READING THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD
Bookbinding, Artificial Intelligence, and Life
by Henry Wessells
[This is the lightly edited text of a talk I gave at Oberlin College on Thursday 9 April 2026 at the invitation of librarian Valerie Hotchkiss.]
It is a great pleasure to be here at Oberlin at the invitation of Valerie Hotchkiss who is a really good librarian and who knows what books are for. I am a reader, a polyglot, a science fiction writer, an antiquarian bookseller, a micropublisher, and a competent hand bookbinder who has over the last 25 years produced somewhere around 400 case bindings in edition sizes ranging from 1 to 17 to 52, and six or seven hundred or so stitched pamphlets, too. I am a USER of books. I will be talking to you in each of these capacities and you will see that there is considerable interplay between the categories.
A bit about my background first. When I was seven years old I understood I could read the entire school library and tried to do so. I also discovered (on my father’s bookshelves) the Bantam paperback reprints of the Doc Savage science fiction novels from the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. He bought them out of nostalgia, I think, because his own pulp magazine collection was lost when the barn blew over in a storm in Vermont in 1948. So, science fiction from an early age, and in another spark of good fortune, I was taught French from an early age and then transplanted to France for three years as a teenager, and so I added Jules Verne (science fiction again) and Baudelaire. While I enjoyed mathematics and had aptitude for the subject, the transatlantic exchange meant that I ended up studying languages instead of calculus: first German, a smattering of Russian, and then Arabic. I remained a reader of science fiction. I am NOT telling you my life story in any detail.
Instead, I will talk about some of my heroes in the world of books, three individuals from whom I learned different things in different ways.
Let’s jump ahead to 1990 or 1991. Some months after our daughter was born, my wife took an introductory bookbinding class at the local historical society. At the last class, I came along and met the instructor. We got talking, and that is how I met Herbert Nieder, who was a master tanner by training, a mostly self-taught bookbinder, and a man generous with his tools and knowledge.
Over the next dozen years, while working as an editor on a reference book and then at a weekly trade magazine, and beyond, I studied with him when I could, sometimes at irregular intervals. I learned to sew and case in books, some rudiments of repair and conservation binding, and we explored interesting papers and cloth for binding. I was not his best student and I was in one sense a profound disappointment to him : I had no interest in working with leather. Bookbinding teaches an awareness of process and the importance of examining the underlying structure of things : how the artefact is put together, how much collaborative or community effort is required to produce a book. This knowledge is portable : it can be applied to other fields.
And then at one brief moment in early 2000 when I was in marginal freelance employment, a science fiction editor friend, David G. Hartwell, asked me if I would do a hardcover edition binding for a book he was publishing, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary by Michael Swanwick. I asked Herbert if he thought I had mapped out the steps correctly, and if I might use his stamping tools for the front boards. The total edition was about 48 copies, sewn and cased in and bound at the kitchen table and using a small iron nipping press that had been my grandmother’s. A set of encyclopaedias works just fine to keep books under weight while the glue dries overnight. I soon undertook to produce another edition binding for El Vilvoy de la Islas by Avram Davidson, which I published, and have gone on from there. I am a lifelong reader, but it was Herbert Nieder who really showed me how to look at books. I count the late Herbert Nieder as one of my heroes in the book world.
