experience when my better half lets me know a film I’m looking forward to is one she wishes to see as well.

Eliding the film as promised, once we emerged from the theater, she couldn’t stop talking about it. Nor could I. Some part of this past week’s writing assumed linguistic form first in our discussions last December.

Naturally, being a plot-oriented filmgoer, she lingered on the affecting scene of the battle on the bridge at Khazad-Dum, and it’s emotional power in the film. That scene, and another powerful scene of battle which I remain silent upon in order to keep to my course, were much discussed between us.

Vivian has an amazing gift, not, I’ve been told, terribly uncommon among the children of immigrants. Television acted not only as behavioral and adaptive model for these kids, reinforcing the dominant culture’s values and assumption, but as a consequence, as a sort of surrogate family figure, providing comfort and stability when one’s parents expressed the stress and isolation of living in an alien culture.

Which is to say: my wife, she likes the telly. Being no dummy, she’s a natural plot predictor; it’s not uncommon for her to predict, accurately, the entire plot of a television show out loud from theme to credits before the first commercial break. Certain kinds of films that are strongly formulaic (if I were to name names, I’d say something disparaging about slasher flicks here) are also susceptible to her predictive powers.

Given that she can read the future of fictional characters on screens large and small with the veracity of the bruja she doesn’t even know she is, it was only a matter of time before she noticed how I would avoid answering troubling questions like, “What will they do now, without Gandalf? How can they expect to make it to, this, um, wherever it they’re going?”

Accusingly she turned to me.

“He’s not dead, is he? He’s coming back!“

She’d figured out the dirtiest trick that Tolkien plays on his readers. I, of course, suggested that it was not my place to lead her backstage, but that we did, of course, have a very early draft of the screenplay in the house.

“I knew it!” she crowed in triumph. “But won’t you just tell me?”

“If you are really curious, you can read the book,” I suggested, not very helpfully. Much to my surprise, after only minimal cajoling, she agreed.

However, she had a caveat. Reading in bed is her modus operandi, but she sensibly retains the habit of allowing herself to drop off when her eyelids droop, even if she’s reading! After having made little progress over a week, what with the dropping off after a sentence had been started as is traditional among her people (that’s a JOKE! Don’t hit me! OUCH), she flapped eyelashes at me in the manner that indicates a favor will be requested.

“Will you read to me?” she enquired mincingly.

I was too crafty for this gambit, pointing out how my mellifluous and dulcet monotone would surely lull her to sleep with despatch.

“Why don’t you read it to me instead?” I wondered, exhibiting my customary combination of laziness and chutzpah.

She drew back. A commitment to read nearly a thousand pages aloud is not given lightly. I pointed out that we could try it as an experiment, and if it proved onerous, we could renegotiate. These terms were accepted, and within a month, she’d completed the first book, reading at a respectable rate.

As part of the compromise, however, I was obliged to sing Tolkien’s poetic airs aloud to improvised melodies based on the Irish library I’d learned over the past five years or so.

And so it was that I came to appreciate what had always been merely irritating doggerel, annoying frippery preciously wedged into the narrative in indulgence of Tolkien’s penchant for trifles of verse. Make no mistake, I’m still no great fan. The verses feel forced and lack both the burnish of the genuinely antique and the passion of independently executed verse, developed not as stage prop but as an independent work of art.

But as stage props go, they are nicely crafted. I found, much to my surprise, that as I sang them I could make educated guesses about what sort of folk form to use behind the verses, and that their rhyming structures appeared to have been designed to fit the musical forms I’d been learning, vernacular fashion, for the past while.

A rhyme scheme might run ABAB or AA BB or AAB AAB or even ABABC; but found that a jig, or reel, or slip jig, or polka, or even other forms that I don’t know the names for (the commonly associated melodic form under the oldest Childe ballad, Henry Lee, for example, is one I don’t know the name of but was able to use), perfectly fit the Professor’s linguistic fancies.

