We're going to Hollywood!

photo credit Los Angeles Public Library

Effective June 1, Stephanie Gibbs Bookbinding is thrilled to announce the new studio location, right on Hollywood Boulevard. Directly above a used book shop, a stone's throw from cocktails and coffee, and, of course, on the Walk of Stars.

Do come visit! (Please call or email first!)
(213) 223-6921
stephaniegibbs@gmail.com
6646 Hollywood Boulevard Ste 206, Hollywood, CA 90028

 

upcoming talk -- April 17!

Join me at BookArtsLA, in West Hollywood, for a free lecture on Sunday evening, April 17, at 6.30.

Here's the text from the press release:

Loving Old Books: An Evening Talk with Stephanie Gibbs

Stephanie Gibbs is a conservator, book enthusiast, expert about vellum, historical bibles, leather bindings. and much more. Stephanie will talk about the care and special considerations for old books.

Stephanie is currently Bookbinder-In-Residence at the International Museum of Printing in Carson, CA, and operates her private bookbinding and conservation practice out of the Book Arts Annex.

Put Another Way:

Let's find an interesting way to look at and talk about my work in book conservation! The goal of the evening is to have a good time and for everyone to stay awake, even if the combination of powerpoint and old books might be, in other circumstances, soporific.

 

year of the monkey

New Year's Eve Fireworks
Los Angeles Public Library Photo Archive

2016 : The Year of the Monkey
And postal deliveries were a bit funky
Empty envelopes in mailboxes across this fair land
Missing holiday flipbooks (made by hand)
If yours didn’t arrive, do write me a note
A replacement will be sent, be you near or remote.

the somersault holiday edition

It has been an autumn of palm trees, oceans, and museums. Thankfully, the museums have palm trees, so there hasn't been much of a need to choose between these focal points.

Then the holiday season arrived, and, with it, lights on palm trees. I was deeply amused.

The discovery of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Archives led to the parallel discovery that lights-on-palm-trees goes back at least to the thirties:

As do any number of other jolly holiday traditions:

Meanwhile, I also discovered the French National Library Archives, except, being French, they call it Bibliothèque nationale de France, and all of the databases are listed and indexed in French. I neither speak nor read French. However, there were illustrated comic books! With build-it-yourself-flip-books! My ignorance of French was not about to stand in my way of antique flip-books.

So, combining an Ansel Adams Christmas Show ("Santa's Circus") from Los Angeles, with a somersaulting top-hatted acrobat from France, the holiday edition 2015-2016 came to be.

The pages were reformatted, cleaned, and laid out in Photoshop and InDesign, and printed commercially. This was a larger edition than in years past, encompassing recipients from both sides of the Atlantic and stretching across to the Pacific, so I used more industrial equipment, as well. It was a good excuse to learn how to use a Challenge paper cutter (without losing a finger) and a drill press (likewise).

Each page was cut down to strips, then each strip separated into frames.

Booklets were then collated, and sewing holes drilled.

It became apparent that a blank spine was simply a spine waiting for its next shining opportunity:

 

The booklets were sewn into their folded wrappers:

 

And somersaulted into the world, carried by USPS circus stamps. Happy new year!

Commencements

An Odyssey.
An Arrival.
A Conclusion.

A Beginning.

we did this

Directions from Easthampton, MA to Los Angeles, CA
Walking directions: 3,107 miles; 1,016 hours.

We took a truck.

An Odyssey

An Odyssey

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.  -- JFK

Use caution - may involve errors or sections not suited for walking.

These directions are for planning purposes only.

You must obey all signs or notices regarding your route.

The adventure begins.

fugit inreparabile tempus

just like that, the weather changes

To travel faster than the speed of light is to travel forward in time. Hypothetically and theoretically, tachyons are able to do this, as they have an imaginary mass (the square root of minus one:  √−1 ), but tachyons in all likelihood aren't a thing. The rest of us travel forward in time at exactly the speed of whatever time is.

