Ep. 303: Three 303 Blank Notebooks

Bookbinding

I delved into prefect binding – the binding that uses glue instead of thread to keep the signatures together; the style of binding most common in ordinary store-bought, factory-produced books that sometimes results in pages falling to the floor on the 787 flying to London, if you were so lucky as to be heading to Europe while re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow. Or your classroom floor. 

I made three blank notebooks using the perfect binding. They are all in the landscape orientation to make it easier to use more of the pages as I envisioned them as notepads for artists.

Book One is A5 with brown endpapers and green tactile covers. It has maybe 50 pages. I grabbed a bunch of a massive amount of paper I got years and years ago from a printing company that was going to throw them all away. The spine edge is tinted blue and there are printer’s cut marks, also on the spine edge. The title is 303. It is pasted on the front using the same paper as the brown craft endpapers.

Why 303? I read about Lennon and McCartney talking about their song One After 909 and the journalist wondered why 909? I assumed it was either a train designation or a departure time. In the article, Lennon mentioned that he had an affinity and connection to the number 9 (Number 9 Dream, Revolution Number 9, One After 909) being born on October 9, and the Beatles first performing in the Cavern Club on Feb 9, 1961, and on Ed Sullivan three years later, also on February 9th. Well, if he had a connection to 9, I wondered, like the journalist, what number do I have a connection with (Other than my birthday and Mick Jagger’s being the same day (different year))? 303 was my draft number back in 1969 when the Nixon administration was handing out draft numbers so that 18-year-old men could know when to move to Canada to avoid the draft. Or plan their lives around being drafted. As it turned out, some draft boards began drafting men in reverse order. I switched my 2S student draft deferment to 1A available but was not called up. Whew, a long and winding road to explain a three-digit title.

Book Two is smaller. Rather than A5 it is A6 (about the same as an American pocket book). I used part of my supply of Chiyogami paper for the title (again, 303). The endpapers are the same brown craft paper as the first book.

This book is completely blank, so it’s useful for doodling or planning trips to Liverpool with your significant other to check out the Mona Lisa Twins (or on YouTube) covering Beatle songs in the Cavern Club. It is small enough to fit in your pocket for easy access to sketch fellow travelers or musicians. It has about 60 plus pages.

Book Three is also A5 with the endpapers pulled from a local newspaper’s stock page. The front title is also pulled from the newspaper but the final 3 is a colorized advertisement for osechi-ryori which is a traditional meal prepared for the New Year’s holidays. Enough food, technically, to feed a person for three days. The colorized final 3 is echoed on the back cover where the 303 is duplicated but in a smaller size with the final 3 upside down. Book Three also has a title page: 303 Tedorigawa Sunrise and the Tedorigawa logo and QR code on the final page. 

I’m not sure if I will be making more of these perfect-bound blank notebooks. I’m not sure if I will be using them or selling them. If you’d like one, let me know. I’m also not sure how long they will last as perfect binding is not known for holding the pages in for long periods, as I mentioned above about pages spilling out all over your classroom floor or the floor of your flight to Barcelona, among other European destinations.

I once bought a book that the entire cover came off about an hour after I bought it. The store clerk sympathized and offered to give me a replacement which, of course, I accepted with gratitude. The cover of that perfect-bounded book has stayed on for about 40 years.

Fiction

In fiction, we have two stories to tell. First, the Proust–Mann Connection. No, I’m not writing a novel called the Proust–Mann Connection (although that might be a nifty title for a time-warping adventure story). I’m reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (I’m in book three: The Guermantes Way) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I have noticed some similarities.

First, they were published within two years of each other which means they were probably written simultaneously (in different countries and languages). Second, they both deal with memory or mis-memory or daydreams. One scene, in particular, is when the unnamed narrator in Proust daydreams about an activity he hopes to have with Mme Guermantes. There is a very similar scene in Mann when Hans Castorp similarly fantasizes about Madame Chauchat. Third, minorly, the unnamed narrator in Proust talks about a memory of his when he was in the Alps at a spa recovering from an unnamed ailment which, of course, is where The Magic Mountain takes place, in a spa in the Alps where the rich recover from lung diseases (probably tuberculosis). 

In my fiction, I’ve worked a bit on The Posthumous Autobiography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Now, for a long time, I was stuck on it. I moved neither forward nor backward. Then, while looking at a very partial and incomplete outline, thoughts appeared in my head about the structure of the life of Agnes. And a flood of revisions and changes swept across my keyboard (normally, liquid on a keyboard is a bad thing.). 

Changes include a new opening chapter, a strengthening of three characters to bring them forward in the plot, and a very large narrative arc for one incident. This last one, the long narrative arc, starts early, includes hints along the way, and concludes near the end of the book. It is a vision that frustrates Agnes because her visions confuse or and most of her visions conclude several chapters after their introduction. 

Videos

A blank notebook using a recycled bathtub lid (cleaned, by me), and suitable for spilling drinks on at your favorite coffee shop is available at Ofuro no Futa (Bathtub lid in the lingua franca of Japan).