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 ringleader was the red haired Cristina, who spoke broken English so quick and colorful that she had a fluency all her own. Then there was Jeronimo (pronounced “Heronimo”). He bore little resemblance to the Indian warrior. Mild mannered, but insistent, he was a photographer, gardener, and artist, and friend of Cristina. Ximena, (whose mother happens to be a famous photographer of the Luchadors – the famous masked Mexican wrestlers of Lucha Libre) had been called in for her production and design expertise. And also, it seems, for her calm under fire. Ximena had plenty of passion for the project. But it didn’t, as in Cristina’s case, display itself in a shower of sparks. Ximena’s intensity was almost like a dispassion; I never saw her raise her voice or even deviate much from her charming though strident tone (in Mexico the two adjectives are not mutually exclusive). The three of them were young, bright, talented, international.          

The project arose out of a dream Cristina had had about making a book. Her dream about a book took the form of a dictionary after someone in the group came up with the title. Sparks flew. In a short time, the group (there were many other key participants besides the three I have mentioned, all of them young) settled on hundreds of words. “Before such a quantity of fortuitous and aleatory information,” Cristina wrote in her introduction, “the free and playful association of ideas and images found in Mexico City became the ideal motor [for the dictionary venture].” She went on: “The book is a collective exercise to discover and try to understand the sundry affection that this city inspires in its most mysterious, intimate, and devoted aspects.”

ABCDF carton, with lens

Toppan Printing Company became part of the venture because we had printed, and still do, many books for the Mexican market. Mexican publishers often produce books with higher production values (finer cloth, paper, and often artwork) than American publishers. Many Mexican art books are sponsored by big companies in Mexico, which give a portion of the books away at Christmas. The books are usually on a patriotic theme, whether it be flora and fauna of Mexico, or crafts, or other products. Not only do the sponsors demand the best but the designers seem to have been raised to demand the very best, too. In this way, Mexico is very different from the United States, where unit price is such a big issue and few big companies sponsor books.       

It also seems nearly all of the designers and publishers in Mexico City know each other or are only a few degrees of separation removed. Coincidentally or not, nearly all of them have some European heritage. We had been recommended to The Control Bureau by a publisher, and bibliophile, who, at the time, printed all of his art books at our plant in Tokyo—one of the elite printing plants in the world. At the time, when the exchange rate was more favorable than it is now, it was also pretty reasonable to print there—if you wanted the very best quality that could be afforded.                                                  

I had no idea what I was in for. The thousand-page book became a 1,500 page book. The quantity became 15,000 copies. Not only that: the Control Bureau wanted a cover that was like red velvet, a carton with a handle, a lens that had an image on it that moved (a flip lens, or lenticular lens). They wanted a CD. They wanted a clear plastic jacket for some copies. They wanted three bookmark ribbons. They wanted the finest paper, but thin. They were asking for the moon. But such a fact never made them blink. It was, after all, a dream project.

Blind stamping on the velvet cover. 3 bookmarks...

Remarkably, every time I forwarded these seemingly impossible requests to Tokyo (the schedule was another issue, as were the many background colors that needed to be reproduced, nearly exactly, in the book), Toppan Tokyo came back with a solution.                                                                                                 

At the time, I was carrying on a clandestine romance with the young woman in Tokyo who handled the projects of Toppan Los Angeles (we felt sure that revealing the relationship would either break some rule or protocol, so we told no one). Her mentor was a Mr. Takahashi—hard drinking, hard working, of limited English vocabulary. Mr. Takahashi helped her negotiate that man’s world of printing, and she did a fine job of negotiating it herself. The book grew in size and cost but she, and the shadowy behind-the-scenes figure of Takahashi San, never lost control.                                                                          

It is somewhat hard to describe what is contained in the book. I always say it is a picture dictionary. But that never seems to get the point across. DICTIONARY ABCDF concerns itself with things that appeared in everyday Mexico City. Things that, if you grew up there, would seem absolutely familiar and if you grew up in the United States, for example would seem utterly foreign—like the way the trees trunks are painted white from the ground to about a meter high, or the way that tortillas are made by machine. There is a page full of Mexico City manhole covers, a page full of the Volkswagen vehicles that preceded the Volkswagen bus—called Combis. There are many photos of Volkswagen bugs which were, at that time, still being manufactured in Mexico and were still the mainstays of the unsanctioned taxi fleets in Mexico City. There are 5 pages worth of mobiliano—or furniture. Looking at it now, I realize how even the plastic furniture in Mexico has a certain look that it doesn’t have here. ABCDF contains a glossary at the back that gives the meanings of the words ands pictures in Spanish and in English.                          

