Off Topic 1: Lumio Book Lamp

A slight deviation from the regularly scheduled programming but this is too good not to share. I love gadgets and usually jump on things that advance technology but rarely have I been this excited about something as simple as a lamp.

Love the design.

I think it’s pretty clear that I’m a bibliophile at heart so when I heard about the Lumio book lamp half a year ago, I couldn’t wait to back the Kickstarter project. Following the inventor’s updates was a journey that was worth the price of the backing alone. Encountering setback after setback in both material sourcing and manufacturing, it was eye opening for anyone who ever wondered what it takes to bring something from idea on paper to mass production. Without further ado:

The box also doubles as a slipcase for travel.

Clean and simple.

Designed as a book, the lamp turns on when you open the cover, radiating a warm glow. The wider you open it, the more light comes out. The Lumio opens all the way around to form a desk lamp or a hanging lamp with the strap. Pics make it look dimmer than it actually is to capture more of the detail.

The wraparound cover is made of wood (I choose dark walnut) and the ‘pages’ are made of Tyvek. Both covers also have high strength magnets that are used to hold the book closed or fully open. They also function with the two round wooden circles that also function as a clasp, stand, and wall/desk mount – genius design. The best part is that the Lumio runs on a lithium-ion battery that powers it for 8 hours and charges with a micro USB port.

At about $100.00, the price is a bit steep but the quality of this project is just stunning. From the production of the wood and power of the battery to the solid design of the box to the leather strap and wood accessories, it’s clear that this was made to last. Hell, the USB cable was even cloth braided to guard against wear and tear.

Fits into the bookshelf well.

Small enough to take anywhere, this may turn out to be one of the more useful gadgets I’ve bought. Simple idea but build a better mousetrap… Definitely well worth picking up for anyone who loves books.

The official site: http://www.hellolumio.com/#introduction

The original Kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lumio/lumio-one-lamp-multiple-forms-infinite-possibiliti

W46: The Leisure Hour

After this week, I’m more convinced than ever that the Biblio-Mat has a darker sense of humour than I do. Having to pack for a cross country trip, I needed to get two books from the machine to keep to my schedule so it decided to give me last week’s 594 pages of goodness and this:

Yep, that's a quarter.

The Leisure Hour may have well been called The Leisure Month, because at 764 pages of tiny text it was a beast of a timesink. Published in 1883, this tome appeared to be the collected issues of a year’s worth of The Leisure Hour, a magazine akin to Reader’s Digest with one crucial difference – no author names were published. With a gorgeous forest green embossed cloth cover and gilded text, it screamed antiquarian relic that would classy up any bookshelf. For a hundred and thirty year old book, it was also in amazing shape, probably due to having never been read all the way through till now.

Phonebook-esque.

The worst part about this book was that it came at the most inconvenient time. Flying to Vancouver and driving back across the country to Montreal was daunting enough but doing it while lugging this book along with the previous week’s was just plain punishing. Travelling light was not an option since it was an extra eight pounds of paper between the two books but at least it provided some distraction on the flight and drive since it was quite the random read.

I did take the train back from Montreal so this section was relevant.

For most trips I tend to have a short attention span due to the nature of travelling so in this sense, The Leisure Hour fit the bill perfectly. Composed of short stories, anecdotes, quick snippets of informational instruction, poems, and editorial articles, it was very much a pick up and go book. With most pieces in the book falling between two to five pages, it was actually quite digestible despite the sheer number of pages. While I had never been a huge fan of Reader’s Digest, something about The Leisure Hour captivated me.

Perhaps it was the redundancy, perhaps.

Part of this was no doubt the way it looked. This was magnificently decadent, which was not that surprising as the magazine most likely had a fairly large following and thus had the support to produce a solid anthology. It could not have been cheap to purchase and this particular volume had “To Aggie, From Phebe, Xmas 1883” written inside.

What was most striking about this book were the engravings that populated almost half the pages. While the only coloured one was the frontispiece, there were eleven that were printed on thicker toned paper and numerous that were scattered across the stories and articles. These ranged from scientific illustration to simple doodles to maps to ridiculously detailed etchings that must have taken hundreds of hours to produce.