It deepened my appreciation of the bones that Tolkien had built. The books feel familiar not only because of our open celebration of them, but because Tolkien’s attention to the craft he was nearly inventing – grafting fiction to the folk tradition – was the product of a deeply knowledgeable scholar, in a kind of literary special effect in which the actors are seamlessly ensconced within latex appurtenances crafted in the basement labs of an Oxford professor.

Triumphantly, and not without deep struggle in the second half of The Two Towers, as is traditional, Viv completed the entire book, all aloud, sometime in early November, as I recall.

Within a week or two, we’d watched the DVD of the film again at home; much to my pleasure, my wife found that the experience clearly deepened her appreciation for the film; and shortly thereafter we began another book. I hope that many of the books I enjoy will open to her in shared experience now.

Rereading the novels was a fascinating, and unique experience. I believe that the last time I read them was at around age 19 or 20, before I completed college, possibly before I declared a major. Therefore, it’s probable that I read them naively, that is, in ignorance of literary devices and critical techniques, solely as story-oriented entertainments.

This time, I was reading the works as an adult, and one with a fair amount of experience thinking and writing about created works from a critical and theoretical perspective. Thus, as I read the books, I experienced them on at least two new levels for the first time.

First, I had the privilege of observing my own interaction with the book; this was an unexpected level, but one which I came to treasure. Second, I had access to much (certainly more than when I was a child) of the basic assumptions that Tolkien would have held about the education of his readership, having read extensively in both European history and Classical history and mythology.

Much to my surprise, my years of playing Irish music also helped me to appreciate the songs and poetry that Tolkien scattered throughout the book, material that I had routinely simply skipped in the past. Furthermore, my interest in folklore (which came out of the music) helped me to recognize many of the themes and characters that Tolkien was borrowing and re-clothing in the garments of Middle-Earth, from Wormtongue and the Ents (Ok, so those came from the Wizard of Oz – ;)) to the horsemen of Rohan and yellow-booted rhyme-spouting Tom Bombadil.

Finally, I also saw, for the first time, some of the mildly bothersome deliberate and accidental assumptions that Professor Tolkien was making that led to certain qualities of the book.

At the first level, I cannot stress enough how beautiful and precious it is to unspool a childhood memory in real-time. It lends a completely unduplicable power to the experience. To read a book you read as a very small child is not the same experience as looking at a photo. It’s doing the same thing you did as that child, and as you read it, memories of your initial experience rise up, unbidden, to create a new, deeper experience.

For me, this was most true in re-reading the book in the chapter titled “The Bridge at Khazad-Dum”. As a child, this was my first exposure to even the idea of death, and I recall the grief and fear I felt, as I realized that books held traps and pain as well as life. I don’t have direct recollections of tear-stained discussions with my parents, but there’s no question that Gandalf’s fall taught me of man’s end, and my own, and my family’s.

On the second level, both of reading with a background of familiarity with many more of Tolkien’s allusions and borrowings and of recognizing and appreciating structures and techniques used by writers, the books spread out deliciously before me, and I came away from them with a greatly enhanced appreciation for Tolkien as a writer, as someone in control of words on the page, and aware of his activity as a writer.

It’s not an original observation on my part to note that Tolkien struggles with the act of writing throughout the books – but he does include direct depictions of this in his inclusion of Bilbo and his book. Tolkien’s writing is at its’ best when he depicts specific individual acts of great bravery or sacrifice. It’s taut and efficient and tense and honest.

It’s weakest when his love for ancient literary forms leads him to emulate rhetorical devices employed within them, such as listing and repetition; it’s also weak when he emulates the traditional underpopulation of the ladies in Northern European legend. His one great chance comes when the daughter of King Theoden enters the story. Because of a plot choice he makes, we’re denied access to her internal life, and though the reader rides with her for many pages, one never is granted access to Eowyn as we are to Aragorn.

