On Killers and Covers

I asked him what it was like to be nineteen, since I was curious and very far from nineteen. I was nineteen in 1975, and that was half a century ago. And he was an engaging 19-year-old who had come to ask me why I was binding a book at a poetry slam.

 

“It sucks, man,” said Pedro (I had learned his name by then).

 

OK—that part hadn’t changed much. It sucked for me, too, but for entirely different reasons. My life, I imagined at age 19, was in ruins. I didn’t know that that was the usual state of things: my life would be in ruins for as long as I let it be in ruins, or for as long as it kept bothering me. The first step in having a “perfect” life turned out to be in not caring whether you were doing it right, whether it was working, whether it made any sense. 

 

But I was interested in Pedro, since he doesn’t have now, apparently, what I had and took for granted.

 

The day after I posed the question to Pedro, a transgendered person poked his automatic weapon through an open window in a church in Minneapolis. The killer’s name was Robin Westman, and she had apparently attended the school attached to Annunciation Catholic Church. Here’s the yearbook photo from when Robin was Robert.

 

 

The Robert Westman became Robin Westman, but there must have been a lot of changes beyond the sex reassignment. Robin killed herself after shooting the kids (and injuring 17 others), so we can’t ask her—what happened? We can’t satisfy our need to explain what is, at first glance, the inexplicable.

 

There might be no explanation, or it might be that we can’t bear to look at what we’ve become. Because it wasn’t Robert Westman or Robin Westman or anybody else that killed the kids and maimed the aged. It was the United States pulling the trigger. It was what we had become that killed us, or will kill us in the uncertain days to come.

 

We might as well celebrate it, since we don’t want to do anything about it. The solution is simple, and we all know it. The solution is to get the guns off the streets, and out of the hands of Robin. But apparently the only thing in the constitution that has any worth is the skewed reading of the Second Amendment, with its supposed assurance that any American at any moment has the right to grab an unbelievably powerful gun and shoot children.

 

We could prevent this.

 

We choose not to.

 

We like to kill kids.

 

If we could accept it, we might be able to change it. Instead, we look at the killer and find the clues to our liking that will explain why the (inevitably) quiet, polite kid went bad.

 

I say—get the guns off the street.

 

The Trump people say—see? Transgendered! Antisemitic posts in a journal! Calls for the death of Trump!

 

Wonderful—but why was the journal written (apparently) in English but using Cyrillic letters? Is there any meaning to it? Did he want to hide his thoughts from anyone stumbling onto his journal?

 

Our need to find “meaning” in this massacre is the problem. Pedro, the nineteen-year-old I spoke to at the poetry slam, grew up in a world where a shotgun poking through a church window was, if not normal or expected, certainly imaginable. I would have been going up to the gun nozzle, puzzled at what it was, and if anyone sticking the thing through a window needed help. Pedro would have been barricading the door and diving under desks.

 

Pedro was interested in books, and we talked for a bit about book covers. His favorite—or at least one of his favorites—was well known to me. Here it is:

 

 

The cover has entered into the collective conscience, apparently. It’s arresting, certainly, and I have used it for the cover of the slipcase that I put books into. In fact, I hate book covers, because they’re a symbol, to me, of how warped our culture has become.

 

Books are commercial items that must be produced (happy to help there!), targeted for marketing, directed towards an audience, and finally festooned with anything that will get the book off the shelf (hopefully passing through a cash register in the process). The back cover is filled with blurbs from The New York Times or from notable persons. The image on the front cover is curated and captivating. The cover, in short, is all about selling.

 

I want my books to be beautiful, not effective. The cover needs to protect the book and be pleasing to the eye. The spine—which I enclose in sheepskin—should feel soft in your hand. The pages should be thick. There should be—and God knows in my books there will be—a host of imperfections that speak of human hands. True—at some point the book will leave your hands and be put on a shelf with its brothers. I’ll print a bit of brown cardboard stock and attach the author’s name and title to the spine, but that’s about it.

 

Pedro didn’t ask me about cover jackets, and didn’t have to hear my screed / screech against them. A couple of decades ago, cover jackets were all the rage, and collectors paid twice as much for a book in bad condition with a cover jacket than they paid for the same book in excellent condition but without a cover jacket. It made sense, since most collectors don’t read. They just collect.

 

It's a wonderful thing, of course, for the people who read. The people who are interested in the book. The people who (rightly, in my view) detach the cover jacket and pitch it.