I had been to Mexico City once, before the book, and I had taken away the (shallow and ultimately wrong) impression that it was kind of like Los Angeles: sprawled out, with many low-slung buildings, bright colors. There were a lot of carts selling juice—or jugo, just as there are in Los Angeles. There were streets full of jacaranda trees, with that strong blue-purple hue that seems so perfect to me. The first time I am in a big city, most of it winds up being a blur. And Mexico City was no exception, especially since, on the advice of our clients in Mexico City, my boss at the time and I had hired a car and driver so as to avoid being kidnapped or mugged or murdered. We saw the city from the back seat of a black Lincoln Continental.                                            

 I went to Mexico City for the second time in my life for ABCDF. And this time, the city was alive to me because of the images I had seen in the book. (The electric feeling of the city was immeasurably enhanced by the fact that Rika, the clandestine girlfriend who I am now married to, was also sent from Tokyo to Mexico City for the purpose of picking up an urgent batch of proofs). That second trip, I kept seeing things that were in the book: a chain of stores named “Suburbia”, the fire breathers who performed by blowing flames out of their mouths at the stop lights, the brooms that were made of real branches and looked like witches’ brooms. Rika and I stayed in the Zona Rosa, a somewhat dubious tourist zone. But we spent 95% of our waking hours at the Control Bureau.                  

Volcanoes: I had hardly noticed the volcanoes that surround Mexico City the first time I went. That second time I noticed them. They seem to be the reference points that the city dwellers mark their existence by—much like Mount Fuji in Japan. The entry for volcanoes in ABC DF includes a poem:

Visión de los Volcanes

But there are days when a breath                                                                          

throws open our windows                                                                                        

 blows down the clothes hung out on skyscrapers                                              

  lifts winged cottons                                                                                                  

 white snakes                                                                                                                    

 and denudes a breast that lifts up                                                                                 

its point of light                                                                                                              

and its congealed lump of milk.                                                                               

Today is not yesterday                                                                                                     

yet the volcanoes still astonish us.

- José Ángel Leya, 

The more you probe in ABCDF the more you find. The opportunity remains for some travel writer to do a piece on exploring The Distrito Federal with the ABCDF as guidebook (after all, it even comes with a carrying case). I was fascinated by the Xólotl, or tiger salamander. “Not content with creating a being that resembles a small monster,” the entry reads, “…Mother Nature gave it another two features that turned it into an enigmatic, almost magical being: it is able to regenerate its nervous system, retina, heart, or cerebellum. At the same time, the tiger salamander can be said to be the Dorian Gray of animals: it is one of the few amphibians that does not metamorphose. It reaches adulthood without altering its youthful shape, a phenomenon known as neoteny.”  

Xólotl

The X’s, though few, are rewarding. Also in that section is Xochimilco (which I never in a million years could have figured out how to pronounce), a remnant of the lake and canal network of the ancient civilization around Mexico City. The valley where Mexico City currently stands was once full of lakes. Settlements were built on those shallow lakes in the form of islands, and canals became the byways. The city of Tenochtitlán was built on an island on the western shore of Lake Texcoco. Seeing the massive lake city for the first time, the soldiers accompanying Hernando Cortez wondered if they were dreaming. As Diego Rivera’s murals in the Palacio National, on the east size of the Zócalo (which also has an entry in ABC DF) show, the unearthly city of Tenochtitlán fell under the heels of conquerors. The canals were filled in. The city became known as Mexico City. As for Xochimilco, it is the last remnant of the original lakes—and one of the last habitats of the Xólotl.

