The Palpable World of the Handmade Book

An important part of A Different Kind of Luxury is about the pleasures of making things by hand, about the both the pleasures and the deeper meaning of working with your own mind, heart, fingers and creativity to make something beautiful and tangible in this too-virtual world.  As I wrote in the introduction to Chapter Two:

 

It wasn’t until I met the craftsman Osamu Nakamura that I could experience exactly how his “simple” life and his palpable contact with the physical world is actually so much richer than the hamster-wheel lives of overwork, busyness, and rush that so many of us have become accustomed to. By using his hands to provide for his needs, he has found a richness of heart and a sensitivity of perception that so many of us long for. 

One of the things that Nakamura excels at making is hand bound books.  Here are is one them.

Nakamura with one of his many handmade books

Akira Ito (chapter Six) also bound dozens of his books by hand including a book on handmade paper making in Nepal.  I wasn’t able to include that many photos of these in the final printed version, but I’d like to share some of them with you here:

Hand Bound Books by Akira Ito, Chapter Six

Although I love sharing these with you so you can look at on them your screen, it doesn’t compare at all with holding such beautiful volumes in your hands.  Paper is different than light pixels on plastic! Here’s a short excerpt about Nakamura and what he says about hand work:

“Making things with one’s own hands cultivates a certain generosity and openness of the heart. It nourishes that state of mind in the craftsperson themselves, which is intimately connected with an entire way of life.”

One of a Kind Childrens Book by Akira Ito
"The morning Wisteria Tree"

Hearing this I am reminded, with sadness, of the epidemic levels of depression in my own country, and wonder whether it might have something to do with the aversion we have to working with our hands. For people in industrialized societies, perhaps the problem is not that manual labor is intrinsically unpleasant, but that we get frustrated because our attitude is one of resentment toward something demeaning. Viewed differently, however, such work presents us with an opportunity to know ourselves and the physical and natural worlds better by exploring this essential aspect of being human: our relationship with our hands. How funny it is that one of the fundamental definitions of being “modern” is the ability to avoid physical labor, when it might be that very thing that could provide us with such depth of connection to ourselves and to the world.

As I spend more time with Nakamura, it occurs to me that it is as though the mastery he has achieved as a craftsperson suffuses all the other spheres of his life.  He then shows me  number of other books that he has bound by hand, and explains the Japanese method of sewing together the cloth-and-paper covers. I look at each of them and shake my head imagining how much time and care went into making them. Given how much labor they take, I realize that it is only possible to make a few copies of each, and that only a few people will ever see them. It seems a lot of effort for very little reward. But then I think that in contrast to a book published by machines in a factory, the simple potency and beauty of a hand-sewn book gives the reader pleasure of an entirely different order.

One of the books Nakamura has bound comprises a few photocopied pages on how to weave sandals from rice straw. Paging through it, I see how much my way of thinking about “craft” has changed over the period I have known him. Instead of craft being a “nice” pursuit with which to fill some unoccupied hours around the house, I have come to understand it as one of the most fundamental and ancient ways that humans have to meet their needs: baskets for winnowing grain, woven cloth to cover the body, forged and hammered iron tools with which to cultivate the soil, and woodblocks to print books and communicate with others. Craft is something every person needed before machines made everything we use. Spending time with Nakamura, I see that the process of making something like straw sandals or a handmade book cultivates humility while connecting us with something fundamental about our humanity: the interaction between the remarkable capacity of our own human hands and the ingenuity of our minds.

Here’s another short bit from the book, in Chapter Six, on consummate craftsman Akira Ito, who also writes beautiful essays on the life of the craftsperson:

And as I read his writing about craft, about being an artisan, I see that when he describes a technique it is more than just instructions or a purely technical discussion for practitioners. For him, the “how” of a craft cannot be divorced from the heart of the craftsperson. It is the core of their life, and the handwork is not simply a means to do something; it is the meaning itself.

In fact, it was the example of these two men who led me to hand bound some copies of A Different Kind of Luxury myself.  I have completed several versions of my own, and I also brought some unbound copies with me to India last year, and I with some bookbinders there produced a limited edition series of five books.  (I’m actually offering these personally for those who might like a copy of their own, please contact me at andy@theopening.org if you would like to buy one, there are three more left.)

Here are also some photos of the two hand bookbinders from Varanasi who bound them.

 

Indeed, something made by hand has a tangible feel that cannot be described.

Sierra Club Recommends A Different Kind of Luxury! and Second Printing

In a review of recent "Green Living" books, the Sierra Club  said:


Couturier introduces this book with a bold statement: "I have always thought it was possible to live a great life." The 11 profiles that follow tell the stories of Japanese artists, farmers, and environmentalists whose unique lives embody ... sustainable abundance.