The full colour was seriously impressive.

For the contents itself, The Leisure Hour was all over the place. Luckily, I had a solid week of traveling to read it all. The anthology opened with a story called ‘The Old Man’s Will’, which would soon turn out to be part of the framework of the collection. When I started reading it, it ended abruptly with four chapters that totaled thirteen pages. The next forty-one chapters would unfold in nine parts scattered throughout, turning it into the longest serial in the book. With a style reminiscent of Jane Austen, it told the tale of a young girl caught up in a love triangle of sorts with suitors from a wealthy family.

Vintage rom-coms.

Despite my disdain for melodramatic romance, I did find myself becoming excited when another piece of the serial popped up and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get drawn into the story. Alas, just when the girl appeared to finally begin to fall for the right man, the story cut out at the end of the anthology. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t find any information on this story as no authors are credited in The Leisure Hour so it appears that I will need to find the 1884 edition to find out what happens. Worst cliffhanger since The Wheel of Time.

The rest of the book was tame by comparison but still quite entertaining. Travel and revelations into other cultures made up a good portion of the editorial articles, probably since much of the world was still considered to be exotic in this time period. Surprisingly, the articles weren’t as unknowingly racists as I would have imagined, but did still had an undertone of considering most of the non-white cultures as savages.

Russians, though, were still cool.

Also enlightening were the educational entries describing how things, such as newspapers, were made and how professions, such as lawyers, work. This not only provided a look into the history of these items and people, but also the society at the time and how they were perceived. Scattered throughout were also various poems that seemed to have been almost included as filler to fix the white space on columns. While not fantastic, it did provide nice breaks from the blocks of encyclopedic text in some sections.

The art was hands down the best part.

All in all, if I hadn’t had a week and a half to spend reading this, I probably would not have enjoyed it as much since you really do need time to digest the almost five hundred pieces of writing. Despite the abundance of illustrations, it was still a heavy read, made heavier when I eventually track down the next volume.

Book rating: 9/10 (Beautiful book, entertaining content, random goodness)

Random quote: “’Forgive me,’ he resumed gently. ‘I thought I was seeking your future happiness.’” (Pickup lines circa 1883)

W45: Darkness and Dawn

This week’s Biblio-Mat book came out with the heavy thunk that was usually accompanied by the sight of a textbook but instead out dropped a work of drama… that was loosely based off of textbooks.

Finally, a good piece of fict- Oh.

Dawn and Darkness was a small book but a lot thicker than it appeared to be. At 594 thin pages, it fell on the longer side of Bibio-Mat books but at least it looked impressive. With a navy clothbound cover, gold foil embossing, and gilding on the top edge, it had a regal vibe to it that, if nothing else, will at least make my bookshelf look more sophisticated. The interior pages were so thin they showed a bit of the text from the other side and the first quarter of the pages had heavy foxing, though, which was unfortunate but not surprising for a book of this age. Written by F. W. Farrar and printed in 1892, this particular edition had a book plate from the Manchester Diocesan Board of Education stating that it was part of an annual prize awarded for teachers of religious knowledge in 1891.

Curious to know what the other parts of this prize was.

Despite the length, Darkness and Dawn was a fast read. It was a re-imagining of various scenes of the life of Nero from ascension to pitiful death and all the misery in between, which made for an entertaining book for people who are amused by chaos and despair. Needless to say, I loved it. The preface stated that the author researched the life of Nero intensively and used surviving knowledge of the emperor as the framework to his story to make it as accurate as possible, but it actually read more like a fantasy novel than history book. What was missing, though, were illustrations and etchings that seemed to go hand in hand with books of this nature from the 1800’s.

The foxing, though, did fill every other page with abstract art.

The most interesting aspect, though, came at the beginning of each chapter where Farrar opened with a quote or reference from other works that related to the chapter. These snippets were presented in their original languages and usually followed with a translation below, which set the tone well for the chapter.

The tone was pretty much hatred in every chapter.

