Incunabula

I do possess one sheet of paper from 1500, but it isn't printed. It was a marbled end sheet from a book that I couldn't afford to buy and it fell out when I opened the book. I slipped it into another book I was buying. It's just about the only thing I every stole. I take it out once in a while (it lives between layers of archival tissue in a large Dore volume). It's a piece of paper, it's 515 years old, the colors are still vibrant. I learned to make paper, and then to marble paper, because of it. The best marbling is done with a feather. I used a swan feather (they had a nest near my house on Cape Cod) because they were large and you could marble a page in a single pass. Then you had to dry the sheets, and flatten them because they wanted to pucker. Making the cases, then making the paper for end-sheets, then marbling, then casing the books, just for a lettered and signed edition of a book, could take weeks. The "Gaelic Tales" took an entire winter, pin-registration for four-color wood blocks is a pain in the ass. It can take days to set up a single run. I don't believe I've ever found a mistake in that book, which is fairly unusual. Modern mass-market stuff has so many mistakes it upsets my stomach. I'm not a perfectionist, not even close, but I took great care making books. Then I fell in with these extremely good carpenters. Doing interior trim in a 1.4 million dollar house is pretty serious business. I hated the idea of ridiculous wealth, but I loved working with great materials. One winter I started all my fires with scraps of first-growth sugar pine. We'd gotten a bundle of salvaged wood, cut from logs that had sank, a hundred years ago, from a flotilla of logs going to a sawmill in North Carolina. It worked like butter. As I've gotten older I care more about the materials than I do about my own ego. I'm full of shit, actually; I know nothing about electricity and every internal combustion engine I've ever owned has failed. An axe is a reliable tool, a hatchet. Fucking chain-saw needs gaskets replaced, brakes need to be re-lined, eventually you need new boots. Thinking about shoes recently, because I need a pair of work boots, which is going to mean shopping, and I hate shopping. But work boots are critical for my life-style and they have to be considered. Also, I have to admit, I bought a log of Velveeta cheese and ten cans of tomato soup. A very cold winter day, a cup of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich might just provide salvation. I cook a pot of Dove Creek pinto beans, make a chili of lamb shanks and peppers, rice and chopped sweet onions, a thin pone of cornbread, life doesn't get better than this.