In the latest issue of Harvard magazine, Nathan Heller writes about Arion Press, the last remaining “full-service letterpress in the United States.” Apparently Arion, which has “an in-house foundry where lead is melted into ingots,” sells editions of canonical titles (like Ulysses) that retail for thousands of dollars. (h/t our own Kevin Hartnett)
The New Gutenberg
The Unbearable Finitude of Reading
Beginning with the same premise—one can only read so many books in a given lifetime—two authors write very different articles: Maria Bustillos lists the recommendations of George Orwell, Henry Miller, and John Waters that she’s followed in an effort to maximize her short reading life. Marc Wortman wonders if authors are being paid by the page and, given our short lives, whether we should even bother with the behemoth volumes coming out recently.
Edge of the Earth
Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is probably the best-known recent example of a memoir that centers on a journey through a harsh landscape. There’s another one that deserves your attention, too — Kathleen Winter’s Boundless, which tells the tale of the writer’s voyage through the icebound Northwest Passage. At The Guardian, a review of the memoir.
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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been
Sci-fi writers are partly judged on how well they can predict where society is headed. There’s a reason that books with uncannily accurate forecasts of the future capture our interest long after their release. At Salon, William Gibson admits one way in which he got things wrong: he didn’t foresee the rise of social media. You could also read our own Bill Morris on Gibson’s Zero History.
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What’s Important
The Los Angeles Review of Books looks at a new history of K Records, the influential Olympia, WA-label that gave us Beat Happening, Modest Mouse, and Kurt Cobain’s arm tattoo.
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