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.”