Tolkien’s careful, meticulous doubling of every significant event or character in the book, once recognized as both literary device and philosophical expression, greatly enhances the works’ power. The Two Towers is merely the double that made topline status; Merry and Pippin; Sam and Frodo; Frodo and Bilbo; The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings; Elrond and Galadriel; Elrond and Tom Bombadil; the Mountain of Caradhras and the Mines of Moria; The Wood Elves and the High Elves; Sauron and Sauruman; Sauruman and Gandalf; and on and on and on.

Another observation, not my original one but lovely and precious to hold in one’s mind, is that the great theme of the books is that of addiction. Whether to pipeweed or power or to the ring itself, Tolkien is musing about the end of things and about giving up that which is beloved, about the end of empire, and about the end of his world, which he saw with World War One, as a young man. Tolkien unabashedly looked longingly at the mythic past of the Pax Britannica, and it’s worthy of note that the late Victorians romanticized the same things that the good don wrote of with such love.

Here in Seattle, I live in a home constructed in 1928 by an entrepreneur from Montana who dotted this section of the city with his beautiful apartment buildings. He designed them with the help of an 1890’s pattern book, published in the UK, and intended as an architect’s pattern book for English country homes of the Gilded Age. Thus, my living room sports faux box-beams of dark-stained wood, carefully scored as though adze-hewn in the forest preserve that surely harbors hart, stag, and unicorn. A large half-scale non-functional fireplace anchors the room. It’s constructed with a medieval servant’s-bench within the alcove, where, in the original, a scullery-maid would have sat to turn the spit.

My house, and Tolkien’s work, are twentieth-century renovations of the Victorian love of things medieval. My love for these things stems partly from the successful presentation of the vision of the past as a romantic and orderly place, partly from the aesthetic strength of the things themselves, and partly from positive childhood experiences of the idea.

The aspect of the books that I found the most troubling was the South Africa-born author’s consistent association of “dark”, “swarthy”, “black”, “swart”, “flat-faced”, and such adjectives to delineate not only the frightful orcs but also the men of the South who fight with Sauron in the War of the Ring. This objection seems facile and not worth consideration at first, but if one really considers it, it becomes an aspect of the works which (uncomfortably I fear) rewards reflection.

Tolkien was interested in constructing an artificial pre-Christian mythos for Northern and Western Europe. He did so both before and after World War Two. It stands to reason that a linguist taken with the cultures and folktales of Europe’s northern peoples would tend to incorporate traditional imagery of the noble in his work. That imagery is the root of our culture’s adoration of the tall and the blonde.

Does that mean that that idea is either good or accurate? Absolutely not. But insisting that something you love, Wagner or Tolkien, is something that it’s not is a failure of both honesty and nerve. So what else does Tolkien celebrate that I do not?

Well, feudalism, war itself (oddly, since he had harrowing experiences in the trenches), the concept of in-born nobility, anti-rationalism, a luddite resistance to the machine – geez! As a value transmitter, I’m hard put to find a single thing in the books that made it through. It’s worth noting, I think, however, that the blonde/dark duality, the anti-technological underpinning and so forth, functions only as window dressing.

The heart of the book is the humanization (um, you know what I mean) of the author’s subjects. From Gandalf’s blustering refusals to admit personal failures (a repeated theme throughout the books: an immortal, practically Christ’s double, an angel of the Lord who uses bluster to camouflage personal failings) to Aragorn’s flight from his heritage to Bilbo’s self-satisfied sense of self, Tolkien rarely fails to show us how these creatures he’s somehow imported from the lays of the skalds and the chansons des gestes are real beings that live in a real world. He does it with the gentle humor and idealizing eye of a beloved grandparent who will not speak ill of even the truly evil – in Gollum’s case, of course, we are presented with the most carefully realized doubled being in the book, and Sauron he wisely leaves to our imaginations.

