The EBM on Writing it Real

It has been quite some time since we've updated you about our Espresso Book Machine. Despite our silence, you can rest easy knowing that Tera, Queen of all things Print-On-Demand, has been busy busy these past few months keeping up with our growing publishing capabilities. She's been designing book covers for authors publishing through the EBM, educating customers about our new printing technology, and hunting down out-of-print books to bring back to life.

She has also taken the time to interview with Sheila Bender's Writing it Real. Sheila interviewed Tera about the Espresso Book Machine in much detail. I just spent the past few minutes reading it, and I can tell you that I have much more in-depth knowledge of publishing, options for self-published authors, and the future of small publishing.

Click over to the interview, it will be a few minutes well spent.

!Viva Poetry!

Five or six months ago a UW committee dreamed up the idea of an anthology of poems for their annual Common Book for incoming freshman—and they started with this poem: Philip Levine's What Work is.

"You know what work is—if you're old
enough to read this, you know what
work is, although you may not do it."

It's the perfect 'gateway poem' for non-poetry-readers, not to mention the anxious future job-seekers of America, which today's college students have become. The unriddling process of reading the poem allows us to experience the extra punch of the last line (I won't tell you, but, yes, it has to do with work).

This isn't the only way to write a good poem, as the other selections do their utmost to show. There's the dreamy romance and brutality of Mahmoud Darwish's Rita & the Gun, which begins and ends with:

"Between Rita & my eyes is a gun."

In this poem you can't exit with some life-changing insight--you're trapped in a fluid, circular universe saturated with an almost unworldly emotion. Darwish is a favorite of mine, a Palestinian who bore witness to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until his death in 2008. He vacillates between rabble-rousing political poems in his earlier years to the wistful soul-searching of the last decade.

Lynn Emanuel's The Politics of Narrative : Why I am a Poet is another provocative alternative, wavering between prose poem and manifesto.

"And I write for people, like myself, who are just tired of the trickle-down theory where somebody spends pages and pages on some fat book where everything including the draperies, which happened to be burnt orange, are described, and further, are some metaphor for something. And this whole boggy waste trickles down to the reader in the form of a little burp of feeling. God, I hate prose. I think the average reader likes ideas."

Whoa. What I like about this grotesque, funny diatribe is it reminds us to ask what we actually want out of a story, movie, poem, book: the conventional sameness with beginning, middle, and end or a visceral, instantaneous thrill or the pure, bald ideas themselves? It also manages to put some pressure on those who dismiss poetry over and over again before they read it, while giving a nod to those who do. Emanuel describes poetry readers this way:

"They pull their own weight."

In fact the whole collection is a solid defense of the genre. The perfect summation comes from UW Professor/Poet Richard Kenney, quoted in the introduction:

"People like poetry like people like music: nobody doesn't. If some think they don't, they just haven't listened to the right thing."

Touche. Yes, I'm happy all the freshman will be reading this, and their families and some other curious folk. It's not just about poetry, but about refusing to be cowed by what is challenging, unusual and smart.

- Tera

Meet the Bloggers

Hey blog readers! Today is Day 2 of our Meet the Bloggers series and we have the pleasure of hanging out with Tera Kelley...

Tera is our Esspresso Book Machine aficionado. She tinkers with tools, aligns pages, warms the glue pot, waits, and then starts all over again. Also, if you have any poetry questions, go to Tera.

What are 3 books that will always be on your bookshelf and why? 
Walden by Henry David Thoreau : a decade-long love affair with the New England gnome-man.

Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin : I'll never finish it.

Middlemarch by George Eliot : I have a soft spot for all things Eliot, especially Dorothea stumbling through the antiquities of Rome.

What are some creative ways the EBM could be used to self-publish?         I just figured out we can bind pre-printed pages—which means if you bring in color copies you can have a full color book!

What out of print book have you been really excited about the ability to print? 
I just found a Bicycling for Ladies book from 1896 with chapters on “Women and Tools” and “The Art of Wheeling.” The writer is truly sympathetic to the nervous ladies about to try out “an unaccustomed exercise.”

If you were stranded on a desert island with one book of poems, which would it be? 
Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems.

You can see all of Tera's posts here.

The Last Light Keeper

Eleven year old, Rachel Halmrast, has published her debut novel with our three-month-old publishing department, University Book Store Press. The Last Light Keeper swarms with dragons, pixies, clever young witches, and a notorious Black Sorcerer. There is a Crystal of Light that must be preserved at all costs, and a gifted young witch, Melissa, who has to do the job whether she likes it or not.

"She walked up to the front door and looked up at the huge knocker on it. It was shaped like a pine tree with the trunk for a handle. She fidgeted for a moment, twisting her necklace around her finger. Her mother had given it to her, right before she had disappeared. It was a small piece of crystal, which seemed always to have light in it, even now in the rain. It had wire wrapped around the middle, connecting it to the string. Melissa loved it. It made her feel like she always had a bit of her mother with her."

Congratulations to Rachel for publishing her first novel way ahead of the curve, and stay tuned for more publishing projects from Homer, our Espresso Book Machine.