To go back a bit, the trade magazine where I worked for three plus years was AB Bookman’s Weekly, established 1948 and in 1996 still central to the rare and out-of-print book trade. On my first day on the job, I wrote two book reviews, adapted several obituaries and notices to fill out space on production day. The magazine’s editor, Jake Chernofsky, enjoined me from using semi-colons, and warned me not to be snotty in my writing. The next day I headed to Boston for the Antiquarian Book Fair, where I met David Godine and others who have remained friends ever since. It was in those first days on the job that I encountered the writings of Joel Silver, Librarian at the Lilly in Bloomington (and now its director). He was a contributing editor and regular columnist for AB. Everything I know about the narrative disclosure of information comes from attentive reading of his essays on bookish topics. And then, nothing like a weekly deadline to put that learning into practice. It was the only time I have been a prolific writer. In the summer of 1997, I attended the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar, a weekly intensive overview of the book trade from business basics to cataloguing and pricing and more. (It’s still in operation as CABS-Minnesota and has a generous scholarship fund.) In those days I could write 50 or 60 pages of finished prose ahead of the weekly deadline, but I had no idea what went into writing a price on the flyleaf of a book. I met Joel Silver in person when he taught the session on the reference books of the trade : this was opening the door to a new branch of knowledge. We have been friends ever since. I have no library degree (my terminal degree is an MFA in writing), but I consider myself a pupil of Joel Silver. He bears no responsibility for the meanders and digressions in my written and spoken work. I am bibliographer and editor of Avram Davidson who was a master of the zigzag. Joel Silver is a great teacher and I consider him another of my heroes.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BOOKS II
How books are made
In musty blackness above old stables,
Forgotten shelves in crowded, disused rooms
Where a faded rose silk wallpaper blooms ;
From ruined boxes, piled high on tables,
Cripples walk, worn red morocco gleams,
Vellum sweats, rubbed calf, dull roan copulate
On uncut sheets, stained wraps and text dilate :
Planting seeds into dark shuddering dreams.
Early morning gilt full moon of August,
Tangled spines and broken boards upon the floor,
Limp vellum, greasy sheep spawned on this shore :
Cascade of lost words made new in this thrust.
A modern Prometheus, disbound, steps from
Emptied pages into the summer day.
For Ed Maggs
[This is one in a sequence of poems, sonnets more or less in the Ted Berrigan mode, first published in 2014. The title poem, The Private Life of Books, read by the author, can be heard as the concluding voiceover in The Booksellers documentary (2019).]
In the bookbinding studio, learning and doing are inseparable : standing at the bench or the kitchen table and accomplishing the sequence of tasks. For an intermittent or semi-amateur binder such as myself, this often required re-learning or recovering a skill. The trial bindings of two of my edition bindings have a note on the flyleaf, MY SHIRT’S TOO TIGHT, because I hadn’t set the appropriate space between spine and covers for the French groove ; but then one adds that extra board thickness or eighth of an inch and the production line gets going. In the same way, it would usually take a couple of fumbles before I regained the light touch and precision for turning and setting the corners. Learning can also involve attempting projects one has NEVER done before.
At the end of 1999, AB Bookman’s Weekly folded, having swiftly become irrelevant as the internet changed the nature of communication in the book trade as in other areas of life. I figured I could write book catalogue descriptions. I asked a friend if he knew anyone looking for a part-time cataloguer, and so I met Jim Cummins. It turned out I could catalogue and sell books. It was never part-time, and the rest is history, to be told another time.
When I was an undergraduate I studied Arabic and the history of the Islamic World from Spain and West Africa to Central Asia. I failed the English usage portion of the State department exams and I was not a suitable candidate to be a spook or a professor. I have kept up my Arabic as best I could, and it has come in useful on occasion. In those years of the Bush administration right after 2001, I saw the UN reports of the weapons inspectors in Iraq, chronicled truthfully in France but brushed aside by the hawks. I despaired of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and wrote postcards to the White House urging the president to think of the children of Iraq and NOT go to war. A small gesture of protest.
In 2008, when I was visiting science fiction friends John and Judith Clute in London, Judith showed me an etching she had just made in response to a poem by Joe Haldeman, the title of whose novel The Forever War (1974) is now a commonplace of newspaper headlines. Judith said she saw the etching as first in a series, and I said, I don’t know what shape it will take, but I want to publish your etchings and Forever Peace in a book. The only way to do it was as a large format album of the series of etchings. I had never made so big a book. I devised a structure, learned to make paste paper in the back yard, and produced 31 copies, which sold out pretty quickly. An esoteric protest, to be sure, but I also printed up and distributed a pamphlet version, which I sent to the U.S. Senate and others around the world. (In November 2016, I did not want to weep silently, and roped in a few friends to contribute to an obscene political pamphlet published on 22 November in front of 725 Fifth avenue, aka Trump Tower. I couldn’t fit the cover placards into my suitcase to show here at Oberlin.)