In a way, then, it’s only appropriate that the troubling specter of race lurks behind The Lord of The Rings – for the author went to vast trouble to create complex world with inflected characters. It’s by no means a topic he was ready to address, and so it simply haunts the work. I don’t think it means the books are bad or dangerous. In fact, if we are prompted to begin actually discussing these matters, to constructively address our own invisible assumptions on such matters, perhaps we may be better off in the end.

I first heard of the Peter Jackson film adaptation of Lord of the Rings the way almost everyone else in the computer industry did – online. I knew Jackson as a filmmaker for both over the top kookery the likes of Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive – which are among the most extreme, yet good humored, films ever made – as well as the film which sort of graduated him as a serious film-maker, Heavenly Creatures, which I thought was OK, but not as interesting to me as his earlier material.

“Great,” I recall thinking, “He’s clearly got the right streak of extremity to do a good job. I hope it works out.” That was the last I really thought about it, except noting from time to time with surprise that the ongoing production was garnering an increasing wave of excited and approving commentary online from some very opinionated and ornery forums, such as Slashdot and in some online film-geek communities. I still wasn’t really paying attention, but the general sense of the commentary I was picking up was that, yes, Jackson’s extremity of commitment to his film projects was coming through in the production.

Then the first trailer for the film was publicly released on Apple’s web site sometime in 1998, I think (I could be way off base). A co-worker mentioned it to me and the real geeks of the office all gathered around a 21″ Apple monitor to watch. When the dust cleared, we all burst out gabbling at once in excitement, amazed. The first film was still over a year away from release but it was apparent that the cinematic approach Jackson had settled on somehow resonated with our own privately constructed visualizations of Tolkien’s world.

I’d seen the 1978 Bakshi animated version as a kid. It gets a bad rap to this day that it does not deserve – Bakshi’s Nazgul are excellently creepy, and his use of rotoscoping and aggressively artificial visualizations give the film a cinematic depth rare in animation, as well as a serious tone which is one of the reasons I have a soft spot for the film. Sadly, if predictably, his story compression and avoidance of the Brothers Hildebrandt style of warmly-firelit, Maxfield Parrish Middle-Earth scenery guaranteed the touchy animator a box-office disaster. Apparently, he’s still not over it, and has been quoted dissing Jackson’s project.

Television animators Rankin-Bass had produced a cute, featherweight adaptation of The Hobbit for broadcast at about this time – utilizing the holiday special formula of cuteness and musical numbers. I recall being, oh, mildly irritated by the adaptation. Then, following the Bakshi disaster, Rankin-Bass picked up the last half of The Lord Of The Rings and made their own conclusion to Bakshi’s attempt on Tolkien’s fastness, entitled Return of the King.

Unfortunately for me, this film made the understandable business decision to eschew Bakshi’s darkly psychedelic vision in favor of… cuteness and musical numbers (there is a memorable orc marching song which is entitled ‘Where There’s A Whip, There’s A Way’). Today, you can conveniently purchase all three of these miscegenated projects on DVD at your local Costco… at a higher retail price than the four-disc extended edition Jackson Fellowship of the Ring.

Seeing the trailer for what promised to be a pleasing translation of the books made me happy, but I again more or less forgot about it, keeping an eye on the horizon for the release date of the film.

Sometime in 2000 I realized it was time to find a copy of the books again and work through them. I expected it would take up to three months, reading in the evenings. I was disappointed to find that editions of the trilogy that employed Tolkien’s numerous watercolors on the covers or supplementing the original illustrations by the author were not easily available. I decided not to fight it and picked up the trade paperback edition that features the watercolor art of the Jackson adaptation’s production designer, the most easily available edition prior to the films’ release.

To my surprise, I tore though the books in well under a month, leaving quite a bit of time before the December 2000 opening of the first of the new films. An unexpected benefit was the reinvigoration of my knowledge of characters and situations in the books. This made the experience of the trailers seen that summer in theatrical distribution much richer and involving, and helped to greatly raise my level of anticipation for the film.