Preschoolers -- The Wave of the Future

One of our latest publishing jobs on the Espresso Book Machine is a school project commemorating a special year at the Alki Co-op Preschool, continuing our trend of debuting young writers and illustrators (just wait till you hear about 11 year old Rachel!). But if you flip open to the dedication page of "To School, To School To Have Lots of Fun" by the Alki 4s, you'll find something cutting edge:


A color interior! How did that happen? Well it took some extra work from the woman who put it all together, Jennifer S. When she came in I duly informed her that none of the 25 Espresso Book Machines across the world (China, Egypt, North Dakota) could print anything but black and white interiors. However...


We can bind preprinted pages. We were able to put together a full color book dedicated to "Teacher Sara" when Jennifer brought in color pages ready to be glued and bound with a Homer-generated cover. We'd like to get the process streamlined in the future--but for now if you want a splashy illustrated work, shoot us an email at ubs_publish@earthlink.net and we'll see what we can do for you.

- Tera

Ink Blot

Possessed of an artistic soul, Homer turned this book cover:

Into this:


while printing yesterday. Another beautiful error from our Book Machine...

Youngest Customer Yet!!

Nine year old Tate heard about our Book Machine on the radio one morning while getting ready for school. He immediately jumped on the internet, surfed our website till he found an EBM book he wanted, and a day or two later came in to watch it print.

The best part is that Tate wanted this 468 page book: a prose version of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Most of us didn't start reading this stuff until at least our senior year of high school. Congratulations to an advanced young reader and an adventurous book collector.




And thanks Tate for providing us with the chance to print Homer on Homer. Our Book Machine is nicknamed (if you didn't know) after Homer Price, the mischievous boy inventor (with his Uncle Ulysses) of a doughnut-making machine reminiscent of our very own Espresso Book Machine. If you're not quite up to reading Homer, the bard, check out Robert McCloskey's kids classic.

"Homer got down from the chair and pushed a button on the machine marked, "Start." Rings of batter started dropping into the hot fat. After a ring of batter was cooked on one side an automatic gadget gave the doughnut a little push and it rolled neatly down a little chute, all ready to eat.

"That's a simply fascinating machine," said the lady as she waited for the first doughnut to roll out."

- Tera, Bookmaker

Sending Books to Haiti

You can still get Creole/English medical dictionaries here. The Haitian (Creole) - English Pocket Medical Translator was put out by the International Medical Volunteers Association and is available to print on the Espresso Book Machine for $8. We recently took an order from an aid team about to head to Haiti.

From our bookseller, Terri: "On April 12th I took a call from a woman at a Seattle hospital. She was looking for several copies of a French/English medical dictionary and the Lonely Planet travel guide to Haiti. I asked her if she would be interested in a Haitian/English medical dictionary instead. She told me that a group of medical staff were leaving in three days for Haiti and would need the books as soon as possible. I let her know that we could have the books ready for her by that afternoon. She was "wowed" and very appreciative of our ability to make the exact book for their needs when they needed them."

- Tera, EBM Operator

Beat the Machine

We really tried to do that with our first large publishing project of a 776 page book.


If you saw my head stuck in the machine last week that was because I had to climb in and assist the book in rotation, as the robot arm twirled it in preparation for cutting.

The folks at On Demand Books (who brought us the EBM) are making leaps and bounds with the Book Machine technology and they promise I will never again have to squeeze a book while the machine is in operation. We'll see.

University of Washington postdoctoral researcher, Stefan Baums, approached us a month ago to see if we could print his dissertation in book form before he left the country for Kyoto. He designed a simple cover to complement the rather weighty title: A Gandhari Commentary on Early Buddhist Verses: British Library Kharosthi fragments 7,9, 13 and 18.

I'm pleased to say we finished the job well before his plane left the runway.

- Tera, EBM Operator

Ouch...

Homer (our book machine) ate a book a couple of days ago....very artistically. I dug it out of the machine with pliers and exacto knife, while repeating, "My, what sharp teeth you have..."

- Tera, EBM Operator

Ruminations on The Machine

Someone recently told me I'd have to become “one with the machine” if I wanted to solve the technical difficulties of binding a 776 page book properly. Very well. I realize that this will require facing my discomfort with all technology post-1901 (since all good, homey things were available then: the awl, gas lamps, the science of evolution, Seattle). I’ve always liked books as aesthetic objects, something to handle and display, though according to Ted Striphas, author of The Late Age of Print, I’m still being swayed by the middle class consumerist fantasy of stocked bookshelves as a sign of elevated society, a je ne sai quoi of prestige.

In Striphas' words:

“...the widespread private ownership of mass-produced printed books as home was crucial to the formation and professionalization of the middle class, its entrée into modernism.”

Sometime in the middle of the 20th century when Christmas really took off, the book industry benefited from the “conspicuous consumption”of educated households where books were part of the object-ambiance, not just for reading. There were even "mimic bookshelves" for those low of purse. Striphas acknowledges that this is a cynical picture; it does not do justice to the influence of those knowing, deep spines confronting us from across the room.