Detail of Rivera's mural

Xochimilco

I went to Mexico City twice for the dictionary. Each time, I went expecting that there would be some friction between members of the team, especially as the stakes rose when the job neared its completion. When I mentioned such a concern to Ximena, she just laughed. And she was right to laugh it off. Never was there heard a discouraging word in my presence at least. The headquarters of the Control Bureau was in a building—perhaps a former carriage house or servants’ quarters—within the walled yard of a substantial house in Coyoacán—a district of Mexico City (in fact, I am currently halfway through reading The Savage Detectives—a book saturated with the love of reading and writing by Roberto Bolano. Much of the beginning of that book takes place on a similar property in Coyoacán—making it easy for me to imagine being there). Rika and I and the Control Bureau team ate one meal of molé, and other traditional Mexican dishes, in the main house. Back in the Control Bureau, things hummed with energy and purpose, and harmony. Music was always playing. I heard some beautiful Mexican guitar music, ineffably sad, that I have regretted a thousand times I didn’t ask for a copy of. It seemed both completely natural and entirely dubious that such a huge project was being orchestrated under our noses. Even harder for me to believe was that the dozens of artists who contributed art to the book did so at no cost. I cannot imagine artists volunteering their work in such great volume in a city in the United States.                                                                                                  

The editors shut the DICTIONARY ABCDF off at 1500 pages, which was pretty much its physical limit. Of that boundary, boundless Cristina said in her introduction: “Nevertheless we are still obsessed by the multiple allusions that we find every day.” I know how it is. Once one is on to something, it is hard to turn the spigot off. But wisely, she did.                                                            

The book, when it appeared, was a magnificent as it had been conceived to be. I don’t think more than a handful of printers in the world could have pulled off what Rika and Mr. Takahashi and the rest of Toppan Tokyo did. We even made the flip lens for the carton (images of the volcanoes), using Toppan’s proprietary lens technology, in our own factory. The book was monstrously heavy, and yet bound so well that it seemed as solid as a new Volkswagen bug. The book caused what could accurately be called a stir in Mexico City. An exhibition was organized at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Proceeds from the sale of the book were donated to a fund to help street children. It truly was an influential work. It even made it into Phaidon’s The Photobook 2 as one of the best photo books of all time.

What did I take away from the experience that had a bearing on A Journey Through Literary America? Simple:

1)    The notion that one could have a dream for a book, assemble some friends, and carry it out.

2)    I had the opportunity to witness, in another country and context, the power of the meaning of place.

On the second to last page of the remarkable dictionary there is a litany of numbers–a Harper’s-like list–that I had never noticed until today. Among its revelations:

35,907 hours were spent

569,750 kilometers were traveled

22,335 images were examined to select the material, of which 1,556 were chosen

3,120 cups of coffee were imbibed

2,520 packs of cigarettes were consumed

4,600 tortillas were consumed

169 friendships were gained, and none were lost.

As time has gone on, this last statistic has had to be revised, I fear. (I speak from personal experience). One wishes sometimes for a neoteny of friendship. It is as painful to lose some friends as it is to lose one’s youth. But I will never forget those heady times, nor the lessons I learned, nor the solidarity of all of us who were working towards such a magnificent goal. TRH

“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.

Mistress of the Universe, Ms. Rand

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, adorned with a pin in the shape of a dollar sign, with a coterie of followers. She sneers at the protagonist for sneezing. She cites the greatest works America has produced as being her two books (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) and the works of Mickey Spillane (who runs a distant third place). Rand exits with a superior and sardonic air, just as she swept in. After her visit, the protagonist does not feel the same about Ayn Rand. The spell has been broken.

Rand, perhaps perturbed by a second rater

Rand espoused the virtue of selfishness, which she termed “the morality of rational self-interest.” Tied, as the theory was, to stunningly attractive supermen and women, with have scoundrels that are truly contemptible arrayed against them, it was a blast of ideas. Lacking in money, and feeling that my talents were unappreciated in a world that too easily accepted mediocrity, I bought into it myself at about the same age as the young woman in the Bottega.To believe oneself a superman, even or 600 quickly-read pages, is to lessen the sting of poverty and hunger, especially if one can feel scorn for the “second-raters,” with their soft layers of flab, who always seem positioned above you, through no virtue of their own.

I remained somewhat in thrall to the uncompromising Rand—at least her fabulous portrayal of the virtues of the “purpose-driven” life—until I was laughed at by my mentor, Elisa Fitzgerald, at the start of my tenure at Vermont Magazine. On my resume, I’d let on I was part of The Objectivist Club (Rand’s philosophy) at the university I had just graduated from. Okay, so I didn’t have much to pad the resume with. I don’t think Rand helped me get the job. 

