Don't step on my double wall box

People say stuff all the time.  Some of it sounds great and right and important, but not all of it is really true.

One thing bookbinders hear is the importance of stepping the walls of double wall drop spine boxes.  It sure sounds good and right and important.

Here's what I'm talking about.

When I make my double wall boxes, for large and heavy books I cut and glue together the walls of the trays.

They are glued together to make the trays.

What folks argue for is the need to step the walls like shown here. This would increase the glue area by one board thickness.

After I put the walls together I line the trays with paper.

Then cover with cloth. I've been using Natuurlinen the past seveal years, but use other materials as well.

We had someone come by the school one year ranting about how you had to step the walls of double walled boxes.  I have this view that all binders and conservators rant about six or seven things, but no two agree on which seven things they should be getting upset about. 

So we did an experiment where we made two trays and then tore them apart. Guess what? No difference. It was extremely difficult to tear either of them apart. They both were over engineered.  We didn't know which we were tearing apart until after the experiment so there was no cheating.

Obviously it's not just the joints that matter. The paper lining helps.  Bookcloth is difficult to tear, and remember that testing cloth strength on a box wouldn't be done by tearing the edge of the cloth but by grabbing cloth away from the edge and trying to pull it apart.  Hard to to do with any cloth.

So, don't waste your time with stepped joints. They look good, until they're covered.  It sounds good that you're using them.  They just don't make any real difference.

The Illegal Immigrant from Sweden

I love the mundane. I don’t find it boring or meaningless. I love all it tells and find what is common to be rich, interesting, and full of life. You just need to look beyond the words, read between the lines.

My Swedish grandfather, my father’s father, was an illegal immigrant who jumped ship in New York. He stayed in New York City for a while before bouncing around Colorado, Illinois, and Nebraska, always one step ahead of Immigration and their attempts to deport him. He didn’t accomplish any great things, but his life tells the story of immigration, or at least one immigrant who came here to escape a circle of poverty.

He came from a long line of tenant farmers who faced bouts in debtor’s prison and the like. It clearly was not a happy life in Sweden and he got out the only way he could, it seems. Worked on a boat and took off when it moored in the city.

He died before I was born, and I never heard much about him when I was growing up. He came from Linköping. His family had lived in that part of Sweden for centuries.

Never knowing him, and not hearing much about him, made me curious. My father had this book of his and it fascinated me when I was younger. It’s funny how much it says about him and his life, but not in words exactly.

To me this book says more about him, and his life, than a diary would have.

Here is the book. A limp leather binding, about 5 x 8 inches. It was not an expensive book, was meant to be an account book of some type, but he bought it to use as a notebook.

The book is filled with all kinds of writing.

He used this book for several years. The earliest writings are from his time in New York City, but on the front flyleaf he’s written his locations as Osceola, Nebraska, and Rockford, Illinois—two of the three cities he ran between to avoid being deported.








Many of his early writings are songs in Swedish. Some religious, some not. He was not a religious person but had attended the state church until his confirmation and I think he just liked music and singing.

One thing that’s interesting is that many of the songs are carefully written in nice handwriting. As the book progresses they are written in pencil without the same level of care and they are more and more in English. Of course they would be.

This one, as you can see, was written 14 months later in Nebraska, in 1911, and is in English.

This page sort of makes me laugh. It is a reference from the Michigan Avenue Garage and says two things that aren’t true. One is that he had worked there since 1902. He didn’t leave Sweden until several years later. The other is that he is a sober and industrious young man. From what I learned from my father we can say that he was a young man. Let’s leave it at that.

That date is either 1912 or 1913.

But he was an illegal immigrant and, after reading this, a fraudulent one as well! Maybe I should be deported because of his actions?

But there are also pages in there with financial records. Hours worked and money received. That’s a lot of 9 hour days and only one day off a week. And a grand total of 29.03 for the month.

I’ve never taken the time to figure out what year this was though it wouldn’t be hard to do based on the dates and day of the week.  And one could extrapolate where his wages fell, was he doing well or barely getting by?

The book also has contributions from my Aunts. I’d like to think they were children when they did this. Hopefully.

Towards the end of the book he wrote this song out. Was it only a song or was he missing Sweden? I understand from his niece, who I met in the 80s, that he only wrote back home a couple of times and then disappeared.

“Last night I dreamed a dream so sweet I thought I saw my home sweet home”

I think the fact that I was so fascinated by this book was an omen that I would enjoy doing what I do now. Preserving the small and seemingly insignificant stuff that can mean and tell so much. And often in a much more interesting way than the broad and “important.”

Folks ask what I’ve enjoyed working on the most and they want to hear it’s all the old stuff, but really it’s the stuff that has a story to tell that’s worth preserving. Even it’s the story of a poor Swedish immigrant who spent years running from deportation.

Eventually World War I began and he joined the army, and in so doing he became a citizen and his problem was solved. He served in Colorado and settled in Denver where my father was raised near Washington Park.

In 1980 I attended college in Linköping and was able to walk around streets that would have been familiar to him. In a way it felt like completing a circle for him.

years ending in 6 have been good... part 2

1996

It all really started in the late 1800s when so many Scandinavians moved to Seattle that English wasn’t even spoken in some neighborhoods and households. Norwegians, mainly, who moved there to do what they had done in Norway: fish.

