Page 67 - the foreign language of motion

Wednesday, 9 August 2006
We visit the bindery where University books
from all over the country are sent to
be bound. Piles of books and the insides of books without their
covers. Are covers like skins or skeletons I wonder? Or are the skeletons of books the
imaginaries contained in grammar,that allow the letters to become other things? The gruff man
leaning all his weight into a machine
that presses the glue of a spine to thoroughly trap the pages.
The naked bodies of books lying bound without spines or covers. Old books with
old pages given new exteriors. Not a speck of
hand writing. This bindery of books like a quiet city of sentences, each
one recumbent in this purgatory,
this in between place,
safe from reader’s skin or hands. It will cost us $20 to have a book half bound, without cover or embossing. A real book has the weight of a gruff man behind it, pressing the pages
in tight. We witness the transformation of the vulner
ability of
paper sheets into the complete and bounded object of
the book. We watch the lines of words being lined up, being straightened into order, the fixing positions of objects.
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