 

There were at least three approaches to book covers. For most of the history of books, covers were meant to be functional and beautiful. A marbled page on back and front, a leather spine—that was it. Watch any BBC history documentary filmed in an ancient library—the books are sober and drab. They were beautiful when young and the colors were fresh. They become somber and dignified as time passes.

 

There was a brief moment when hard covers became beautiful, and when some sort of détente was arranged between commerce and art. It was the Victorian age, of course, and here’s a nice example.

 

 

It’s beautiful, it’s functional, and it took a bit more time and effort. Besides the design, it had to be printed on book cloth and put on the boards of the cover. It stayed there as long as it had a cover. It was not some piece of paper that was an advertisement posing as a cover. It might even have been art itself, or suggestive of it. Here’s the 1855 cover:

 

 

Dude—the guy’s NAME doesn’t even appear on the cover. Apparently everybody in 1855—or at least everybody in 1855 who wanted to buy Leaves of Grass—knew that Walt Whitman had written the damn thing. And nobody suggested that the ornamentation on the capital letters was—perhaps—just a bit distracting, if not actually indecipherable. Speaking of which, the “of” doesn’t amount to much either.

 

But I support it, though the Victorian book cover had the same fate occur to it as occurred to the rest of society at large. It became cheap and commercialized, and in the end, we were all buying books that looked like this:

 

 

My God, did Whitman really get to be that old? Did they exhume the body to take a picture of it? I know William Carlos Williams (who wrote the introduction, as if the book weren’t enough) and I have heard of Malcolm Cowley (whose blurb escaped the back cover and moved to the front). The little blurb for The Modern Library is distracting. I would decrease the picture size and put a proper border around it. I would increase the size of the bottom textbox with Whitman and Williams’ names. I would make all sorts of adjustments, but am I a graphic artist or a bookbinder? 

 

I might—and often have—come up with something far worse than the image above.

 

So screw it. I am not my clothes, and the book is not its cover. We just have to be presentable.

 

Pedro had that conversation with me, and then drifted off into the poetry. I met him later in the evening, and he was with his father.

 

A very nice guy.

 

Younger than I am.

 

We spoke, we said farewell, and I left with a nice memory. A father with his son at a poetry slam.

 

Robin Westman had parents too, and they opened the door to the police, who combed the house looking for clues to answer the question. The parents left the house that had sheltered the killer as the police looked for motives.

 

Pedro’s father took him to a poetry slam. Westman’s parents, unbelievably, seemed to have left the house to the police and found themselves sitting on the curb. The neighbors saw them there, looking blankly at the street in front of them.

 

Looking for a parade that never came.

 

Dawdling by Walden Pond

Put something down on paper, I told myself, though I have no paper in front of me—only this old laptop. Just start to write, I tell myself: there’s a delete function. It’s like priming a well—throw some water down there and see if any will come back up.

 

Speaking of back, there’s Abrego García. He was one of over two hundred immigrants who got rounded up and sent to El Salvador. A judge had ordered that the plane taking him and the others be grounded. If they were in the air, they were supposed to turn around. There was no ambiguity in the order.

 

There was no ambiguity in the response, either. The Trump administration ignored the court order. It was one of the first signs that this administration was completely lawless and felt great about it.

 

It’s hard to know why Abrego García, and not any of the other “detainees” captured the public eye. Every story had its heartbreak, often appealing to one person but not to another. I worried about Abrego García, but I also worried about Andry Hernández, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela. He got sent to El Salvador as well, and only got out last month to return home to Venezuela.

 

These are the two guys I know about—what about the other two hundred people who got kidnapped? What about the thousands of people who are facing a decision today—do I risk going to Home Depot, to stand around and look for work as a day laborer? Do I go to mow the lawn or pick the fruit? Or do I stay home and cower? But for how long? And who feeds my family if I do?

 

My Monday morning, which I think is horrible, is a day at the beach compared to this. I leave my apartment and walk thirty feet down the sidewalk—a house is being renovated on my block. Which means that Richard, who is Cuban and lived in the states briefly, is at risk. So are the other guys who work there. Always, in the past, the gate to the building they’re working on would be open. Now, it’s shut—though you can hear them working there—and locked.

 

It's relentless, and it’s designed that way. It is, in fact, what I always feared: a vast, unyielding network that is designed to remove a certain number of people every day. Once in the system, you are completely unprotected—it won’t matter if you’re a US citizen or not, if you’re here legally, if your tattoos are just tattoos, not gang symbols.

