New flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.
Today’s icon:
Generally used for reading-and-writing-stuff
Icon by sunlitdays
Planners ‘verse, pre-apoc.
Anna set down her glasses and pushed aside the heavy leather-bound book she’d been working on. The copy wouldn’t have quite the same thick tactile feel as the original – they could take the time to scan, OCR, print, and bind copies of books that were falling into dust, but not to letterpress print them. There were too many books to save for that – but it could be read without destroying it, so its knowledge would not be lost.
She ran her thumb over the gold-leafed spine. Somewhere, someone in the Family thought that this information was worth saving, worth her time to bind and Janelle’s to scan and edit. But after hours dealing with rich leather and dry text, she was craving something a little more juicy and a little less weighty. She stretched, popping her back in three places, and, with a silent apology to the text on windmill construction, headed for the door.
A twenty-minute walk (and a cup of coffee and two doughnuts; it had been a hard day) later, she was nestled in the back corner of her favorite second-hand book store, surrounded in piles of paperbacks and gleefully searching for the trashiest supernatural romance she could find. The proprietor, a grubby, grumpy man named Rick who usually set aside centuries-old wrecks for her, was cheerfully pulling trash from his shelves.
“This one should be good,” he offered, handing her a cover with a leather-pants-clad woman with a tramp stamp and decorative claw marks. “Enjoy.”
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Anna and Janelle might like to consider some good fiction that should be copied as well. Not necessarily officially. Or they could argue for it on the basis of ideas, slide it in beside biography and autobiography.
Yep, find some things that show up the value of proper planning or learning, or other messages that they’d like to convey to future generations. Or books that have people managing to survive and build after disasters (hmm… Say Heinlein’s Tunnel In The Sky for one with what was supposed to just be a camping trip/survival demonstration turning into a true survival demonstration when the students aren’t picked up at the appointed time and have to use a few months (one season’s? It’s been a decade or so since I read it) supplies to give themselves a chance to survive for an unknown length of time).
Or classics, perhaps. Or cultural-shift books. Stephen King.
I took a three-hour bookbinding class a few years ago. It was rather enjoyable. But, if you were doing it day-in-day-out and as fast as you can while still doing a good job — yeah, you would start getting desires for cheap pulp paper. 🙂 It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for some of their
argumentsdebates over methodology. Such as glued versus sown bindings (I’ve heard arguments that properly done a glued binding should be just as lasting and secure as a sown binding, and that the problems usually given have more to do with cheap glues and poor technique) and printing methods.“Perfect bindings aren’t” was the way someone I used to know described the problem.
I had a job for ~ 6 months working in the book arts center of a small college. Took a class in letterpress and some summer classes in bookbinding. LOVE LOVE LOVED it.
At the time the statement was made game system books were coming out in ‘perfect binding’ and they would crack the first time you opened them. They weren’t inexpensive books, so it was annoying.
*grins* I love a good paranormal romance. They are pretty trashy, but so fun. So I can totally relate to this one. *grins* Thanks.
*grin* yeah, I was trying to elicit the trashiest of the trashy with that one. 😀
*grins* Trashy can be very fun. And the covers are often embarrassing. I think you hit the nail on the head.
‘zzah!