McHuston Booksellers

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Tag: McHuston (Page 93 of 111)

Panning planning.

May 2, 2013 /

A two-hour drive for a Hideaway’s Pizza? Crazy, maybe. To be sure, it wasn’t planned. I’m one of those who sometimes acts on a whim rather than thinking it over. The drive was back in the day when Stillwater had the only location, and I was recalling fond memories of it to the passenger in my car.

Me: We really ought to go get one.

Passenger: Okay.

Me: How ‘bout them Cowboys?

So, we hit the highway and drove and drove. It was a time of conversations between friends about important things – because everything seemed important, or at least magnified in intensity and perceived with a flourish.

The pizza? It was good. We knew it would be. Even if it had been bad it would have been good, for all the effort put into sitting down in that little restaurant and having it presented to us.

Some of my capricious decisions haven’t turned out so well. It hasn’t stopped me from acting on little-considered ideas.

Planning is part of the fun, I’ve been told numerous times. A variety of responses have always popped out of my mouth to that one.

Planner: You know planning is half the fun.

Me: Sure. It doubles the disappointment when the plan falls through.

Planner: You just have to make an alternate plan, just in case.

Me: A plan for a failed plan?

Planner: Right.

Looking ahead with anticipation is one thing, but I’m better known for stopping (while admittedly lost) to find a road map that will explain which highway is the one we should have turned on forty-five minutes ago.

The cliché is something like this (always abbreviated, and trailing off in a near-whisper while looking at someone’s failed endeavor): The best-laid plans…

The rest of it, usually omitted because we don’t know what the heck it is supposed to imply, goes like this in another abbreviated form: The best-laid plans of mice and men…

Scottish poet Robert Burns is credited with the saying, which concludes: The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray. Besides his writing, Robbie Burns also kept a garden and once plowed through a nest of mice while tilling. He figured the mouse probably assumed it was a safe spot to build a nest, but – as he noted – plans often go astray.

Which brings me to my point.

Early last week, when emails were being exchanged among the Rose District merchants about First Thursday plans (the night we all keep our businesses open later), it was noted that the day’s forecast included a high of 82-degrees, sunny skies, and balmy breezes. A perfect evening for outdoor strolling, shopping, and listening to the outdoor concert by the band hired especially for the event.

The emails solicited replies from other store owners about their own plans.

Ahhh. There’s that planning thing again, the virtue I’ve been accused of not possessing in the least. In truth, I didn’t have an etched-in-stone event. Playing it by ear – that’s me.

Sunny skies? Ahhh, no. High of 82-degrees? That was yesterday. Strolling and listening to the outdoor music? Jogging in place might be the better idea, in order to keep from freezing up.

As I sit here typing, the day’s high has likely come and gone. Temperatures are expected to fall into the low forties by late afternoon. Sunshine? No. They’ve changed that plan to a possibility of freezing rain or snow. Snow!

We may see some record low temperatures by tomorrow morning, but snow in May in Tulsa County?

I’m not planning on it. So, come visit!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District: 122 South Main Street
Broken Arrow, OK!

Cosmetic surgery, 200 years later…

April 27, 2013 /

Here’s what I’m thinking about, with an Exacto-knife in my hand. I’m slicing off a layer of dried leather and glue, trying to cut as thin as possible so I won’t damage the paper underneath. And here’s what’s going through my mind…

A little over two hundred years ago, another fellow was carefully applying glue to the same part of the book, that same glue that I’m trying to remove. I’m thinking about him, working in his bookbindery, applying the skills that he acquired as an apprentice, working in whatever light was slipping through the window – or maybe, working late by candlelight – to artfully connect two leather-covered boards to protect the fragile paper pages of a just-published book.

How old are you? If you’re in your early thirties – or older – and could be transported back into its time, the Declaration of Independence would have been written in your lifetime. This book was first put together in 1807, in America’s first generation of freedom from English rule.

Thinking on it, I’m pretty sure that – while I’m thinking about him and his work – it never crosses his mind that another person will come along behind him to repair damages to his product, his book.

It certainly wasn’t his fault.

In fact, as the book was presented to me, I could appreciate the beautiful leather covering the outer boards. Unfortunately, the hinges – that part of the book that takes all the punishment every time the volume is opened up to read – did not fair so well. One was being held on by a piece of linen tape after being completely loosened from the book. The other was still hanging on like a loose tooth in the mouth of a seven-year-old.

The job ahead of me? Take as little apart as necessary from a book that has survived more than two centuries, and put it back together in an artful style that will do credit to the original binder and preserve the book – hopefully – for another two hundred-plus years.

Man.

I shouldn’t think about it like that. Don’t need the pressure.

It’s enough that the book’s owner has entrusted it to me to return it to him in a condition that is not only better than it was when dropped off, but nice enough that he can show off the book as part of his collection.

And me? Just a practical bookbinder.

These are the adventures.