Michael Zinman is a New York-based collector and living legend. One day he dropped an orange Sainsbury’s bag on my desk and said brusquely, “What is this ? Should I give it to one of my customers in the Middle East ?” Inside was a cotton flag of red and black and green and white, with a label on it reading, in English, given to me by the Sheikh of Aqaba.
I said, let me think about it. When I got finished thinking about it a few months later, I had identified the third surviving example of the flag of the Arab Revolt of 1916 led by T. E. Lawrence and the Hashemite prince Feisal. It sold at auction in London for a tidy sum and now hangs in a museum in Jordan. Over the next many years, I produced Michael’s Annals of Collecting series, and worked on many joint ventures between him and the Cummins firm. One of his biggest collections was of early American imprints, material printed before 1801, now at the Library Company. Once he disposed of that collection in a joint sale/gift arrangement in 2000, he began collecting other things. So sometimes our collaborations were on early printing for the blind — a window into the nineteenth century origins and impulses of the American progressive vision : abolition, prison reform, assistance to refugees, education of the blind, and more — or exotic imprints or tart cards (trade cards of modern-day London prostitutes) or good old rare books. I learned a variety of things from Michael Zinman, to be less fussy about condition (and even completeness) when dealing with material of supreme rarity. If a copy can be completed or restored, that is good ; even when one does not restore the copy, it is also good. During the early years of the covid epidemic, I casually asked Michael if he had any children’s books. And so I became a specialist in eighteenth-century American children’s material : it takes one source and one collector. I have probably handled more examples of the New-England Primer than any dealer since Charles Heartman (a dealer overshadowed by Dr. Rosenbach).
What Michael Zinman also taught me is to be ready to take another look at the material. That is the task of the reader, the bookbinder, the human being. As Henry David Thoreau said, “It is never too late to give up our prejudices” (from the first chapter of Walden).
When I said I am a user of books I mean that books are necessary to the trade of writer and antiquarian bookseller. Yes, I read for pleasure and take pleasure in what I read when it is well written, but books are one of the tools with which I think about the world, learning about subjects of interest and trying to create context.
Bookbinding encourages thinking about how each element must fit and work with the others. One learns by doing it.
The book is an engineered object. When it functions properly that engineering is almost invisible unless you know how to look at the structure. A book functions best when OPEN. [Accompanying gesture of holding a book by the front board and letting it fall open.]
To be a science fiction writer is, in the words of Tom Disch, to read the newspaper “in a state of alert anxiety and think about what each headline portends”.
In the twenty-first century one can push a button and a machine will extrude a hardcover book. You will have the text, yes, but that is about all you will have apart from what my friend Reno W. Odlin called a paperback in drag. Learning to make a hand binding offers another order of knowledge.
So too, with reading and thinking. There is a current ad in the New York City subway for some brand of generative AI designed to produce reports. You can see the possible allure for employers and owners. Push a button and something comes out at minimal perceived cost, and with no knowledge gained by the employee in the process. No investment in the employee as asset : to carry this notion to its logical conclusion, why bother to have employees at all ?
Roman Jakobson wrote, “It is the purposeful poetic use of lexical and grammatical tropes and figures that brings the creative power of language to its summit”. How much of that occurs when a button is pushed ?
Charles Darwin wrote in a letter on 1 November 1846 : “I have unfortunately lost the reference & it is a high crime, I confess, ever to refer to an opinion, without a precise reference.”
The nature of generative AI is in fact degenerative, serving only to cut information loose from its tether. It is the opposite of learning.
We are human beings on a small bit of rock circling our sun, one star moving through our vast universe (I am paraphrasing Fredric Brown’s “Imagine”). How do you want to experience the universe during your brief, illusory, impermanent interval here? Do you want to instruct a machine to do it for you? The great satirist of science fiction Robert Sheckley wrote about this in a story called “The Robot Who Looked Like Me”.
To make a book is to work with other people, to make a society. A legal system is an engineered object, too, created by a group of humans : for whose benefit ?
Interrogate the book on your desk, interrogate the nature of the legal system. Attempt things you haven’t done before.
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