My grandmother, born in Minnesota, moved to Seattle in 1901 when she was two. She spoke only Norwegian at home, with friends, shopping—until she started school—all Norwegian.

So many Scandinavians moved to Washington State that part of the charter for the University of Washington required the school to have a Scandinavian Department. The charter calls for, not just a few classes covering that part of the world, but a whole department.

Another result of this migratory influx was that my high school offered Swedish as a foreign language. I took it for three years. Swedish appealed to me because my father’s father came from Sweden (settling in Denver), while my mother’s four grandparents were from Norway.  Norwegian was taught at Ballard.  Danish was also available at a high school, but I can’t remember where.

Because of my high school Swedish classes, I managed to be in the receiving team to greet the king of Sweden when he came to Seattle. Didn’t actually shake his hand, but if I remember right, I wore platform shoes, just to be extra fancy. I certainly didn’t cut my hair, though.

After high school I attended the University of Washington and took Scandinavian classes—mostly because they were smaller than classes in my major. I accidentally took enough classes to get a degree. Anyway, as an undergrad at Washington I spent a semester in Linköping, which is not pronounced “Link-o-ping,” as my wife believes, but “Lynn-shipping,” as the Swedes say. Linköping happens to be the very town from which my grandfather had emigrated illegally. There I met Lasse who is still my dearest friend, even though he is so inconsiderate in that he and Maria have the nerve to live about ten thousand miles from Arizona. I love them, but clearly they are bad people. Well, just for that reason.

I loved it there.

Fast forward to 1992, when I finished at North Bennet Street. My goal upon graduating was to get more training but without having to pay for it. First I wanted to take the time to relearn everything we had covered in school, which I did in my evenings for a few years. After I had gotten comfortable with most of what we had covered at NBSS, I applied to several grants to study in Sweden somewhere.

In 1996 it happened. Thanks to the graciousness of Per Cullhed and Lars Munkhammar (and the Fulbright program) I had the opportunity to work and study in the library at Uppsala University. Their graciousness was equally spread amongst the others in the lab: Adam Larsson, Lars Bjordal, Bosse Carlsson and Åke. (Åke was 63 at the time and had started in the field when he was 13!) It was a fantastic year amongst even more fantastic people, in a great country. Even taking the wrong bus en route to Linköping was kind of fun. Ended up in Lidköping. Clearly my Swedish wasn’t so great.

It was the year that made everything else possible. What did I do? I made books, studied structures, laughed, swore in Swedish because it didn’t sound like swearing to me, went to Helsinki and Copenhagen, and made more books. I also bought as many books as I could afford. At the end of the year, one of the other Fulbrighters told me that I was the only one of us who had done what I set out to do. I think that was probably true, but it was only true because the folks who hosted me, helped me do it.

One example is shown here with Bosse teaching me proper safety practices in a conservation lab:

People ask me what the year in Sweden was like and I tell them this story, which perfectly sums up the spirit of the entire year: By the end of the year, my finances were smaller than slim. When packing to come home, I tried to get a bunch of stuff into three suitcases each less than 30 kilos (maybe it was 25, not sure). Gave everything else away. I knew I’d have to pay for the third bag, and probably for all the bags, which were overweight a tad—a real concern given my empty pockets. When Lasse and I got in line at the airport a man walked up and asked where I was going. Seattle, I said. He said, Come with me. We lugged my bags over and set them down next to a counter. The computers had just gone down, he said, and they weren’t charging for extra bags or extra weight. I just had to weigh the suitcases and put them on the conveyor. Pretty much the whole year was like that.

After finishing, I went back to the University of Washington and began working part time so that I could do more private work. I was looking forward to doing that for years. The Mendery at Washington was a nice place to be—gave me great experience and I got football tickets. The Huskies were even good at the time. I was preparing to work at UW half time and looking forward to that arrangement very much. There was lots of interesting work up in Seattle for private practice.

But then, and I think because of the time in Sweden, NBSS called and asked me to run the bookbinding department. I went out for an interview, it all worked out, and then I flew back to Seattle where I spent the final few weeks working until two or three in the morning to finish off my private work, Mendery work, and pack. Slept a few hours a night; managed to keep eating. It was a bit tiring but an exciting time. Early August I drove out in a rental truck to a new life.

Taught at NBSS for almost ten years. Probably should have moved on in 2006 to keep up the decade theme, but we moved to the desert in 2007 instead. A move that was possible because of my time in Sweden. A Fulbright carries some weight, even if folks don’t really know what it was for.

During my time in Massachusetts, I helped get Adam over here to teach; first at NBSS and helped some on a grand tour, maybe cracked opened some doors for him. I was able to see Per and Bosse when they came over for meetings. And for several years students from NBSS went to Uppsala for a couple of months in the summer. They all loved being there as much as I had.  And when I think about that year those are the things that I'm happiest about.

One really nice thing that reminded me of it all happened last Spring when I was teaching in San Francisco. I saw that someone I’ve never even met was teaching a binding technique that I had brought back from Sweden. I had taught it to Juliayn, who had taught it to them, and they were now teaching it to others.

That’s what the year 1996 was really about, after all. It wasn’t so much about me spending time in Sweden, but more about sharing knowledge across borders. And that’s what it did to a T. But I’ll take all the other benefits as well . . . .

And to think it all started with Norwegian fishermen heading out of Ballard looking for salmon a hundred years ago.