In January of 1807, the year this book was first put together, every street and alleyway in every neighborhood of the world was dark after sunset – except Pall Mall in London, where gas lighting had just been installed. Ludwig von Beethoven had his 4th Symphony performed for the first time. Slave trade was abolished in the US and England, at least by vote. Robert Fulton got his steamboat out on the water and proved its worth. It was in that same year that this little book was under the hands of a bookbinder with greater skills than I possess, who was finishing off a product destined for the hands of someone wealthy enough to own a book.

Things have changed since then.

Not just the ability to own a book, either. Those years of apprenticeship in learning the bookbinding skills are less necessary. What I know was learned from Youtube videos and some practice.

There is some respect in there, too.

I love books. That ought to be obvious. A book in the trashcan is either a cardinal sin or an act of decency, like euthanizing a crippled thoroughbred. Working to repair or restore a book is just part of my passion. But I’m not an Old World bookbinder.

We’ll see how it turns out, but for now, scraping the old glue and leather from the spine of this one has me thinking. I have a lot of respect for the person who put this together. I don’t want to screw it up.

I have no time to think about how long my repair will hold up, and whether someone will come along in another one-or-two-hundred years to scrape away the evidence of this evening’s book-surgery, after what I hope will be a successful outcome. There aren’t any guarantees, anyway. The current owner might drop it in a puddle of water after walking out of the store. I’m giving my best effort, damn the Kindles. It’s a nice little book and deserves whatever life-extension I can give it…

Come visit! There are plenty of old (and not so old!) books to look over!

McHuston

Booksellers & Irish Bistro
122 South Main Street
Broken Arrow, OK 74012

New stuff. Magical.

April 13, 2013 /

Maybe it isn’t considered the age of Invention and Wonder, but the years of my youth included enough newly imagined products that it may have de-sensitized me to the process. I didn’t grow up during the Industrial Revolution, but the latter part of the twentieth century did bring out eye-openers like the cellular telephone. And the weedwacker.

(That’s probably not a good description of the range, but you get the idea.)

There were many new items on many new fronts. Microwave ovens. Video games, beginning at Atari. Pong. Oooh. Calculator watches (I didn’t say all the inventions were keepers…)

In the days of my growing up – my youth – we’d turn around and something new would hit us in the face. Sometimes literally. (I got whacked on the forehead by a Frisbee at a Jethro Tull concert at the Convention Center. Ironically, I had just turned back around after warning my buddy Mike to be on the lookout for flying disks. It was his first concert, and I was the experienced venue-pro. Naturally, it hit me instead of him.)

I’ve never surveyed it, but I imagine some people believe these things have been around since the dawn of man. Nah. In a historical sense, many of our everyday comforts are recent contrivances. I remember when Mountain Dew first came out. Yellow liquid that looked a lot like – well, let’s say it didn’t look particularly appealing when poured in a clear glass. That’s why it came out in a green bottle, I suppose.

Something new would come out, and it seemed to be generally accepted without a lot of hoopla or fanfare. I don’t remember lines of people camped out overnight for a chance to buy a portable Compaq computer. (They were so large as to be only marginally portable.) No midnight-opening events for the eight-track tape players. Or the cassettes. None for the VHS, BetaMax, or VideoDisk either, as I recall. (Early DVDs were the size of vinyl records, but I’m betting few of you recall those beasts.)

They might generate a brief Wow, or Hmmmm. The more elaborate items could draw out a Cool! (Or Far-Out, as it tended to be expressed back then.)

Now, though, I find myself taking the time to actually marvel about the products being introduced. Not the phones. I know some of you live and breathe for your cels, but – old school as I am – those are still just telephones to me. And I’ve never been that keen on phone conversations.

Bluetooth, now – that definitely rates a ten on the coolness scale for me. Here, I’ve just berated the cellphone and now I have to backtrack and admit I like being able to take a picture with it and – through a series of onscreen menu choices – send it through the air to my computer. Wireless. Cool. Far-Out. Awesome.

Here’s another. The image is of an approaching storm the other evening. I wasn’t near a television or radio, and knew there was a threat of nasty weather.

“Where is that storm?, I wondered aloud, talking to myself as I am wont to do these days. “How can I find out?”

There is an app for that. Downloaded a powerful weather radar program that even allowed it to email the radar-sweep to someone. I sent a copy to myself, just to see what it looked like on the other end. Click on it and you’ll notice the first wave of severe weather has already moved east of Tulsa and the big blob is still approaching. The calm between the storms was the impetus for my downloading the application. They’d said another wave was coming, and I just wanted to be able to see it. Bam! There it is. Oooh.

The picture of the storm is a still image, but the application does the whole deal, the line that sweeps around in a circle like the second hand of a clock, updating the intensity-color-shades as it passes. Just like the toys of the big TV boys (and girls).

I’m still marveling at the fact that I have access, 24 hours a day, to the same sophisticated technology that the meteorologists have. Of course, I have little or no understanding of what the different settings and screens are for, but I know the big red blobs are danger, Will Robinson. Green? Good. Red, bad. Green, good. Awesome.

There you have the summary of my weather-radar savvy. Color-based.

Cool.

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