New film explores storytelling in digital age
Bay Area artists, historians work to preserve — and reinvent — books
Give that iPad a rest. Sign off of Audible.com for a while. The quirky people featured in a new documentary called “The Book Makers” want you to know that the printed word is not dead yet.
“The book is made for a human being with 10 fingers, two hands and a nose separating two eyes,” a defiant Peter Koch says in the film. “Until we lose our nose and we lose our eyes, and until our 10 fingers fall off, there’s never going to be a more perfect reading device than a book.”
Koch, a Berkeley-based fine press printer is among an eclectic group of folks who have dedicated their lives to preserving — and reinventing — books in the digital age. They insist that there’s nothing like the look, feel and smell of an alluring stack of pages bound between hard covers — and that those pages give readers
a sense of control that they just can’t get from a screen.
Created by Mill Valley’s InCA Productions, “The Book Makers” (8 p.m. Friday, KQED) is an hourlong film that celebrates Koch and his peers, most of them Bay Area residents. They’re artists, authors, collectors and historians who have a passion for the fine craft of bookmaking. But we’re not talking about your ordinary paperback tomes. No, far from it.
Mark Sarigianis, for ex
ample, has set out to produce a deluxe edition of Charles Bukowski’s 1982 semi-autobiographical novel “Ham on Rye” on his own in Oakland. And he’s using the laborious, traditional metaltype process that leaves no room for error. Making the task even more complicated: He prefers rare, handmade paper shipped in from Canada, and he hired an artist to create wood-block illustrations.
It’s “crazy,” even “stupid in many ways,” admits Sari
gianis, who closely guards against typos. But, hey, he’s a book guy and he loves it.
Not everyone, however, is drawn to the old-school methods. Koch, for some reason, was inspired to craft a 30-pound book made entirely of lead.
And then there’s Berkeley artist Julie Chen, who is seen creating a box-like book with fold-out parts and other interactive elements that combine to give readers a “theatrical experience.”
Says Chen, “The fact that
we can read so much text on a screen has actually freed the book up to do what it does best.”
Authors Dave Eggers and Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) make cameo appearances to sing the praises of books (“They get into our bones in a way almost nothing else can,” Eggers says). But the true stars of the film are the people redefining the mechanical forms of storytelling in interesting ways.
Books with covers made from goat skin? OK, sure.
Books containing paper pages processed in damp, dark caves? Yes, that’s really a thing.
“The Book Makers” travels from the Bay Area to New York, London and Germany to profile these passionate
experts. And then it bounces back to San Francisco to explore the happenings at Codex, a huge fair where artists and book lovers from across the globe gather to sell their wares and celebrate their craft.
Among the Codex attendees is Mark Dimunation, the chief of special collections and rare books at the Library of Congress. Clearly, he’s in his element here, and he’s not a tablet computer kind of guy.
“The physical book is alive and well, thank you very much,” he says. “And it can do things that only a physical book can do.”
In addition to its Friday airing on KQED, “The Book Makers” can be viewed on www.pbs.org.