For those not familiar with Roman history, Nero was the emperor probably most known for fiddling while Rome burned. This, of course, was an exaggeration as he simply lounged around fawning over the flames and singing odes to the fire but never actually picked up any instruments. Regarded as a cruel and tyrannical emperor that offed anyone that looked at him funny, he is often overshadowed by his uncle Caligula, mainly because Tinto Brass never made a film about him.

Cruel? Maybe. Fabulous? Definitely.

The book begins with Nero coming to power through the death of his great-uncle Claudius, who was also his stepfather (it was a different time). From the first few pages he was already painted as a spoiled brat that looked down on everyone, including said uncle, and spent his time scheming and tormenting others.  However, it played out in this version that his mother was the one who poisoned Claudius so that Nero could replace him on the throne. The plotting and execution was quite well written and read better than most thrillers today, especially since there were a lot of throwbacks to the beginning at the end that made the small details much more significant.

The following chapters depicted various scenes of Nero’s reign. While a good chunk of it centered around his half-brother Britannicus and his half-sister Octavia, who was also his wife (it was a very different time), much of the book followed the struggle of power between the Tolkien-level ensemble of characters and showcased the sheer amount of deceit and backstabbing in Roman politics.

Cause modern politics is so clean.

Funny enough, for the infamous great fire scene, Nero was presented almost as a sympathetic figure. Sure, he enjoyed seeing the city in flames and was fascinated by the inferno, but the citizen’s accusation of him being the one who set the fire felt like a witch-hunt that targeted a naïve boy who just happened to have a borderline sexual fixation on bright red and yellow colours.

Weaving countless storylines together, the book drew on a lot of imagined interactions that paid off in real events. As this was based on real life, there were a lot of deaths as none of the characters could be rescued from the history books. What resulted was an intricate tale of plotting, power struggles, incest, murders, royal schemes, and vengeance. I half expected a crazy blonde girl to show up at the end with three dragons since this might as well have been Game of Thrones without the Starks. Seriously, Nero was pretty much this kid:

Admit it, you can't wait to see him die.

Book rating: 8.5/10 (If all history books were written like this there would be a lot less sleeping at school)

Random quote: “They began to dig the grave, and he whined out, ‘Oh. What an artist to perish! What and artist to perish!’” (I’m determined to use this at least once in my lifetime)

W44: Pioneer Work

Every time I’ve brought a friend to use the Biblio-Mat they would go first and get an amazingly fascinating book and I would become excited only to drop my toonie in and pull a dull read, like say, a book about commuting across the prairies twenty odd times. So this time, I figured I would go first and fool the mechanical book machine elves inside. Didn’t work. My friend received an old book of vintage card games. I ended up with this:

Who wanted to read about awesome vintage card games anyway?

Outside of the publisher’s logo, the light olive green cloth cover was bare. The spine read Pioneer Work, however, the title page called it Pioneer Work for Women, and the publisher’s page called it Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, so someone was clearly just seeing what was going to stick to the wall.

No nonsense coversheet.

Interestingly, there was no publishing date but from different references in the foreword, it appears to have been printed around 1913. Although the book was only 236 pages long, the font was tiny and the text went a lot further to the edges of each page than normal books.

Pioneer Works was actually an autobiography by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States in 1849. She was famous enough to have a legitimate Wikipedia page so at least the book was not a completely unknown piece of work as it is often the case with Biblio-Mat books.

Apparently she's pretty great at treating insomnia.

The first few chapters in the book covered her childhood, which turns out was fairly privileged in both wealth and family values. Born in England to a liberal sugar factory owner with very progressive ideas, her childhood would be considered more modern than what most kids go through even today. For instance, instead of beatings, she actually got time outs to reflect on her mistakes. This was in the early 1800s. Hell, I grew up in the 90s and I still got spankings left right and center (builds character). This would actually end up explaining a lot of the things she would go on to do further in life.

At least she had a great eye for title pages.

In her early teens, her family moved to America and they ended up spending some time in New York before moving to Cincinnati. What was fascinating in these chapters was the sheer amount of racism present in her new environment, all described in detail. It became a constant reminder of the time period and setting.

Inside cover was fairly artsy as well.