 

So Abrego García got rounded up and sent to El Salvador. We all followed his case, and a United States senator, Chris Van Hollen went down to Central America to see him. They met at the hotel von Hollen was staying at, not at the prison camp Abrego García had been sent to. 

 

I watched Abrego García speak to the senator, and thought, “great—but what about the others?” Then the senator left, and Abrego rotted a couple more months in prison.

 

Sorry, he wasn’t rotting. He was being tortured (actively) and held in subhuman conditions (passively). And when he was released, in early June, the story should have been over. But he was arrested again, this time on charges that he was helping to smuggle people into Texas. Unbelievably, the judge ordered Abrego García to be detained in prison for his own protection. The idea was that he was safer from the government in prison than on the streets.

 

Even that didn’t work. Abrego García was taken into custody by ICE again this morning, and faces possible deportation to Uganda.

 

Uganda?

 

I don’t know much about Uganda, other than that it’s in Africa, it had a murderous dictator (Idi Amin) for a decade or so, and it’s nowhere I want to go. This is probably about all Abrego García knows as well, since he is from Venezuela, and probably doesn't speak great English.

 

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the United States government had to “facilitate” the release of Abrego García from El Salvador. The Trump administration disregarded the order for months; the court did nothing. 

 

The message couldn’t be clearer. I have blue eyes and fair skin, as well as an American passport. I am no more safe than Abrego García. I write critically of Trump and all his minions, and occasionally Blogger (the site hosting this blog) will “flag” my posts. Nobody is reading this blog, but it is being surveilled. My name could appear on a list of subversives, I could be detained at the airport, I could be sent to El Salvador and sleeping in the same bunk as Abrego García.

 

I’m not safe from my own government.

 

It’s a change, because I used to rely on the government. I wanted them to tell me about the hurricanes, at least, or the flash floods that might take out the summer camp that I sent my kid to. I want them to keep the mercury in the thermometers and out of the rivers. I’d like them to teach my kids, and yes, slavery is wrong. Teach them that, too.

 

So Abrego García is having a lousy morning, and I am having a great morning (because I am not in prison, in Uganda or anywhere else) but am not feeling it. I could go to the beach, today, and probably should.

 

Or I could consult ChatGPT or Replika—two site using artificial intelligence to provide (among other things) counseling to teenagers. Kids aren’t talking to anybody, not even themselves, and they probably don’t have the money to hire a therapist. So they are taking their mental health to…

 

to… 

 

…a computer program that is highly “intelligent” but not human. The New York Times says that the services offered by artificial intelligence are occasionally better than real therapists.

 

I’m saying no to the artificial therapists, and my Puritan ancestors are telling me “no” to the beach, as well. Instead, I’m going to be binding a copy of Walden, which is crazy because I have no interest in Walden and less interest in Henry David Thoreau.

 

We read him “then,” I told myself. “Then’ is the 1960’s, when the biggest issue (and it was big) was a war in Southeast Asia that we shouldn’t have gotten into and couldn’t get out of. We read Thoreau because he had spent a night in jail, for not paying his taxes to support the Mexican-American War. 

 

Thoreau got a visit, too—not from a U.S. senator but from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who reportedly dragged himself into town and shouted, “Thoreau, what are you doing in jail?”

 

Thoreau shouted back, “Emerson, what are you doing OUT of jail?”

 

Thoreau went on to write On Civil Disobedience, and it got around. Gandhi read it. Martin Luther King read. And we all read it, back in the 1960’s—all of us who were marching and protesting.

 

How quaint it seems.

 

However vile Richard Nixon was, he was one of us. He was a human—a piano-playing alcoholic who beat his wife and sobbed drunkenly in front of the oil portraits of Washington and Lincoln. Right—the drunk I became and am now makes me empathize with Nixon. But why do I feel that living with Trump—who is a teetotaler—is worse than living with a drunk? Every situation is always worse than you imagined, everything happens too quickly, any control is illusory and usually a trick played by fate to tell you, once again, that you’re fucked.

 

That said, what do you do?

 

Well, Michelle Obama knew the answer, which is when they go low, we go high.

 

Lovely, we’ll stride proudly with our head held high!

 

…as we approach the guillotine.

 

Gavin Newsum—the governor of California and Trump’s current most-outspoken critic—has the opposite approach. Beat ‘em at their game, he says, and proposes gerrymandering California to counteract Texas. That might work, if the rest of the country buys the argument that, “well, they(meaning Texas) started it!” I used to try this on my mother, and it was a dud.