For instance, on my bookshelf Mr. Casaubon of Middlemarch (one of my favorite cautionary cranks) scowls at, on the one side, T. S. Eliot’s The Uses of Criticism and, on the other, hot-tempered Roberto Bolanos’s The Romantic Dogs, a lusty collection of poetry from his early twenties. Baroness Blixen of Kenya (Out of Africa) raises her eyebrows at the teenage Marguerite Duras of Cambodia (The Lover), while Mrs. Dalloway nervously arranges her flowers and sighs at the voracious appetites of the British Empire. Every few months my eye is caught by Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and I wonder again why he couldn’t have born it one more day–a Jew escaping France before the German occupation gets stopped at the Spanish border and commits suicide in his hotel room, the night before Spain opens its borders to refugees–. Granted I could have looked this all up on Wikipedia in fifteen seconds flat, but the resonances would not be so tangibly stirring on the shelf in my living room all day long, catching my flighty thoughts and deepening them.

But we all have to admit the book industry is in a crisis and Striphas has a good point that it is no longer conspicuous consumption that will save the publishing industry (though we at the bookstore wouldn’t mind a good try!). Something like the music industry's horror-struck encounter with Napster in 2000 is happening to publishers who with the hurricane of new digital options are being forced to confront a longstanding problem: you can’t just sell a book once, watch lamely as it it passes from hand to hand, circulates in the library, and surfaces again and again in used bookstores and websites through the years without earning you one extra penny, and expect to pay your editor’s and production team’s bills. In order to survive, publishers have to find a way to capture those fees for use.

Striphas brings up an eerie example of a William Gibson novel, Agrippa (Book of the Dead), which was an early "electronic book", a physical book encasing a floppy disk which would erase itself upon the third reading or so. Luckily the targeted readers were nerdy enough to love that kind of thing. Not all of us will be so tickled by the future of "controlled consumption," as we learn to lease the contents, rather than own a book outright. What is the essence of "book" after all?

Perhaps the Espresso Book Machine is targeting savvy, (dare I say nerdy) readers in its own way. It is a neat hybridization of digital and glue-and-paper print technology, and I often like to have a good chat with a customer before I hand him/her their steaming, sizzling Print On Demand title (At which point we dutifully repeat “hot off the press” together. Every time.) But I am also curious what people think is going to happen next. Will we as readers be satisfied with the unreal pixels of E-books? How important is browsing in a physical space, bumping up against other readers, and stumbling on that new obsession with Serbian folk songs or the Googleification of Everything? And my burning question, how long is someone willing to wait for my glue pot to heat up so I can make the next damn book? More adventures in Print On Demand coming soon.

Post-training delirium; Difficulties of naming her/him/it

Our EBM trainer wheeled his toolkit/luggage out of here Saturday evening, leaving us all in an applied physics daze. My brain being composed of about 60% literary criticism, and the rest inert gray matter, I took a day to recover from the crash course in how to maintain our new robot. I still find myself muttering phrases like “book block” “photo-cyan” “vertilamer clamp” and “shear jaws” on Monday morning, as we fire her/him/it up for the first time with very few difficulties.

I did drag myself out of bed this morning for a good cause: we are printing Haitian Creole – English Medical Dictionaries for use in that country. I guess the noble impulse originated with Google, who is a partner of the company (On Demand Books) that brought us our Book Machine: five or six other EBMs across the US are being put to work for the same purpose. It's strange to think of these slim volumes--still hot from printing—arriving in the hands of nurses and doctors in a disaster-zone.


Meanwhile, I have been too much in the guts of the Machine to anthropomorphize her/it/him properly. Names proposed are The Tin Man, Ruby (after Rube Goldberg), and Bartleby the Scrivener. Privately, I keep wanting to call her/him/it Hal, despite the lack of a burning red eye and soothing, male voice reassuring us, “Everything is under control...”

Welcome home, Espresso Book Machine!

Day One of training has come to an end. It turns out our model is perfect. I tried to stump the engineer with troubles other operators have had. For example, the “fat book flop” when a 600 page tome splays open during the binding process and can’t be muscled back into position. “We’ve installed a shield for that.” How about the need for waxing the shoot through which the cover passes, making it slippery enough to overcome accidental friction. “That’s been redesigned completely.” I don’t know if it’s pride, but I believe him: our book machine is god-like. In a heavily wired, robotic kind of way.

***

All day bookstore staff piled recommendations on my desk of titles for test printing. Goody Two Shoes, a children’s book classic from the 18th century. Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (“the most delightful of English essayists”) and the winner, first out of the gate, was Edmond Meany’s 1901 dissertation, Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce. Steve, our lit guy who harbors a secret passion for out of print NW history books (who knew?), handed me a photo of Edmond Meany, one-time University of Washington professor, standing over the seated Chief Joseph. Yes, they actually hung out together. We printed the large-format book successfully, complete with the signatures of Meany’s advisory committee.

It has been a great highly-caffeinated first day.

- The Book Barista