Einstein's special theory of relativity states that a finite speed of light protects us from time travel: without it, we could wander around in time essentially the same way we can wander around in space. This protects the past from the future; it's up to us to protect our future from the past.

stat sua cuique dies

all math and facts in this post are directly attributable to Prof. Brian Cox, The Infinite Monkey Cage (Series 12, episode Speed) 

(all errors are my own)
both photos credit KGG

riding the rails (redux)

what to listen to: the memory palace episode 38
 ----------------------
We seem to be experiencing a sibling-transport parallel.
Two brothers, automobiles and trains.
The next in the series must be planes and ships, for the sisters.
 ----------------------
The entire book is constructed from postcards: the slipcase, the cover, the pages.

The Registry sends postcards as license renewal reminders.

Yes, my first thought upon receiving this notice was "re-purpose!"
My second thought was: "Do I or do I not keep my current photo?" (undecided)

cover postcard: reproduction from Historic Northampton

explanatory text, since that's my thing

cards hinged into sections

sewn on a concertina, since postcards lack flexibility

image: engineer at his retirement party

Shelburne Falls is a tiny village populated by artists, old-school Yankees, and escapees from New York City. There’s a range of galleries, cafes, and bookshops, and a reserved parking spot in front of the coffee shop for the police. The upstairs of the Town Hall shows old movies every month, and there is a candlepin bowling alley with two lanes and a small bar. The downtown is two blocks long.

I was there most recently in May 2015, and found myself, for the first time, in town at the same time the Trolley Museum was open (Saturdays, 11 am to 3 pm). So I went in, and discovered this array of vintage postcards. From the numbers stamped on the backs, they were apparently the “master stock” of cards that could be ordered for sale. From the range of locations of the images, my guess is that they were photographs taken by one of the engineers as he traveled throughout the region. The staff were somewhat shocked when I purchased so much of the stock, but these are some of the best railroad photographs I’ve seen.

riding the rails (full story)

Many things never to be seen again have passed by these windows, shaking in the shadows cast by box cars, passenger cars, the links on the train speeding past the back of the building. This is the room beloved by small boys and avoided by responsible grown-ups, a room which is one step away from running away and joining the circus or hopping the next train out of town and exploring the unknown secret paths and worlds linked by the railway.

Unmapped from village to village, it speeds indifferently past swamp and forest, subdivision and slum, city and field. Die-hard enthusiasts chart times and locations in their little black notebooks, waiting expectantly for the 10.39 southbound from Chicago or the 2.23 west to Phoenix.

Today's rumor holds that the trains will be stopping, no longer serving the mysterious depots linked by these very tracks beyond the building. Soon it will be deconstructed into a bike trail, with only the memory of the concept of train, the mysterious smokiness of a midnight escape into a parallel world. Soon there will be no more fantasies about forbidden worlds; there will only remain the well-lit perambulations of the mothers with prams.

What will this world resemble, the day time world bleached of the mystery of the midnight rattling train? Where do the people in that other universe of mottled greys sleep, eat, shop; where are their friends, families; what are their entertainments? Is it too late now to learn how to ride the boxcars, hitch a ride with an indeterminate destination and an ever-changing route? To find the rhythms of the unseen never-nine-to-five?

This is the life that has been pitched as sordid, dark, dirty. The hobos always slightly hungry and completely drunk, at least in those times when they aren't slightly drunk and completely hungry. Hot water showers, feather pillows, regular laundry service are the sacrifices from the daytime world to ... to ... to ... a land from where only the most subjective stories escape.

A world of tramps, beggars, prostitutes, drugs, alcohol, disease, theft. A world of communal brotherly love free from middle class consumption expectations; a world of secret meaning and unspoken codes, Boy Scouts who never returned from a camping trip, but loaded the pup tents and propane stoves into the badge encrusted backpacks and took their skills with flint to a new land of opportunity. A world of half-crazy social rejects who should be in institutions, but wandered off the sanatorium grounds or were discharged when insurance ran out or escaped from family arrangements to disappear into a netherworld, a place that may or may not make more daily logical sense than the outward tokens of the civilized world.