 

So it’s a Monday morning and people are doing their Monday morning things like making a living and binding notebooks. Not that those two activities have anything to do with each other.

 

And Judge Zinis is having her Monday morning as well. She’s the judge dealing with the Abrego García case, and she has ruled for months now that the federal government must “effectuate and facilitate” Abrego García’s release from his illegal detention. The Supreme Court threw out the word “effectuate,” which meant “do” but agreed 9-0 that “facilitate” had just the right passivity—sitting by and letting the El Salvadorians put him on a plane, if they were so disposed.

 

The United States did nothing; the El Salvadorians did nothing. The Supreme Court did nothing. 

 

Judge Zinis must have been pissed—and why shouldn’t she be? She has been ordering the government to come up with any real evidence they might have against Abrego García, and all they come up with are plane rides (no ticket needed) to foreign jails.

 

Worse, ICE set up a hearing with Abrego García and then arrested him when he showed up. It was a trap.

 

Well, she must have been disgusted, and I was disgusted too, which is why binding a copy of Waldenseemed like the least nonsensical thing to do. Short of buying Judge Zinis lunch (they probably have Uber Eats or Door Dash up there) there wasn’t much I could do. 

 

Want to know my worst secret?

 

I bind books so that I don’t buy bottles.

 

And since the only bottles I buy now (infrequently) have shampoo in them, I can now bind books. Even better, I can thread a needle.

 

You smile indulgently, perhaps, thinking that it’s just aged hands and faltering eyesight that keeps me from threading needles easily. But it has nothing to do with that. At the end of my drinking, my hands shook so badly that a friend felt my hand shaking as we stood joined together in a circle to say the serenity prayer, eight years ago. For years, I tried to thank God, mentally, every time I threaded a needle, which became second nature, of course. 

 

I made jokes about it: “It’s just as we feared,” I once told Raf when he came upon me sewing something. 

 

“I’ve gone from the bottle to the needle!”

 

He wasn’t amused.

 

So Judge Zinis made another ruling that said that the government cannot deport Abrego García—and this seems to have stuck.

 

At least for now.

 

9:23 on Tuesday morning.

 

So then I went off to bind Walden, which I thought was going to be a simple affair, since the book is only 50 pages or so.

 

Not that I remember all that well, since the last copy I saw of Walden was half a century or so ago. It was a dirty, slim, earmarked (if not indeed ragged) paperback with cheap paper and miniscule print. It had been thrown on a dirty sofa next to an overflowing ashtray.

 

Well, books change over the years.

 

They grow up, maybe, since my copy of Walden, which I downloaded from the Internet Archives is derived from a copy published in that leisurely age, 1899. It has all sorts of gewgaws the paperback never had, like faded but impressive woodblock engravings (or reproductions, at least), and type font that is usually associated with the dire side effects of a vitally needed drug. (You know, “may cause itching,  ___45-other-things, seizures, paralysis and death.”) Yesterday’s book was on cream-colored paper that was substantially thicker than the toilet-paper-like paper of the old paperback. And the paper will probably stay cream and not turn brown, since it’s acid and lignin free. 

 

The Victorians were generous—more port? Another cigar?—in their books, too. The book comes with a generous portrait of the author, a wieldy forward and introduction (probably a preface in there, as well), a list of the assorted works of Henry David Thoreau, and for all I know an extensive biographical sketch.

 

The book was over five hundred pages, and would have collapsed any old sofa that it had been hurled onto.

 

So it had grown up, Walden had, since the days of my youth. Actually, it had aged substantially better than I had, and I got real pleasure seeing the sections slowly build themselves up. 

 

A book is bound from the back to the front covers. It’s logical, of course—would you build a house by constructing the roof, putting the attic underneath it, then the second floor, and all the way to the basement?

 

Thus the binder, if he is of a mind, rereads the book from the back. It’s like telling a story with friends—you remember what happened, but not why, or all the details surrounding why it happened, and why it had to happen. As the evening goes on, you remember more and more of the back story (as we call it, now).

 

And as the afternoon wore on, I left paragraphs starting with, “And so my two-year journey into the busy solitude of the pond drew to a close,” and worked my way towards, “the noise and bustle of the city had become impossible for me.”

 

End-papers, cover, and bam--that’s it.

 

Another secret—binding a book is a LOT more fun than actually writing it. Writing goes on forever, and then you have to watch your friends shift nervously, every time someone mentions the fact that you’ve written a book. Because they haven’t read it, and why should they? But they’re feeling lousy about it, as they should.