Surprisingly, her college career made up only a small portion of the book considering how groundbreaking it was at the time. Summed up in twenty odd pages, the rest of the book focused on her studies and adventures in Europe. This ranged from political protests to hanging out with Lady Byron. Ultimately she leaves England again and returns to America to do medical work and spends much of the latter chapters in correspondence with various people she met in London.

Didn't even know pig skin was an option...

The writing style of Pioneer Work lent a lot to the readability of the book as the actual core story was neither amazing nor educational. Reminiscent of Jane Austen’s narrative with a heavier epistolary twist, the prose had a flowery tint that was sometimes overpowering but ultimately held attention throughout. Without the artistic flourish, though, the biography could have been summed up as rich English girl goes to America, enrolls in medical school, graduates after studying really hard, and ends up wandering back and forth between America and England.

Book rating: 7.5/10 (Much better than anticipated)

Random quote: “I find interesting details of that long drive, when every day took me farther and farther away from all that I loved.” (Life summed up in a sentence)

W43: The Carver’s Companion

This week’s Biblio-Mat offering came out of the machine with a quiet thunk. Being thin and wide, I was hoping for a book of illustrations but received a tome of crafts.

Meta.

Published in 1958, The Carver’s Companion was a book on carving wood and stone by Peter Morton. With a brown non-descript cloth cover, the book very much resembled a piece of wood with a small oak leaf engraved on it. At 70 pages, it was one of the shortest books I’ve received from the Biblio-Mat, but felt much thicker due to the 46 unnumbered photo plates pages spaced throughout.

Also a lot of in-text illustrations.

The Carver’s Companion began with an introduction into the art of woodcarving. Interestingly enough, it focused on the two branching paths of apprenticeship versus art school with arguments that could be applied to many fields of study. Through apprenticeship there was more hands on practice but one would be limited to making the products the shop produces. While boring, it did eventually allow you to master a task completely and utterly. The path of art school, though, contained more theory and explored a wide range of mediums and styles but never focuses on anything long enough to be proficient at it. Seeing how the examples of the greatest carvers given all started as apprentices, the book was clearly leaning towards the side of learning through doing.

Most artsy fruit bowl ever.

From there, the book opens up into the actual craft of carving. Listing the tools required, which were a lot, it jumped right into exercises to practice the art of woodcarving. This pretty much amounted to buying planks of wood and learning how to gouge straight lines, curved lines, and intersecting lines into the wood. Once that was practiced enough came the next steps of carving block letters.

I own nothing that remotely like this. (This will be important later)

Surprisingly, the next section after these basic exercises focused on the importance of taste and design. With more focus on composition, the information provided didn’t actually teach design as much as implant the notion of its importance. Aspiring stone carvers were also told that they’ll need to become woodcarvers first as the disciplines build upon the shared principles of basic carving.

Carving made easy: Find a block of stone, then chip away anything that doesn't look like a man.

Moving onto furniture carving, it became apparent that this book wasn’t as much a how-to guide as it was a how-should guide. With the bulk of the lessons basically revolving around practicing and studying how the works of master carvers were created, it was less than useful to the carver looking for instruction. Thankfully, the Roman lettering section included picture guides that at least showed you what the final work should aspire to be like.

Basically: Keep practicing until it looks like this.

Ending on material selection and restoration, I felt that much of the important parts of carving, such as techniques, planning, and more importantly, mistake covering up, were eschewed for historical analysis of famous works, which was funny given the emphasis on apprenticeship over art school at the beginning.

Of course, that didn’t stop the grand tradition of participating whenever an arts and crafts book comes out of the random book machine. A quick trip to Home Depot resulted in a small plank of wood and a box cutter as buying a hundred dollar set of wood carving tools I would only use once was only a slightly worst idea than cutting down a random tree in the middle of the city for carving material. The result was less than satisfactory.

Yep, that's wood alright.

Even in high school I knew that woodwork was not for me, placing far below cooking, metalwork, and sewing. With that in mind, I went for an easy design – the Biblio-Mat. After all, rectangles meant easier straight cuts, which were simple enough, until the $2.50 nature of the wood reared its head and started splintering. Now I understand the desire for endangered exotic hardwood as the splintery texture of homegrown pine sucks for the delicate art of box cutter carving.

