For Book Nerds

If you are a dinosaur or dinosaurette who still reads paperbacks, or even hardbacks (and, yes, I do read on my phone and laptop occasionally), you may have often noticed that as you get to the center of the book, the inner margins get a bit tight. 

You have to push down on the book's spine to read it. You have to torture your book. (What do authors think about this, I wonder?)
 

Pages 168 and 169 of "The October Country" from 1996. Look
how nice and airy the inner margins are. (Katy Buchanan photo)

This book pictured, (I've posted previously, it's one of my very favorites, a soft-cover of Ray Bradbury's "The October Country") actually looks to have been well planned. It's a Del Rey Book, part of the Ballantine Publishing Group (part of Random House, part of Penguin, yada yada, which, come to think of it, should be a publisher, too).

There is a thing in book binding called, I think, 'creep' which means that pages laid out flat, with identical margins, do not end up even once the book is bound. The center pages have lots of space on the outer edges and very little at the spine.

But here is this book. At 338 pages, it has a lot of room for page creep. But at the very middle, the spread of pages 168 and 169, the inner margins leave the reader plenty of comfort to read without squashing down (torturing) the spine.

The margins are the same throughout the book. It has a very comfortable feel for a book of such strange tales.

I would love to know who was behind the production of this  October 1996 book. The text design was by Holly Johnson. For a mass market paperback, it's pretty neat. 

Happy reading.

i remember 100 percent

memory. distinct. sexual harassment.

yes, i remember certain things distinctly.

and not just about being harrassed, which is just a condition of being female.

i remember my beloved dog coming out, finally after weeks of hesitation, from a tunnel during an obedience training class and looking up at me with trust.

Best dog ever. (Katy Buchanan)

i remember sharing a brief moment with a stranger asking for directions on penn avenue in pittsburgh and laughing when we both realized her destination was about 10 feet away and in plain sight.

i remember being angry during a winter drive in massachusetts with my sister suzanne and her two kids in a scary snowstorm.

i remember a man walking past me on a Cleveland street in the early 1980s and saying at me "nice bouncing boobs." i remember what I was wearing (knee length, pink knit dress, quarter length sleeves), but not what he looked like, just his words.

i remember a mainstream television network science reporter, also in the early 1980s, at a press conference at the University of Pittsburgh, telling me he would like to "take a nap" with me.

i remember a man named Peter who was in my Ohio State karate class helping me 'caress' his private parts in a corner of the natatorium. he told me he was teaching me certain blocks (me, very young, inexperienced and without knowledge to convey my ... discomfort?) .

i remember parts of lots of things. being in NYC as a young woman in the late 1970s with a college friend who wanted to sample a dish at a restaurant in Chinatown ... really rude, she just helped herself to my plate.

i remember being rude myself, when a roommate was smoking in our dorm and i told her to "put it out, it offends me." (this was also in the late 1970s when people still smoked everywhere, freely.)

i remember the taste of ripe tomatoes and crusty french bread at summer camp in the French Alps in the early 1960s.

i remember many years ago, also early 1960s, when our young family was traveling, sitting at a motel pool somewhere in North or South Carolina ... or maybe Virginia, and being hit in one eye with a hot pepper.  painful and blinding. someone did that to me. i remember that distinctly.


i don't remember all the specific details of any of these life events, i just remember those moments. and isn't it interesting that these memories were formed when i was very young.

  
my point is, that I think certain things sear themselves in our brains. maybe we don't capture everything about events, but the important, memory-making details, never go away.  maybe the brain just captures what's most important (how does brain know? i have no idea. brain has it's own secrets). i'd be willing to bet combat veterans have a lot to say on this subject.

so, yes. i believe dr. ford.