Then the starboard watch board the main tack, and the larboard watch lay forward and board the fore tack and haul down the jib sheet, clapping a tackle upon it if it blows very fresh.

and

When all was right, the bunts were triced well up, the yard-arm gaskets passed, so as not to leave a wrinkle forward of the yard — short gaskets, with turns close together.

are sample sentences from Richard Henry Dana’s 1843 Two Years Before the Mast, which I am currently reading, having found a copy in a secondhand bin for a dime or something.

My wife’s brother lives in Dana Point, which is named after the gent, he having been engaged in “hide droghing” along the coast of California in the 1830’s, which forms the bulk of the book’s narrative.

Great hanks, however, are devoted to old-timey seamanship, and hover on the very precipice of intelligibility; and I find these passages exhilarating. The use of a specialized jargon reflects my own speech when I’m isolating bad ram, for example, or reformatting a hard drive, or performing a low-level diagnostic in an effort to isolate bad sectors.

There’s a sort of poetry of possibility in jargon, and reading it in Mast makes it plain, as it’s stripped of referents for me. I know not a thing about sailing, and thus the language strikes me in a manner similar to a dada or futurist poem – sounds with no literalist meaning available to me, only tributary and referential meanings traversing time into my mind.

Dale Lawrence dropped a line to note that an editing error had dropped a graf from the website posting of his article on New Orleans. Its the third graf, and it’s about the beat. Dale noted it was ‘crucial’, and I see what he means.

Tomorrow night, he’ll be channelling Lou Reed in Bloomington. Wish I could be thre.

On Sunday, the four of us (Eric and Anne, visiting from Chicago; and my wife Vivian and myself, for those keeping score at home) engaged in one of the umpteen mandated activities for out-of-town visitors and took our city’s lovely, 60’s vintage monorail from downtown a whole mile to Seattle center, where the Space Needle and the Experience Music project are located.

The Seattle Monorail Project and the local politics around it came up, of course. I held back from a full-on rant about the incredible resistance to the monorail initiatives – soon to be voter approved in three separate ballot measures – on display from local elected officials and media, the absolute flip-side of the cheerleading for our thrice-defeated-at-the-polls sports stadiums. Our local political class and media leadership have set a tone, which is inimical to democracy, and it chaps my hide.

But as I said, I held back. Good for me.

We were considering visiting the Pacific Science Center, but decided against it; Eric and Anne were not really interested in visiting the Experience Music Project either. I’m not certain why, exactly, but after making sure they had a reasonable idea of what was available to see there, I didn’t push it.

We knew that there was an antiquarian book fair being held that weekend on the Center grounds and I was sure that Eric would be interested. We wandered in the direction of one of the exhibit halls, where I thought the fair was (incorrectly, as it turned out), and paused to observe the not-so-new any longer fountain, doing its’ synchronized fountaining to various music pieces, including a particularly ridiculous New Age inspirational number, all thrumming synth pan-pipes and smattered harpistry against the reverb of the kettle drum and chimes.

I was inspired to spontaneously narrate an inspirational powerpoint montage on the theme of teamwork, corporate efficiency, innovation, and the idiot pablum of the cube farm. I amused myself hugely. I have no idea about anyone else.

Moving around the fountain we passed the unctuous pre-recorded security warnings emanating from Key Arena, which sounded exactly like something from a Judge Dredd comic. I mocked them in this manner: “Greetings! You have entered a zone of suspended constitutional rights! For your safety, please do NOT make cynical or sarcastic remarks regarding these security measures! This undermines the ability of our enforcement personnel to maintain control of the situation! Violators WILL be beaten prior to being ejected from the premises!”

Ah, simple pleasures for a simple man.

Finally, after some misguided peregrinations we arrived at the book fair, two large rooms full of old and interesting books. I almost immediately ran into Rick, the guitarist from the Sun City Girls, a long-time acquaintance, and we chatted about their upcoming tour, his book stock (he was there as a dealer) and caught up in general.