 

(This makes perfect sense, to me at least. But don’t worry—I’ll probably edit it out.)

 

Binding a book is nice because the rules are clear from the beginning, and you follow them or you don’t. If you do, and if you’ve made 500 awful books or so—then you’ll be fine. You can throw the rules out, and more likely than not, you’ll end up with a mess, and not the glorious creation your fevered brain attempted to create.

 

Even though I tell myself, before I begin writing, “you know all the words, you just have to put them into the right order,” it doesn’t really help. Writing a book is like a blank canvas, but binding that book is more akin to a coloring book. The mind can rest as the hands toil.

 

And so Abrego García had his day in court, and not a government-funded vacation in a Ugandan jail.

 

The world has another copy of Walden.

 

I’m still sober.

 

Judge Zinis is plowing through her day, and I am plowing through mine.

 

Is it enough?

 

No—but it has to be. 

 

 

  

 

          

Planting History

What I really should do, but will probably not, is to tell you about the important meeting that Trump had with Vladimir Putin. You will remember—or maybe you won’t—that Trump had promised to make a deal and settle the war in Ukraine in the first 24 hours of his presidency. He then met with the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, and berated him in the oval office with cameras rolling for not wearing a suit and not being grateful. It was agonizing to watch.

 

Now, Trump is doing what he can to divert attention from his dalliances with a couple of known sexual abusers—Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. So the idea of meeting Putin in Alaska (without the un“suit”able presence of Zelensky) got floated and instantly was taken up. This is not an administration fettered by overthinking.

 

It was horrifying, if all the details are correct. Trump got out the red carpet (quite literally, since there were marines on their knees rolling the damn thing out), and then stood waiting like a dog for his master to get off the plane. At which point he clapped, and then veered like a drunk down the red carpet. 

 

Things got worse. There were three of them and three of “us,” though how much “us” is in Donald Trump is debatable. Trump got off to a fine start by delivering a monologue that lasted 20 minutes and was largely disconnected from any reality that should have been dealt with. Putin sat quiet and let him talk. Then the flattery, along with the history lesson that Ukraine had been part of Mother Russia for centuries. Anyone could see that, especially a man with the insight and the erudition of Donald Trump. That alone would be sufficient to justify his very firm no, to the historical impossibility of ending the current war with anything but the “return” of the Donbas region. It’s a huge amount of land, and it includes, of course, Russia’s access to the Crimea. 

 

My knowledge of Russian history is less than Putin’s, but even I know about the Russian mania for the Crimea.

 

The whole affair was a bust, because there was no cease fire—which had been the goal. Actually, Trump had told everyone that it was gonna happen, because Putin really, really liked Trump and wanted to make a deal with him. Still, it didn’t happen, though the world got to hear Putin speak of being “neighbors” TO THE United States, and his wish to increase that good will which should exist between neighbors.

 

During the peace summit, Russia bombed Kiev severely and repeatedly.

 

Trump looked old and weak. Putin looked old and in control (that KGB training comes in handy). The European leaders looked aghast, when they put down their phones after talking with Trump. He was calling them, essentially echoing Putin’s talking points, one by one, when he called them for support in getting Zelensky to propose to his country that they give up the area about the size of the east coast of the United States, stretching from the northern tip of Maine to the southernmost Florida Key.

 

So they put down whatever they were doing that day and flew to Washington, to support Zelensky and try to quash any plans to give up the Donbas region. The strategy appears to be to flatter Trump, and then slip in whatever truth they want to impart. I get it—I do the same thing to my cat. I put the pill in a nice, dripping spoonful of tuna fish, and we’re all happy.

 

That was hardly the most important news, since really the whole thing was about appeasing a severely-stricken malignant narcissist who has also developed a rampaging dementia. He also has the codes for the nuclear football.

 

Just to exhaust the Fire Department, Trump set another fire, this time in Washington, D.C. by sending in 800 national guardsmen last week to “combat crime.” The number of guardsmen is now up to 2000, according to one report; the mainstream media is covering the spontaneous protests (which are apparently large) with reverential silence.

 

 

There is, in short, serious shit going down, but did Trump go down? Not at all, he went up—UP!—to the roof of the White House, apparently twice on two different days. Having settled (or not) the difficulties in Ukraine, Trump got out his developer hat (or hardhat) and did what any real guy would do. He surveyed the site of the new ballroom that has to be put on the site of Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden. The whole thing is part of redecorating the White House to make it look like Mar-a-Lago, and in this he has been entirely successful. We all remember the ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, though it’s always lovely to refresh the memory. 