Just as Harry Potter has been an entry point into reading for many children, I think the tomes of Ayn Rand, which seem impossibly lengthy at first, encourage readers at a certain age, and a certain level of suggestibility, to take on more challenging works. One finishes the Rand books in a surge, wanting to read more, hungry for ideas.

And then…shades of the working world start to close around the working stiff. Time for reading becomes a luxury. And after high school or college we slowly start setting about forgetting most of what we learned. That is why it is so important to read as much as one can in those high school and college years, when the mind is a field ready to be sown.

The trick is simply to get A Journey Through Literary America into the hands of that little group at the Bottega. The blond woman had just had the literary equivalent of a cakegasm. The young man sounded just as enthusiastic as she. The doors to their reading habits are standing open. TRH

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 other books, labeled with some Chinese characters that are a translation of the concept of “A Journey Through Literary America.” It would be something to see our printed sheets being driven around by a woman with a kerchief on her head, sitting “sidesaddle” on a forklift, completely oblivious (probably) about the subject of the book she is shuttling around.   

Now that it has been given the green light for printing, our book will disappear beyond our reach for a while. When reading the latter half of William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, I was reminded of the book’s current status in his description of the Snake River:

“A few miles south of the highway, the Snake River came out of five-thousand-foot-deep Hells Canyon, a place as inaccessible as any in the country. North of the road, the river, called by the voyageurs La Maudite Riviére Enragée, “The Accursed Mad River,” went back into a canyon two thousand miles deep and almost as inaccessible. It was as if the Snake, which travels such difficult terrain that explorers proved its true source only in 1970, crawled from underground to see sky before disappearing again.” (p. 244)

Our book will resurface long enough for us to check the printed sheets, and then disappear again until the book is completed. We cannot do much more to affect the outcome of the book now. It’s up to the skill and dedication of the Toppan Shenzhen pressmen and bindery. TRH

As preparation, I have been reading a book I once read in paperback, in my teens: Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon, copyright 1982. Least Heat Moon, half Native American (they were called Indians in those days), leans against a cane on the back jacket of the 9^th printing that I borrowed from the library, a short-looking man with a thick head of hair, a pair of suspenders, and a soulful look in his level gaze. If I am right about his stature, it probably served him well for the long journey he took. After losing his job and, to some degree, his wife, he got in a van he named “Ghost Dancing” and drove around the country, sleeping in the van most nights.

“Bust” of William Least Heat Moon

William Least Heat Moon he explained the source of the book’s title thus:

“On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back rods blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose itself.”

 

Detail of 1960 road map, with blue highways.

The above passage is typical of Blue Highways. Well-wr0ught, with a sense of rhythm and depth that suggest miles on the highway spent working out the sentences. Least Heat Moon’s observations, I am pleased to say, remain as trenchant as they did when I first read them.

This is the cover of the bestselling paperback I read in my youth

The text has aged well. Sadly, I bet 90% to 95% of the people he profiled along the road—venerable American men and women who were denizens of the blue highways—have passed away.

The atlas I have been consulting for our own travels is “The Mapquest Atlas,” copyright MMIIV, it says (a Roman numeral which doesn’t exist, I think) which I got for free with a book club offer. It is from back in the days when Mapquest was in its ascendancy and Google was perhaps nothing yet but a twinkle in is founders’ eyes. I felt bad obtaining it, with its jaunty Mapquest logo, even though it was free. Road atlases, it seemed to me, were the proper domain of Rand McNally. In my Mapquest atlas, the interstates are blue, with narrow white lines in the middle like a digestive tract, and the blue highways of the past are red or orange or nonexistent. Even when he made his jaunt, it seems like half the towns he visited out of curiosity, towns such as Liberty Bond or Moonax, Oregon, had already vanished from anything but his map. Towns like Nameless, Tennessee had ninety residents and a general store. Nameless has not been effaced. I can call it up on Google maps. The so-called”street view,” shows a bend in the road and the driveway of an unidentified house which seems to be in some other township though.

Blue Highways is great for stirring the traveling blood. And it is useful for travel tips, though I don’t know how well the following one has aged: according to the author, the best kinds of cafe are the ones with the most calendars.

No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop.

One calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey.

Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present.

Three calendars: Can’t miss on the farm-boy breakfast.

Four calendars: try the ho-made pie too.

Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they’ll franchise.

Unfortunately, that is one my little family may have difficulty putting to the test. With an eighteen month-old son, and a limited window of time, we’ll need to keep mostly to the interstates, which generally preclude eating establishments of an original nature. But it is a trip, and a trip all the way across the country, and nothing can take away the epic nature of that.

Book Update: due to a paginating error, what I thought would be a rubber stamp of approval on the plotter proofs turned into another wait for a new set of plotter proofs to be made. I won’t belabor the details of what exactly happened. The lesson learned is that not everything in printing can be anticipated, not even if one has been in the business for over a decade. Tune in again in a few days and I hope you will read that A Journey Through Literary America has gone to press.

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 that all of the pages were put together in the proper order. It is the final opportunity to check the content of the book before giving the approval to print (at which point, everything is quickly water under the dam).

In my twelve, going on thirteen, years of shepherding books through the production process, I have had several clients who hit a snag at this point. I believe one can develop an emotional attachment to the unfinished work. One can resist letting it go out into the imperfect world, where it too will be found to have some flaws. I think some expectant mothers might feel this way, too. We have gotten to this stage for some books and been presented with changes to nearly every page. (Sometimes, on the other hand, I wish people had checked the plotter proofs MORE carefully).

Of course, other expectant mothers can, by this point, the “ninth month” of our 2 ½ year process, just want to push the damn thing out. And by this point, I think I side with them. I hope I will not be sheepishly admitting next week that I made six dozen changes to the plotter proofs.

Haptics – I first heard this term (just yesterday, in fact) from Doyald Young, who cited Hermann Zapf’s use of it. It comes from a Greek word meaning: “I fasten onto, I touch.” Zapf has used it to describe the tactile pleasure one takes in the whole sensory impact of a printed book. I took one step to deepen the haptics of A Journey Through Literary America today. I asked the plant if they could make the jacket with a “French fold.” A French fold jacket is folded inward at the top and bottom of the book, so it is (at the risk of making it sound like a Glad trash bag) “two ply.” I’ve always considered it the quintessence of luxury.  TRH

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.

The Roth house (second from the left). Photo: Thomas Hummel

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 with peanuts—Jewish. That was then. Nowadays, the neighborhood is quite mixed.

Photo: Thomas Hummel

There is a plaque on the house Roth grew up in, and a nearby intersection is named “Philip Roth Plaza,” The term seems misleading to me. I usually think of a plaza as a place to gather. I wouldn’t recommend gathering in the middle of a Newark intersection.

It is proper of Newark to honor Roth with at least an intersection, because some of his best writing is about Newark, starting with Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)—the novel that made him a household name and suggested a heretofore unheard-of (in literature anyway) use of liver for a sex-crazed boy. American Pastoral (1997) features vivid descriptions of Newark, from World War II through the Newark Riots in the 1960’s, and beyond. It sparked something in me back in 2008. I remember, for example, marking the passage where Roth writes about the Newark viaduct, “the Swede’s first encounter with the manmade sublime that divides and dwarfs. (American Pastoral, 220).” As Roth went on to say:

“That grim fortification was the city’s Chinese wall, brownstone boulders piled twenty feet high, strung out for more than a mile and intersected only by half a dozen foul underpasses. Along this forsaken street, as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America, was a reptilian length of unguarded wall barren even of graffiti. But for the wilted weeds that managed to put forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed away, the viaduct wall was barren of everything except the affirmation of a weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its ugliness.” (p. 219)

Photo: Thomas Hummel

What was so special about American Pastoral that it lit the fuse for a book? I think Roth did it for me by the way he attached importance to surroundings. In one passage he writes:

“Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surfaces of things.” (p. 43).

As Samuel Johnson once said, “The true art of memory is the art of attention.” And what Roth created—and sold me on—was a truly artful job of memory and art. Through a preponderance of evidence, real and imagined, he brought the particular character of the city of Newark to life on the printed page.

After reading American Pastoral, I wanted to go to Newark with my brother, who lives in New York City and is always up for poking around a down-at-the-mouth area, and photograph the Viaduct. Put images to Philip Roth’s text. Part of the spark, then, came because I felt sure that the Viaduct was still there, and as Roth had described it. If I had to follow the river of this book’s inspiration all the way to its headwaters, this would be it: the little spring at which it all started was the idea of capturing places in pictures that great authors have described.