There were two R. Crumb originals from the eighties on display and for sale in one booth; I did not ask the price for fear I’d decide I could afford them.

We wandered on, and in the second room, were immediately confronted with an intimidating, enticing, huge pile of individual leaves from medieval miniatures, all of great beauty. The booth these leaves were at offered a very extensive and high-quality stock, but was the only dealer offering large quantities of leaves. Individual book leaves such as these are controversial because in order to offer the leaves, a book must be broken up, which obviously makes scholastic work on the book impossible.

Nonetheless, stuff like this happens to all old and valued art in every culture throughout history and I can’t find it in me to get worked up over it.

Other items of note (some of which I’m still amazed to have gazed upon) included a first edition of a book printed by Ben Franklin; a book carrying a dedication and autograph from Ché to Juan Peron (“saludos revolucionarios, Ché”) that was of obscure fascination for me; a little note from J.R.R. Tolkien, which thrilled me in a way that’s hard to describe because I knew his handwriting.

The same case displayed two letters from George Washington, one of which was laid serendipitously next to a note from Thoreau. Geo’s handwriting was astonishingly meticulous, zero line variation or letter-shape variation, and open and clean and large and legible. It emanated discipline and rectitude.

Mr. Thoreau’s hasty note featured such wild variation of line width and apparent velocity that one could hardly fail to note that the philosophical approaches to life (and what we know of them as they have been depicted to us as media creations) of these two distinguished gentleman, inventors of my nation, were embodied in such a quotidian thing as their handwriting.

There was an unbroken medieval book of days available for a mere one-hundred-thousand dollars, and many small, ancient copies of printed manuals of magic and alchemy, collectively known as incunabulae and somewhat disparaged because of their status as supposed unreliable information sources and wellsprings of superstition. To me, they may be that. But so are more conventionally accepted works of spiritual reflection, and these books are also interesting sources of art and the printers’ craft well worthy of a leafing through.

I had an interesting conversation with a dealer who specialized in Latin America concerning some interesting books I have that passed to me from my family’s time in Chile in 1969; one of the books was published following the Chilean coup (of a few years later) in English and I understood it to be a publication of the junta aimed at increasing American support for the coup; the gentleman I spoke with knew the book bad had some differing opinions about the book, and encouraged me to get in touch with him.

I was surprised to see only one example of American woodtype publicity posters from the nineteenth century, which are my favorite for their shouting, bumptious ornamentation and flowery throbbist purple prose. Again, I did not ask the cost lest I should decide it was affordable.

There were four small first editions of the initial publications of Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish priest who spoke out against the treatment of the Native Americans at the hands of Columbus himself and continued to do so until his death, many years later. These works were heeded in their day but the polices growing from them proved unenforceable, and the consequence, through the end of the great plagues among the Natives, was virtual genocide. However, las Casas’ forceful advocacy for the native populace unquestionably helped provide the framework from which the rich and beautiful hybrid cultures of Latin America sprang.

Seeing these books was a moving experience for me. I was grateful for it.

Finally, there were numerous large (15 x 22 inch or larger) examples of medieval music, which immediately appealed to me as a possible wall decoration. Upon investigation, I was both surprised and not surprised to find that these large sheets were, as with the bound music I mentioned earlier this week, relatively inexpensive. Prices ranged from about $300 to as low as $50, which astounds me.

I was pleased to be able to (more-or-less) read the Latin on many of the sheets.

I did not buy any, though. If we’d gone on Saturday I believe I would have returned on Sunday to pick one up.

Eric and I began our friendship because of a book. It was one of those ’70s Star Trek paperbacks. Since then both he and I have perpetually crammed our living spaces full of other books. Vivian occasionally tries to cull the herd, as it were, but I’m agin it.

Thus it was appropriate that today we worked our way from Pioneer Square back up to Pike Place Market and thence to Capitol Hill, my ‘hood, by way of bookstores and one book bindery.