Into this sea of shadows and half-recognized personalities and fragments of lives left behind or lives unlived, the sorrow of broken dreams, the anguish of broken families, the misery of broken hearts. The decay of dirty laundry, dirty skin, dirty rails, dirty boxcars, dirty camps. The freedom from news stories, stock reports, traffic jams, florescent lighting, cubicles, mundane repetitions, alarm clocks, insurance claims. The freedom from studying maps and analyzing outlooks and making deadlines and of creating a sense of urgent importance.

This is why small boys sit in this room and wave to conductors, eagerly wait, quietly, for the roar and shake of the train passing by, Union Pacific or Santa Fe or Northern or even Amtrak echoing down a secret hallway. The boys recognize their futures proscribed in the schoolroom, a future of straight lines and rows of uncomfortable chairs and too small desks set at the wrong angle; a future of twenty minute lunches in sanitized cafeterias that smell of grease and Clorox; a future of badly fitting business casual and early male pattern baldness; and these boys know that is not for them.

For them are the day long escapes into neighborhood-wide hide and seek, the forts behind abandoned houses or in the trees behind cemeteries, the gangs of roving youths with handshakes and coded language to separate friend from foe. The boys are enthralled not with the love of being irresponsible -- they are not Peter Pans shirking duty -- rather, they are in love with the grey areas, the figures moving in the shadows cast by the trees, the half-seen, half-heard, half-fabled world that they can almost grasp: but when the hold is too tight, the shadows slip between the cracks of the fingers, and are lost to the demands of sharpened number two pencils and math homework and mowing the lawn and younger brothers who refuse to go back where they came from, because the shattering noises of the tag-along scares away the shadows.

Always carry a pocket knife. Always waterproof matches. Know how to knot, how to signal with a mirror, how to bind a broken bone or build a tourniquet. Know how to absolve responsibility and how to avoid entrapment. Know how to escape a fight and how to break a nose. Know how to shoot to kill, how to shoot to maim, how to skin a squirrel.

These boys no longer have career days at school that allow for the occupations of Johnny Appleseed and Davy Crockett; the grand colonial explorations and exploitations of the empire have ended; space is not the final frontier, it is a box of gravity-free tedium, and bad food and bladder issues. The only modern route for an explorer is to disappear into the cracks of the uncharted lands of civilization, to fall between the rails. To follow in the footsteps of thieves, bandits, petty criminals, murderers, the criminally insane, the physically unusual, and disappear into the smoke and mirrors beyond dry cleaned shirts and fortnightly spreadsheets.

The boys wear their blue-striped hats and their overalls, and in the dirt behind the shed they practice hobo signs. These might not be the hobo signs in use by that transient mass, but they practice scratching, hiding, recognizing, discovering, honing attention for the days when attention is crucial. Not for the seven times table or the correct spelling of scissors -- but for the express or the local, the northern or southern, the friendly conductor or the aggressive enforcer. They would have built ships, carved canoes, discovered canyons and dinosaurs and the secret unseen lives of the others, but all they hope for now is to disappear.

Now, though, the rail line is scheduled to disappear, a diminishing demand for freight, a lack of maintenance of the infrastructure, new engines too expensive and old cars too worn. Safety standards too strenuous, trade routes too altered, and everything automated for delivery tomorrow. Delivery yesterday.

So this train line will lie quiet at the end of the month, an exploratory team is already in negotiations to erase the link with the secret unseen world of the tracks and replace it with the sanitized acceptabilities of jogging bankers and cycling schoolteachers. The boys will no longer come to this room, paralyzed by the count of engines, box cars, coal cars, flat cars, caboose, struck dumb by the peek into a society they almost belong to. Once they could access the hidden potential of a full life straining at the bit to be grasped, to be experienced, but now the secret code is slipping away.

Without the trains, without the small boys, this room will lie empty and forsaken, until the building is renovated and this becomes the conference room, with patterned chairs in shades of mauve, and a stifling view of the daytime multiuse trail, a reminder during meetings that even leisure is productive. Where will the boys go? Where will the doors crack open into the secret society of unexplored options, the beckoning call of the might have been, the might become?

written Oct. 2, 08
dedicated to MJG

the meter was out of order

the meter was out of order ($1,326.50)

parking violations, towing receipts
recovered from a borrowed car

(photos from the full trip west to be published throughout March)