Compensation
I am a sick woman, I am a spiteful woman. I am so sick I would give exorcism a try to see if this is not a virus but possession by a vengeful spirit, but the exorcists I used to work down the hall from have all left, chased out by a vicious Landlord who only wanted money on a regular pre-arranged schedule and did not care how many devils were left behind to harass and insinuate their way inside his other tenants in what is now an extremely unsafe office building, so I cannot take that cure. here’s a feeble reminiscence to keep you from forgetting all about me until I’m well again.
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Just a very few years ago I took a bookbinding & conservation seminar in Italy, organized in that order, so that first we learned to Bind a book and then conserve it, like how first you put Merlin in the hawthorn tree and then seal him up in there for centuries, protected from red rot & insects & damp, taking him out to learn more of his secrets when it pleases you but always remembering to follow procedure and put him back in before you go. For the duration of the program I lived in an alleyway called the Vicolo del Gallo, which means the street of the rooster, or cock alley, if you will. but the nice man who coordinated student living concerns said We call it the Vicolo del Gatto, actually, because guess who lives here (it was cats.) Italian street cats are not friendly (to me) especially when we are neighbors. Italian cemetery cats are a very different thing, and when I later went to Rome to faint on Keats’ grave I made friends with the little cat who guards him.
In spite of how I loved what little I learned of it, bookbinding combines two of my least favorite things, which are senseless waste of animal life and sewing. They sat us at our sewing frames and after some lecturing, one of the first things we learned was Compensation. You have to do what is called Compensation for the difference between the width of the thread and the width of the quire, and first I overcompensated and then when it was pointed out to me I undercompensated.
this was the first hint that I was not to be a master bookbinder. But there was no time to be sad about it when other wonderful things were happening, such as the instructors would rush around the room handing us knives, very sharp, and hammers. These spoke to my blood and my instincts as a sewing frame never can. You know how a Western bound book has a rounded spine, which is different from the flat back you get on certain books with limp covers or without spine coverings? you know how you get that rounded shape? you hit it with a hammer. You whack it it on both sides until it learns the direction it is meant to go and gives up the fight. I liked hammering even more than I liked knifing, but most of all I liked it when they gave us scalpels. did so much scalpel work that summer it is basically like I have been to medical school. One of our instructors told us a funny story about how a British Library conservation colleague stuck a paring knife into his belly by accident when cutting leather and had to be taken to the hospital. It could have been a cautionary tale of why to be careful with knives but he made it all about how Englishmen like to say “sorry” to everyone while bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. so do American women, sometimes.
Both instructors were my favorite on alternating days, but the tale-telling one, my favorite, was the one who would roam around the room and tell people that what they had just done with a needle and thread was “the worst mistake I have ever SEEN” in tones of acutest pain. He had no sense of proportion and didn’t want any; few to none of us were ever going to enter his profession but he could not stand to see us fuck up the smallest things and he would not stand it. He did not care for our self-esteem, he cared for sewing of endbands. One day he saved a little lizard from getting incorporated into the wheat paste. A great man.
The other instructor, my favorite, was the one I stabbed in the thumb by accident when he was trying to give me special scalpel assistance, I was very sorry but he said it was nothing. I worried that this was just his European gallantry, considering the blood, but he swore to me it didn’t hurt, not that he would mind if it did. When we were in Rome later, waiting by the Porta Sant’Anna, all in the midst of telling us about some nun he had been in love with and how tragic this was he suddenly interrupted himself and said “Look! look at that man with the green umbrella!” and we look, and there he is, an distinguished older man with a green umbrella crossing the street away from us. “That man is one of the most powerful conservators in Rome,” he says. “I HATE him.” One day during a smoke break in the garden walkway he rescued a trapped pigeon with his own hands. A great man.
There was a sponsored day trip that I skipped, to Orvieto I think, to see an Etruscan necropolis, but I went to college in Western New York so I know all about cities of the dead already, what is one more to me. Then one day they said Surprise, we are taking you to Rome on Friday to touch the Pope's books, and after that they left us at liberty in what is the greatest city in Western Europe, as I have already made some references to. I was not the only one who had never been there before but nobody was excited enough about being IN ROME, nobody else was teetering on the cobblestones struck with Stendhal syndrome and I don’t understand why not. What am I going to say to you about Rome that doesn’t sound like a guidebook or make you want to punch me? can I tell you the best Roman gelato flavor is Thumbelina (walnut-rose-petal-violet-petal)? it is, but I can’t tell you that. Go to the Villa Borghese when you can, take a photograph of a seagull flying over the Tiber, annoy your own friends and relations with it. there, that is my guidebook. During our farewell-to-Rome dinner, my favorite instructor told me about one of the monks in a monastery on Patmos he had stayed at for a time, who would bang his head on the table in penance for all the murders he had done. Then it was good-bye to Rome.
Back home in the palazzo it was time for Stamping. Bookbinding is so dangerous, and they saved the most dangerous parts for last. Did you know there is a bookbinding tool called a guillotine, it is what it sounds like. Anyway but do you know, the worst thing to have to do in the morning after you have drunk too much is hot stamping an archival binding, which is the same as a stationer’s binding. The smell of burning sheep’s leather pervades the room, it gets in your clothes. I stamped my binding, I stamped it and stamped it. When you start indelibly decorating without a plan you have no choice but to keep going and going and cover as much of it in gold as you can, hide all your mistakes under gold. I hot-stamped my thumb (the way you know when the finishing tool is hot enough is when you dip your finger in water and touch it and it sizzles but the water doesn’t all evaporate instantly, it takes a couple seconds. Usually it doesn't hurt.) I almost hot-stamped a fellow student’s bald head as he was bending over the heating device just as I was replacing a tool. the lure of the blank canvas is a powerful thing.
Of the Conservation segment of the program I remember much less. Mainly I remember something about necessary trade-offs in restoration wherein you have to damage one component if you want to repair another; just like the famous saying, my favorite instructor said, that goes "You can't have a drunk wife and a full barrel." Is that like not having your cake and eating it too, somebody asked, but he didn't know that one.
That is all for reminiscing for now, I have to go make myself a hot toddy or a posset or look up what a posset is and then make one. When I am well again I will tell you all about GWENYTH, a werewelf gothic by ‘Robin Carol’ that I like very much, with a psychiatrist in it, Dr. Gabriel Bela, who says to the heroine: "My dear, I was born to wallow in the cesspool of the human mind." If you know of any other ‘60s category gothics with werewolves in them you better let me know or by God I won’t forgive you.