My original intent was to write text that was more like what you would find in a guidebook. Lively, yes, but mostly spare and functional. A side dish. And then what happened is that fervor of the writers gripped me. A side dish wasn’t good enough. I needed to do them justice, as much as I could. And at times, I felt as though I were competing with them. I did so with a pure pleasure in the sport of it, as I might get from leaping to catch a baseball, or a running down a fly ball.

I sometimes think that in 2007 I was inching my way towards an early senescence. I got tremendously tired at night. There was hardly a movie that I didn’t fall asleep in the middle of. I still had the lifelong desire to write but the novel I was working on sometimes put me to sleep while writing it. That fog has now lifted. Willa Cather once claimed that in order to write well she had to “get up feeling 13 years old and all set for a picnic.” Since I started working on A Journey Through Literary America, I have gotten up feeling, well, not that good but with a relish for life and for writing that I think must be akin to what Cather felt. TRH

Author’s note: capturing the Viaduct the way that Roth described it turned out to be nearly impossible—for me anyway. Tamra Dempsey, who took all the photographs for this book, had more success than I. But the best picture of it that I have seen remains the picture of it that Roth created, using words, in his book.

Today we uploaded the files for the jacket and the endsheets. The only element that hasn’t been sent off to Toppan Printing is the layout for the foil stamping on the spine of the book. After two years and seven months of inspiration, travel, and toil, A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA is on the verge of being fully realized. Only a slight sliver of foil remains.

We have seen first and second proofs for the main part of the book. These are called “press proofs” or sometimes “wet proofs.” They are printed on the same paper that the book will eventually be printed on (Japanese Oji White A Matte), on proofing presses that aren’t as large as the behemoths that will print the book, but are still quite formidable pieces of equipment. So, what I am actually holding in my hand is about as good a facsimile of how the book will look when it is finally printed as one could get. Sadly, press proofs are on their way to becoming an obsolete technology, to be replaced by digital proofs.

It still seems like magic to me how, using the bright inks of cyan, magenta and yellow—in shades which seem the opposite of “rich”—combined with black, the printer can reproduce anything from Monet to Manuel Alvarez Bravo—and everything in between and besides. There is artistry, often overlooked, involved in the separation of the colors to CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). More about that later, perhaps. What I should say now is that the proofs are looking very fine. I do not believe I am saying this as a father would say he loves his son. For in the 12 years I have been working at Toppan I believe I have overseen close to one thousand projects, and I believe I have attained a level of objective distance, professional detachment—enough perspective to look coolly on in judgment. I look at these proofs and the quality of the reproduction of the images—and the proofing—looks first rate. I owe it all to photographer and designer Tamra Dempsey and to Bright Arts colour separation house in Hong Kong.

Now we just waiting to see a few dangling elements: the long awaited map, and the front matter and back matter. The front matter includes the title page, half-title page. copyright page, preface, and table of contents. All of these things I knew about but I was always fuzzy on until the wheel turned and it was my own book. The back matter includes the map, the footnotes, and endnotes, a few odds and ends. My father was an English teacher at Rice High School in Burlington, Vermont for over thirty years. He taught term paper writing by the book, with index cards, outlines, footnotes and bibliographies, and trips to the University of Vermont library (which seemed immense at the time) to do research. There was no way that this book, my first, would go without endnotes and a bibliography—compelling evidence of a well-researched work. In fact, at last count, it had 388 endnotes. They are unobtrusive. Just like the two extra buttons a shirtmaker sews on a dress shirt below all the others. There if you need them. Don’t let the endnotes throw you; A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA is not written in the prose of high academia. It is a book about the lives of some of the most interesting people who ever walked the American earth – America’s writers – and the places that inspired them, with over 140 photographs, and hand drawn maps by Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner. The book would appeal to anyone from a perspicacious high school student on up.

I am not sure if it was the best idea to start this blog “in the middle of things.” But perhaps this brings you closer to the (measured) excitement I feel than if I had anesthetized you first with relentless verbiage (the term has always made me think that was what rabbits would eat, if they ate words) about the book, its origins, purpose, etc.