Two hours not very well spent.

I think I’ll stick to needlepoint.

Book rating: 5/10 (Interesting subject, bad follow through)

Random quote: “But the beginner should not be too kind to his hands and too harsh to his pocket.” (So true in almost every new hobby)

W42: RCA-Victor Records

Albeit a strange read, this week’s Biblio-Mat book was nothing less than fascinating in capturing a slice of music history.

Definitely has a kitschy feel to it.

RCA-Victor Records was actually a 1950 catalog of all the musical records RCA-Victor had produced up till then. The stylized blue/red gradient cover on cheap cardstock seemed to capture a beach sunset and evoked a surf culture vibe even though it predated the movement by a decade or so. The 297 interior pages were beginning to become brittle, which isn’t surprising as the 25 cent printed price pretty much guaranteed that the quality of paper would be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Interesting enough, this catalog was printed for the Canadian market, which couldn't have been that much different than the American market at the time.

Copyright was a simpler thing back then.

My first memory of RCA revolved around their cassette tapes. My parents had a whole bunch that they would record Chinese music on and I was always fascinated by the RCA ones since they were all solid black with white ‘RCA’ on them, which stuck out from the multicoloured and transparent tapes of Maxell, TDK, Sony, etc. It would be many years before I actually learned what those letters meant.

Kids today have it easy.

RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, grew out of a monopoly backed by the US Army and Navy. Formed in 1919, it lasted until 1986 when it was bought by GE and then broken up. Like Sanyo, the brand license was sold to manufacturer goods with the name since it still held value to people, which explains why we continue to be able to buy RCA branded electronics today. The recording arm of RCA, though, split off into a separate entity and is still active under Sony Music Entertainment.

With the purchase of the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929, RCA-Victor was formed and became one of two main record labels in the US. Going up against the 33 1/3 LP’s introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, RCA-Victor opted to push their 45 rpm vinyls hard but the format was a dismal failure, probably due to people having to swap records every five minutes. As such, this 1950 catalog was probably one of the last ones to have a 45rpm focus.

Probably a good thing.

The beginning of the catalog gave great insight into what the musical tastes of the time were. With a section on all the famous composers arranged in chronological order, it was clear that classical music was the big market at the time. Even more useful, though, was the pronunciation guide for foreign names and titles.

Bahkh!

This was followed by a glossary of musical terms that proved to be more enlightening than first thought as it not only covered the standard common terms like Allegro and Forte but also the lesser known and more obscure ones like Fantasie, Pizzicato, and Scherzo. The eight pages of terms was probably the highlight of the book in terms of pure educational value, which was very much unexpected from a catalog.

This was quickly followed by what was expected from a catalog – advertisements. The three pages of ads contained the only images in the whole book shilling RCA-Victor’s brand of needles, record players, and storage albums, probably because you would need a whole book full of 45’s to play a half hour of music.

Not as fun as the stuff on the back of comic books.

The majority of the catalog itself wasn’t much of a read as it was just a reference for order numbers and prices. Though this section spanned 271 pages, it was actually much shorter in terms of unique items as each record showed up twice - once under the title of the song and again under the artist. That being said, it was still an enlightening read through as it not only showed where the musical tastes of the masses leaned towards at the time, but also the scope of music industry in 1950.

Is it a soundtrack if it only has one song?

This catalog contained every record RCA-Victor had produced up until the middle of the 20th century yet still contained fewer songs than probably half the people I know have on their computers. It’s a shocking reminder of how pop culture music as we know it is still a relatively young medium. Most of the records ranged between $0.85 to $1.25. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $8.00 to $11.75, which isn’t too bad for a record until you realize it only had two songs on it at most.

RCA-Victor seemed to have mainly backed the orchestral and classical scene and it wasn’t until they bought Elvis Presley’s contract in 1955 that their focus shifted into more pop culture. As such, most of the artists and songs in the catalog outside of play recitals and motion picture soundtracks were unknown to me so I will end this with the most famous RCA-Victor artist I found in the book:  

Spike Jones and Lisztomania at its best.

