The perfect baby gift

When three of my nieces and nephews were going to have children very close together we had to decide what to give them as a baby gifts.  To me the key phrase in that sentence is "baby gift."  A gift for the baby.  As opposed to a gift for the new parents.  It always seemed to me that giving baby clothes was a gift for the parents, which is fine - there's nothing wrong with giving gifts to new parents, but then call it a parent gift, not a baby gift.

My idea, and Diane agreed, was to give each child a drop spine box like this one, with their name on the cover:

Inside we filled it:

In each box was a New York Times and a Seattle Times, from their birthday, along with eight or so magazines that were on the news stands when the child was born.  We picked magazines which would cover culture, fashion, sports, computers, technology, news, music and others we thought would be of interest.  I think Diane put an architecture magazine in one of them!  We tried to think of magazines that would evidence the greatest change over the next fifty, or hundred, years.

What I particularly like about it is this:  it's kind of worthless now, it's just a bunch of magazines.  But in thirty years it'll start being kind of interesting.  In fifty years it'll be pretty cool, and in a hundred years it'll be amazing.

At least we hope!

To make the box I made a drop spine box the size of the newspapers and then infilled the lower part of it so that the magazines wouldn't jostle around too much.  And that's the important thing here, the box can't allow the movement of the magazines or newspapers.  And it needs to be made of proper, acid-free and durable, materials.  You can see the structure in these pictures, and in the picture above:

On the inside of  the other tray is a letter from Diane and myself explaining why we did this.  Diane wrote it, so it is prose that reads as poetry.  

What struck me after we had done a couple of these (this is the third one) is that even having a newspaper will be interesting in a few decades.  News of the Picayune going to three days a week is pretty hard to hear for someone like me who loves newspapers. Especially Sunday newspapers.  You also have to wonder how long printed magazines will last as well.

I often get asked what I think of Kindles and Nooks, with the expectation of I'll start screaming or yelling about how they are the end of civilization and decency.  But really, the main thing I think we lose with electronic books is the loss of cultural history.  You won't be able to pass down grandma's Kindle in the same way you can save her cookbook.  And the stains on the pages of the cookbook, even more than the words on the page, say a lot about grandma, what she liked to cook, and even how careful of a cook she was!  Same for Bibles, or favorite children's books.

Sometime you should leaf through the pages of Copernicus' books, and see all his marginalia.  Reading his notes means you can see his thoughts as he read a section of the text.  His unguarded thoughts.  Sure todays' Copernicus can make notes on his or her Kindles, but you won't be able to read anything off a fifty year old model.

Maybe that's why I like this gift so much.  It's saving a bit of culture in a way that will allow it to be experienced a century from now.  In that way, it's perhaps more of a gift to Phoebe's grandchildren than it is for her.

Of course part of the key to it, I suppose, will be to keep it out of their hands until they are old enough to  understand what it is.  And hope they find it interesting enough to take care of and save.  We'll see...

Rock and Roll part 2

At the time I bought the book I posted last week I also bought this book.  Diane and I would drive around Mass. on Saturdays and just stop in small towns and look around, then drive on to the next town. It was a fun way to spend a day.  At a store that sold odd lots of things they had a pile of books, and I bought these two because I like the genre of music.  But also because they were sewn bindings so I could do something with them.

This one is called The Book of Rock and was published by Rolling Stone magazine.  It's pretty small, 3.25 inches tall and 2.75 inches wide.

I thought it would be fun to make a decorative box for it, and decided on an amplifier.  I wavered between spending a lot of time making an accurate model of one using Sculpey or something like that but that didn't really interest me.  Lugging amps around was never the most fun part of playing music, so maybe I had issues.  So I made this, which I liked because I thought the cartoonish nature of it suited the content more.

The box is leather with silk over where the speakers would be and painted super glued down where the controls are.

The front cover is the same scans of ticket stubs I used in the other book.  Concerts mostly seemed to me to be about the joy of music, the fun of enjoying something with a crowd, and spontaneity of the show and feeling like you learned something about the artist just by watching them perform.  So, thus the stubs to commemorate the best thing about rock music.

The back is money, which is what everything ends up being about in the end.  By the way, the name on the amplifier is sort of the Swedish word for money.  The endbands were money as well.

Here's the whole thing:

I did it as an onset board binding, where the leather was on the book before the covers were attached.  It allows for a very clean edge where the cover meets the leather.

It was an interesting project, because it's outside what I normal do but it's something I wanted to try and I'm happy with how it came out.