Having spent a good part of my life treating the printed word as a precious thing has put me at a bit of a risk of thinking like a museum archivist. Although I take great pains to use stable materials in the printing and binding of the work produced here at The Nomadic Press, that does not mean that all printed materials need to be handled with an obsessive reverence.
A couple of winters ago I was reading a pretty good book. As I finished reading a page I would tear it out and throw it in the fire. This meant that I was always reading just the top sheet of a book and I never had to hold the tome open (one of my pet peeves is books that are printed with no space in the gutter, thus forcing the reader to exert constant effort just to keep the damn pages spread apart).
This winter I decided to finally finish Homer’s “The Iliad” and finish it I did. I shredded my copy of it and built a display case for the leavings. I know, one might say that this puts things back into the world of the museum.
Rather, I consider it more of a object for a cabinet of curiosities. In any case it was fun to make.
Next on my reading list, the burnt ashes of “War and Peace” in an urn. And I’ll try not to set the Nomadic Press print studio on fire.
Perhaps the disposal of this book requires the construction of a trebuchet. You know you want one.