 

 

All of this is really important, and a serious person would be telling you about it, but I am not a particularly serious person. I certainly wasn’t last Tuesday, when I had wasted my day finding a poem that I intended to bind into the indictment of Donald John Trump that Jack Smith had presented to the country in the first week of the year, before he skipped town.

 

But I was thinking about books, since the image of Trump on the White House roof (the cartoons the next day had crowds gazing up at the President and shouting “JUMP”) was too unsettling. Books don’t get up on the roof, generally, and they stick to their libraries until it gets timed to be rebound.

 

They lead quiet but not inconsequential lives. Actually, the most consequential thing about them is that against all odds some of them survive.

 

This post has no chance, I think, if someone or something wants to get rid of it. The website hosting this blog could have AI scouring their servers; my words and whatever thoughts they convey could be scrubbed from the internet in the time it takes to shut down my computer, stick all my stuff in a backpack, and head for the door to go home. I could disappear very easily, and so could Jack Smith’s indictment.

 

But something altogether extraordinary might happen if I printed a bunch of these posts into a book and gave it to Johnny, my brother. Johnny might put the book into the Norwegian chest that came over on the (as usual) second boat, us having missed the first. And there the book might sit, enjoying the dark and the muffled sounds of life outside the chest. The living room and especially the dining room are really nice places to be.

 

And some ancestor might come along, some day, with a morning free to look at a manuscript in that old chest. The pages would be yellowed, perhaps, though if it were lignin / acid-free it would help. But long after the Internet had forgotten about Trump on the roof of the White House, well, my book would not. All I (and my book) depend on is Johnny, who is a superb older brother and generally reliable. The ancestor might learn that the “tourist visit” thousands of Trump supporters made on January 6, 2001, to the United States Capitol was a less than peaceful affair. Though it taught us a lot.

 

Books only have to deal with fire, floods, desiccation, ill-use to the point of abuse, termites and time. They don’t have to deal with evil or malice.

 

They’re the quiet dudes in the room. You have to open them up to get them to talk.

 

Or rebind them, since that’s what I was thinking about, as I walked to the Poet’s Passage. One of the great things about books is that for centuries they were damned expensive to make: outside of the time and labor to produce them, vellum and parchment weren’t cheap. I throw away paper when I glue an end-paper down—such a practice would have horrified a monk in a medieval scriptorium. He would have gathered up the scrap and used it to thicken a book cover. In fact, stuff crops up from time to time in book bindings, and it recently did several months ago. Here’s a hint from the BBC:

 

…the 700-year-old fragment of Suite Vulgate du Merlin – an Old French manuscript so rare there are less than 40 surviving copies in the world – has been discovered by an archivist in Cambridge University Library, folded and stitched into the binding of the 16th-Century register.

 

I’ll let the BBC continue the story.

 

Today, multispectral imaging (MSI), CT scanning and 3D modelling has enabled scholars to not only read the faded and hidden texts of the fragment, but to understand exactly how it was folded and sewn into the register. The Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory team at Cambridge University Library has even been able to analyse the different threads used by the Elizabethan bookbinders and the different decoration pigments used by the medieval illuminator,  whose job it was to "illuminate" manuscripts with decorative illustrations and rich colours.

 

Well, well, I thought—it’s an interesting world. We no longer need to take the cover off and undo the binding of a book to see what’s inside. I knew about that, since we are doing essentially the same thing with the Dead Sea scrolls that are far too fragile to unroll.

 

What I didn’t know—and was pleased to discover—was that a bookbinder could plant history, as it were. Kids put messages for unseen eyes in the improbable future to discover in empty bottles tossed into the sea. Why not bookbinders?

 

So I gassed on about the Irish-monks-saving-Western-Civilization to the people at the Poet’s Passage. Then I told them about the Merlin manuscript, discovered after 700 years of gentle sleep in the inside of a book cover. Then I read them the poem of Arthur Waley about censorship. The poem that I had wasted a day trying to find. You remember, the poem that ends:

 

It is not difficult to censor foreign news,

What is hard today is to censor one's own thoughts --

To sit by and see the blind man

On the sightless horse, riding in to the bottomless abyss.

Then it was time to slip the poem into the folded cardstock sheet of the cover, and to put glue on the marbled paper to the cover. I sealed it up in front of everybody, since who wouldn't be curious to see, and indeed want to see…

…history being planted.