Vivian and I are having an 1868 American edition of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words rebound as a gift for Viv’s best friend, a piano teacher. I was surprised to learn that genuinely old lithographed scores, such as those in this book, are quite inexpensive. The book, in fact, cost significantly less than the new binding; and you’ll generally find that antique bound music collections are very inexpensive. Much less, in fact, than prose books of similar vintages.

I suspect that this is a reflection of the relative incidence of literacy; many more persons can read transcriptions of spoken language than can read musical notation.

I find the valuations remarkable, particularly in light of the extremely elaborate frontispieces which have been common to music publication since at least the 1820’s. It’s a really interesting way to increase your personal exposure to antique book design, type, and illustration, especially if (as I do) you admire the frequently disparaged work of American commercial typographers and typesetters of the nineteenth century.

When we walked into the bindery, I immediately noticed not one but two 13 by 10 inch 4-inch tall printer’s lithography stones, the foundation of industrial printing from just after the turn of the 19th century until around World War One. No longer produced, these stones were all quarried at one place, from the Solenhofen Limestone, in Germany.

Science geeks will recognize this as the place which yielded archeoptryx, the dino-bird which is regarded as the best evidence of the link between dinosaurs and birds. Archeoptryx is also the reason that the stones are no longer milled. The deposit which the stones were taken from was desirable for lithography because of its’ perfectly even grain and the ease with which it could be worked. The process was partly invented in Solenhofen because the stone was available.

The same conditions that produced that perfect grain – consistent settling of silt without disturbance for centuries – also, necessarily, created conditions perfect for incredible preservation of fossils. Archeoptryx is important not only for the morphological features it shares with dinosaurs and birds, but also for the fact that the fossil’s original soft organic matter was cast, as well as its’ bones: you can see the animal’s feathers.

When alternative plate material, such as plastics and steel, became available for use in lithography printing (still the primary method for commercial printed material production today), mining of the deposits for the production of further litho stones was forbidden. The litho stones of Solenhofen became heirlooms of a vanished technology, so that the trove of fossils secreted and remaining might tell us new stories of the deep past.

Thus, the stone which helped to build mass publishing and therefore literate culture and all its attendant benefits (and comp/aints) is now more deeply precious by dint of simple physical rarity and the even more rare fossils the stones hold within their hearts. Perhaps Daumier’s celebrated “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was drawn upon a stone that holds with in it an even more perfect specimen of Archeoptryx.

To find these stones, holding dual significance of the heritage of nature and culture, employed in the shop of an antiquarian book bindery made my visit there distinctly pleasant. In the bindery, the stones are used as a cutting surface for the leather being prepared in the bindings.

The craft of the shop, of course, carries information forward from the past in two discrete ways itself. By repairing old and worn bindings for antique books, the information in the old books becomes more accessible itself; and the craft of the shop per se is an information vector from pre-industrial times.

The heritage of deep archeological time; the heritage of the book itself, predating printing; the heritage of the antique book from the inscribed manuscript to the introduction of flexible-plate lithography; and the heritage of printing, of widely reproduced knowledge and art, all were represented before me in that tiny craftsman’s shop. I stood and smiled in this knowledge.

Eric, Anne, Vivian, Eric’s cousin Ilse, and I went to Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics for a picnic today.

Eric has one of them new fangled micro-wireless doohickeys, a Danger hiptop, I think, that allows you to check email, reply, websurf, and so forth from a thing about the size of an overweight palm pilot.

I tried to post to the site from the line for the ferry with it, and was able to log in and compose an entry, but lost the signal about the time I hit “submit”. So, no George Jetson entry for today, alas.

I do have pix, but – alas – the MT upgrade has sprung an undoing of thumbnailing at upload upon me. So none for now. (OK, now is later, now. so now, being later, there’s a pic)

Eric did, pretty much, keep saying “wow”, as he looked out across the view from the Ridge. “We don’t get so much of this in Chicago or Indiana.”