Gutenberg Elegies

I love books—the look, feel, smell and weight of them. When I hold an old book, I remember the story of an aged librarian who wandered his collections stopping to stroke the books and muttering: “Don’t worry, my darlings. They’ll never turn you into microfiche.”

And I cherish old papers— letters, pages of diaries and ledgers, anything with the mark of a hand. Resonant with memory, these are the ephemeral stuffs of connection between generations. The beauty of typeface and patterned endpapers reminds us of the elegiac aspects of typesetting and bookbinding in an electronic age.

Handwriting, too, earns a threnody in digital times. School systems have begun to discontinue teaching longhand. Block letters will do for a generation that communicates on the keyboard. Yet for most of us, cursive script was our first experience with disciplined drawing, an expressive component of literacy.

The same design principles apply no matter the medium. Issues of space, color, tone and texture remain. To think of collage as painting and drawing by other means is close to the heart of it. These materials bind me to early loves in acts of creation and remembrance.

How we remember the past determines the way we inhabit the present. Forgetting is not an option.
Every book is an embodiment of mind; in its way, an incarnation. If these collages can serve as plausible metaphors for the fragility of the life of the mind and of cultural memory, then I am keeping faith—still—with reality.