A Journey Through Literary America
by Thomas R. Hummel and Photography by Tamra L. Dempsey
Monthly archive August, 2009
The Greatest Project I Ever Worked On (As a Printer)
I inherited the estimate from the soon-to-be departing production assistant, Angela. It was a quote for 10,000 copies and about $100,000. Not small potatoes. The client name was Control Bureau. Well, ok. The contact’s name was “Ximena” which I pronounced to myself as “Eximena” until I finally spoke to her and understood her name was pronounced “Himayna.” The book project was named Dictionary ABCDF and I kept thinking that someone had left out a vowel. I took the estimate folder with few expectations. The biggest jobs are always the hardest to get, and this one, for a thousand-page book, seemed destined to fall by the wayside. After a few weeks of minimal tending, the project suddenly sprang to life. The people from the Control Bureau said they wanted to come to LA and pay us a visit. They came and stayed the entire day. Within the first few minutes I had learned that the “DF” of ABCDF was “Distrito Federal” – the official name of Mexico City. ABCDF was to be a picture dictionary of beloved things in Mexico City. I also learned that these visitors from Mexico City were unlike any other clients I had ever had. The [...] Read More »
New England Independent Booksellers Assoc. Trade Show
Please look for Val de Grâce Books at the New England Independent Booksellers Association trade show, October 2 and 3. We will be exhibiting the book, of course, as well as the Literary America line of gift cards. Read More »
Chaucer's Books – Book Signing
http://chaucersbooks.com/ Read More »
Ayn Rand and the Ardor of Reading
Yesterday we were having lunch at La Bottega Marino, on the Westside. It is an intimate place, with small round marble-topped tables grouped close together, perfect for overhearing conversations. At a table in the corner two young women sat finishing their dessert while they waited for someone to arrive. “I’m having a ‘cakegasm,’” one of two announced happily to the waitress as the other excused herself to use the bathroom. The friend arrived, a young man. He spoke in a soft tone—a bedroom voice. The girl at the table started talking about the book she was reading, which she said was incredible. At that, naturally, my ears swiveled in her direction. “Don’t get me started on this book,” she warned the young man, “I won’t stop talking about it.” “I love reading,” the soft-voiced young man said. She couldn’t resist. Minutes later, she started describing what I quickly realized was The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand—the immensely long novel about a driven and unyielding architect named Howard Roark, based on a heroic Frank Lloyd Wright. I am reminded of the wickedly funny incident in Tobias Wolff’s Old School, in which Ayn Rand comes to the campus of the prep-school-aged protagonist. She sweeps in, [...] Read More »
Progress on the Book
The interior pages of the book have now been approved for printing. What remain to be approved are only the jacket and the sample of the foil stamping on the cover. We are almost there! What happens next? Well, the plant starts printing, of course. The plant can produce millions of books per month. But whenever I have visited Toppan Shenzhen, I have been astounded at how one book can take up so much space for a little while. The printed sheets come out of the machine and are stacked on pallets. Many pallets. Men and women–mostly women–in the light blue Toppan uniform drive forklifts around the factory, moving pallets. Sometimes they are just moved into the cavernous hallways in order to make room for other books. The same thing happens with the completed case stamping samples. They are stacked somewhere in uniform piles. Everything is coordinated. But it all seems a blur when you are there. When I have visited, and seen a book that Toppan Los Angeles was working on, it has always given me a thrill. I would love to see our book in the factory that I have worked with for so long, occupying pallets alongside [...] Read More »
Buckeye Book Fair
We have been invited to exhibit at the Buckeye Book Fair in Wooster, Ohio, on November 7, 2009. Please look for A Journey Through Literary America in the program for this all-day event! Ohio authors covered include Sherwood Anderson, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove, who are all from within spitting distance (as the crow flies) of Wooster. Read More »
Blue Highways
It is now August 12th. In less than two months, my wife and son and I will be hitting the road in a one-way Budget SUV rental, headed from Santa Monica, California to Boston, Massachusetts. It will be a reverse journey in terms of the history of American literature: the California coast that became a symbol of promise—of sunshine and well-defined noirish shadows—backwards through Salt Lake City—the location that Brigham Young declared was “the right place” for his band of followers in 1847, eastward over the Rockies, through the prairies and past the isohyetal line of rainfall that defines the American Desert, back through the settlements of farms and white houses of Illinois and Ohio. A stop along the way will be Cooperstown, New York, founded by the father of James Fenimore Cooper—once the greatest “painter” in words of the American landscape. Then we will pass through the Berkshires of Massachusetts (once home to Melville and Hawthorne) on the way to Boston and to Concord, where the first shots of the Revolutionary War had been fired, and the first blood spilled, before Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Alcott made it their home. As preparation, I have been reading a book I [...] Read More »
It's a wrap! (Except for the wrap)
Yesterday, we approved the last remaining proofs: a photograph of Leadville, Colorado, a photo of “The Last Good Country” from upper Michigan, The Wayside in Concord—home to many Concord luminaries—and a photo of Clyde, Ohio. Only one thing remains: a color correction to the jacket. The next stage, in the seemingly endless procession of approval, is to see plotter proofs. In the old days (like, ten years ago), when books were printed from film by exposing the film against a chemically treated metal plate, plotter proofs were known as bluelines or blueprints or ozalids. Please don’t ask me where the terms ozalids or plotter proofs came from. They belong to the obscure and strange and often rather unpoetic bevy of terms printers use. (The list of terms also includes a number of words that have quite different meanings in everyday life. For instance, in printing, a signature is a sheet, printed on both sides, containing a section of pages. Our book, for instance, will be printed in 16 page signatures. Another such term is imposition: the arrangement of pages into signature order). The plotter proofs will be arranged in signatures. And the main purpose for checking them is to ensure [...] Read More »
The Notion of the Book
The idea for A Journey Through Literary America came to me in January of 2008 in Kawasaki, Japan (near Tokyo), where I was visiting my wife’s family. On the plane on the way over, I had devoured American Pastoral by Philip Roth. The book is narrated by one of Roth’s literary alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman, but it mostly concerns itself with the life of someone he grew up worshiping: one of the greatest athletes that Zuckerman’s Jewish Newark neighborhood of Weequahic had ever known: “Swede” Levov. So named because he looked so Swedish rather than Jewish, the Swede had married a Miss New Jersey (Catholic, much to the horror of his parents) and waved goodbye to a promising baseball career in order to take over his father’s glove factory in Newark. Weequahic is not only Nathan Zuckerman’s stomping ground but also the neighborhood where Philip Roth grew up. One might use the term “predominantly Jewish” nowadays for how it was, in order to be respectful of other races that might have lived there, but back then I am sure it was known simply as the Jewish neighborhood. That is, solidly, squarely, any way you slice it—like a Snickers bar is packed [...] Read More »
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