the failure blog
all of my ideas about blogging, it turns out, have to do with failure. i keep thinking up topics that are failure-heavy: failed coptic binding, failed teaching experiments, failed writing, failed violin practice, and of course, bookstore failures.
This doesn’t —- or shouldn’t —- have the itchy schadenfreude or self-pitying tinge of failblog; rather, it should be a celebration of trying and failing and trying again, and knowing that failure is a part of trying, a part of succeeding, and a thing often more full of learning and excitement than success is. Maybe Beckett put it best:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
First up: adhesive failure.
While working on the broadside for Genine’s reading last friday (which you can check out here: unplumbedpress.com), I hit up against the fact that adhering one piece of paper with a center fold to another piece of paper with a center fold, and expecting both pieces to remain perfectly flat and in sync whether folded or unfolded… this is a pipe dream. a fantasy (unless the inner paper has a ton of give; very little sizing, perhaps). at least with the paper we were using (beckett concept sandpaper in 70# text, which was beautiful, but not terribly cooperative, and gainsborough cover, which was also beautiful, but very rigid).
On to the adhesive fails. Glue sticks are nice, but soon gave in to the repeated strain of folding and unfolding (the broadsides fell apart).
I tried PVA —- and of course, if you use PVA (or any wet glue), you have to dry the adhered thing under weight. Under weight! If you dry it under weight and open… the thing doesn’t want to close. the inner paper buckles. If you dry it under weight and closed… it doesn’t want to open.
Man. What a doozy.
Now, at this point we were kind of pressed for time, and I started to be really against the idea of wet glue, period. The whole drying under weight thing? it seemed to me like a fool’s errand. The kind that would leave us with no fancy broadside folios to give away at the reading, and lots of glue on our hands (and clothes, and the zen center’s beautiful dining tables, and my dining table, and…). Enter the adhesive of champions: double-stick tape.
That’s right. Double-stick tape. The photo/archival kind. We went with the Tombo kind in the cute little applicator. Why? Don’t know. ‘Cause it was cute, I guess. We use up nine of those suckers, in the end.
Still there was that same problem, though. If we adhered it flat, it didn’t want to close without wrinkling the inner paper, and if we did a tricky kind of closed-book gluing, it didn’t want to open all the way.
What did we do? Like good little buddhists*, we took the Middle Path. hyuck, hyuck. We split the difference. I adhered them while holding them open at a 45 degree angle, and left a little pocket of non-tapedness at the “spine.”
It still doesn’t open flat. So it’s still kind of a failure on the adhesive front. But it mostly opens. And, thank god, nothing wrinkled or buckled or otherwise sabotaged the smooth speckly beauty of the Beckett Concept.
Confidential to Mohawk: XOXOXOXOX.
*For the record, I’m not a buddhist. Genine is, though. As far as I know
