from the printer’s error, 2001.

fellow compositors
and pressworkers!
i, chief printer
frank steinman,
having worked fifty-
seven years at my trade,
and served five years
as president
of the holliston
printer’s council,
being of sound mind
though near death,
leave this testimonial
concerning the nature
of printers’ errors.
first: i hold that all books
and all printed
matter have
errors, obvious or no,
and that these are their
most significant moments,
not to be tampered with
by the vanity and folly
of ignorant, academic
textual editors.
second: i hold that there are
three types of errors, in ascending
order of importance:
one: chance errors
of the printer’s trembling hand
not to be corrected incautiously
by foolish professors
and other such rabble
because trembling is part
of divine creation itself.
two: silent, cool sabotage
by the printer,
the manual laborer
whose protests
have at times taken this
historical form,
covert interferences
not to be corrected
censoriously by the hand
of the second and far
more ignorant saboteur,
the textual editor.
three: errors
from the touch of god,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
by preemptive commentary
the better.
third: i hold that all three
sorts of error,
errors by chance,
errors by workers’ protest,
and errors by
god’s touch,
are in practice the
same and indistinguishable.
therefore i,
frank steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative master
of the holliston guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and
therefore also divine.

hello simran,

(your book(s) asked to write you a personal note - it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)

holy canasta! it’s me… it’s me! i can’t believe it is actually me! you could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! i’ve got to get packed! how is the weather where you live? will i need a dust jacket? i can’t believe i’m leaving mishawaka, indiana already - the friendly people, the hummer plant, the linebacker lounge - so many memories. i don’t have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it’s time to see the world!

i can’t wait to meet you! you sound like such a well read person. although, i have to say, it sure has taken you a while! i don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between jane eyre (drama queen) and fundamentals of thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? at least jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. how many times did the ol’ brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?

i know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls i’ve had, i’m ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). just five months ago, i thought i was a goner. my owner was moving and couldn’t take me with her. i was sure i was landfill bait until i ended up in a better world books book drive bin. thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, i’ve found a new home. even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from brazil to botswana.

but hey, enough about me, i’ve been asked to brief you on a few things:

we sent your order to the following address:

[address redacted]

order #: [redacted]

we provide quick shipping service to all our customers. you chose standard shipping. it should arrive in 6 to 9 business days. at this time, we are not able to offer tracking on our standard shipments.

if you have any questions or concerns, please contact my friends at customer care by submitting a ticket.. if you could please include your order number (11796506) that would be very helpful.

eagerly awaiting our meeting,

parisian encounters: great loves and great passions

… what is remarkable beyond the store’s [shakespeare & co.’s] unique literary genealogy is that, at a time when digital publishing is undoing and repackaging so much of literary culture, its nature as a store is generalizable to small bookstores everywhere. it is intimate and surprising, serious and fun. it is a curated space which is a source for curating one’s sense of the world and of self.

indeed, if the idea of curating is one of the most significant cultural forms of the 21st century (and i believe it is, given the volume of cultural material available to us at this moment in history), the small, well-curated bookstore will not simply thrive as a commercial enterprise, it will be culturally indispensable.

while rim’s certainly not the only apple competitor caught with its pants down, it was the one with the most to lose. samsung, toshiba, lenovo; they were on the hook for hardware, sure, but they could bunk comfortably on the USS android. and more importantly, they could crank out consumer-focused ipad clones.

rim, though? rim had to make an enterprise tablet. you know, that thing that no one needs or wants. it had to go it alone. and it got it so very, very wrong. no native email or calendar at launch, no bbm. and when you screw it up that badly, all you’re left with is a $485 million answer to a question no one was asking.