Book rating: 7/10 (Unexpected fun read)

Random quote: “Storage albums are readily stored in cabinets like books and the resulting library will gradually grow, enriching one’s life and providing unfailing entertainment for the leisure hours.” (Provided you have records to put in them and a record player to play those records…)

W41: Cathedral Cities of Spain

This week’s blog post comes a couple days late on account of me taking a trip and not packing a laptop due to the Biblio-Mat spitting this out:

Yep, that's a quarter.

Published in 1909, Cathedral Cities of Spain was 347 deckle edge pages long and weighed a good four pounds. With gilded lettering on a dark red embossed cloth cover, it had a regal beauty to it that continued into the interior with red and black all caps typeface on the title page that set the tone for the rest of the book. 

Pretty.

Interestingly enough, the author, W. W. Collins, R.I, also illustrated all the remarkably beautiful plates inside. Upon researching him further, it turns out that William Wiehe Collins was actually a landscape painter, which makes it all the more impressive that he somehow managed to fill three hundred odd pages with words.

Worth at least a couple thousand.

My first thought when I picked up this book fell somewhere along the lines of ‘Cathedral Cities of Spain? Isn’t that pretty much all of them?’. My second thought was on how much it looked like a gothic phone directory. Luckily, my week consisted of going to Chicago to run the marathon, which meant two days of sitting on a balcony doing absolutely zero physical activity to rest up for the race, so there was actually ample time to delve through the tome on this trip.

Really, how many non-Cathedral cities are there?

For a 104-year-old book, this copy of Cathedral Cities of Spain held up remarkably well. Binding was tight and pages were still white and flexible. Most surprising, though, was that it included sixty plates reproducing Collins’ watercolour paintings of the cathedrals in full colour. Considering most of the newer books I’ve received from the Biblio-Mat only contained black and white images, this was impressively decadent. There were also a number of unopened pages that made reading difficult but I did not have the heart to slice them apart seeing how they survived a century in this state.

The deckle edges were legit.

The book itself was a very straightforward guide to all the big cathedrals in Spain, broken down into twenty-four cities. Speaking of each city as if it was a past lover and an old friend, Collins evoked a romantic feel into every location in the journey, whether it was a grand hub of commerce or a fishing town. However, he never shied away from discussing the negative aspects of each city either, pointing out bleakness and boredom in some areas and rampant poverty and begging in the streets of others. It was a refreshingly honest perspective that is seldom seen in travel books, oh like, say The English Lake District.

If you squint it looks like a Monet. Then again, so does everything else.

 Devoting an average of twelve pages per city, Cathedral Cities of Spain felt like a whirlwind tour of the country that was efficient yet satisfying. Each chapter contained a quick anecdote about Collins’ journey and a brief history of some notable events that happened there before launching full force into describing the cathedral scene. For the first few chapters this description was limited to how the buildings looked but as he travelled deeper and deeper into cathedral country he became more and more immersed in what the cathedrals contained.

More often than not: dead bodies.

In some instances, such as the Alhambra in Granada, not only was he was able to journey down into the crypts to see the tombs of kings and queens from another era, but also allowed to go through relics that the average visitor would probably never hear about, let alone see. It was truly an exploration into the history and culture of these cathedrals that felt like I was there uncovering the past with him.  

Who needs photos when you have immaculate watercolours?

Inspired by this, I decided to explore the cathedrals of Chicago, a city known for its architecture, and document my own historical findings. Unfortunately, it turns out that running 42 kilometers straight does terrible things to one’s ability to ascend and descend stairs so I gave up after reaching St. James Cathedral. However, I did make a visit to the very close by and very street level Chicago Tribune Tower, which contains numerous fragments of temples and cathedrals from across the world. Rubbing them is almost the same as visiting them right?

Not so forbidden now, eh?

Book rating: 7/10 (Bonus point for being ancient)

Random quote: “Next to it hangs Ferdinand’s sword, with a remarkably small handle. I had thought from the kneeling effigy in the Capilla Real, that both he and Isabella must have been “small made” and this verified my guess.” (Turn of the century PC?)