Koichi Yamashita (ch 9) with his water-powered rice hulling mill

Also!  My publisher, Stone Bridge Press has informed me that we have nearly sold out the first printing and we will be moving to a second printing next month, less than a year since the book first came out.

Oizumi himself asks: “Why did you put the chapter about me first?” (includes new excerpt!)

When I visited the ever-amazing and gregarious San Oizumi in May of last year, he asked me the question, “Why did you start your book with the chapter about me?”

It was a hard decision, actually, and one recommended by my editor at Stone Bridge Press.  At first I thought that with his brusque manner, his anarchism, and his un-padded statements, the chapter about him might give people the idea that the book was more hard edged that it really is. 

But I became convinced that the editor at the press was right.   (I had considered starting with the chapter about Murata, or the one about Atsuko). I decided based on a number of things, including how he’s funny, and the range of his accomplishments, and how he lives in such an interesting place, and makes such fabulous pottery.  Also, really important to me was that the way the chapter starts answers the potential objection--before we even get started--that this way of living is some kind of hobby or fad for middle class or rich people. Oizumi grew up poor in the slums. 

Oizumi's pottery amongst the vines

But the clincher for me was that with the beautiful photos on the cover and inside, with the glowing jacket blurb text, and the general positive feel of the outside of the book, it would be easy for people to assume, wrongly, that this was a book that didn't grapple with the real world--the real world of nuclear power accidents, slums, electricity use run amok, racial tensions and war.  Oizumi looks at all of them, straight on, and tries to make the world a better place.  (He’s got time to do that, I should mention, because of the way he has set up his life, and because of his attitude toward consumption.)

So I’d like to give you another excerpt from the book, and I hope you enjoy it.  

“I was raised in the slums,” San Oizumi tells me as we sit in the cozy central room of his large, rambling, mud-walled farmhouse. “There in the tenements was a world that I could never have dreamed of before we had to move there . . . so many people living right on top of each other: sick and broken people, the mentally handicapped, prostitutes. As a fourth-grade boy,” he admits, “it was kind of exciting. I even heard about a neighbor woman who killed her husband, crazy with jealousy. It was quite an education for an elementary school student.” He smiles slightly and raises one eyebrow. “But,” he says, now serious again, “because I grew up as a poor person, surrounded by poor people, I learned a lot about the distortions and sickness that lie at the foundations of our society. I don’t have any illusions about what it’s really all about.”

Such statements are typical of the broad-shouldered potter with the unhurried voice. Although he offers his insights with seeming indifference, when Oizumi looks at me, he’s all serious attention. It’s not a glare but it’s more than a gaze, and it always has a strong element of concern to it. Although Oizumi can at times come off as gruff and brusque, I never feel that I am speaking about something trifling with him. This has the effect of making me really consider my words and try to speak from a deeper, more serious place in myself.

Oizumi in his beautiful dining room

I had come to meet him originally because I had heard of his old-style wood-burning pottery kiln of mud and clay and of his organizing against a high-level nuclear waste dump planned for his rural district. After meeting at tonight’s gathering of citizens’ groups opposed to the dump, we’ve come back to his house. Sitting around the huge wood-slab table he has made, with pieces of his luminous pottery all around us, we drink tea and talk into the night.

Oizumi tells me of his upbringing and of his father. “Dad was a poet and woodblock carver,” Oizumi says in his thick working-class accent. “But you can’t make much money writing poems,” he laughs, “so we were very poor. When I was a very young child, before we moved to the slums, we had a house in a small village. The other villagers were very suspicious of my father because he had a record by Beethoven, and they could see by the letters on the album that it was clearly foreign, so they thought he was collaborating with the enemy Americans.” This suspicion was corroborated for them because Oizumi’s father could speak a little English and refused to go into the army.

“He didn’t want to have anything to do with people in the business of killing,” says Oizumi in his matter-of-fact way, “and as a result, the village elders shunned him and the other members of our family. But when Japan lost the war and the U.S. Occupation forces arrived in the village, there was no one else but my dad to translate. The same village elders who had ostracized him came begging at his door to ask for his help. But he didn’t want to help the Americans either: in his eyes, they were murderers just the same.” A few years later the family was forced to move to a tenement building in Sendai, an industrial city in cold northern Japan. The old man died from tuberculosis when Oizumi was only in sixth grade.

Oizumi speaks with his daughter Sonoe

Like his father, Oizumi is willing to make decisions entirely on principle, and he too is perfectly willing to suffer the consequences of his actions. “Growing up in poverty,” he tells me now in his calm, slow voice, taking a sip of tea, “I learned that even if I have very little money, that’s not the end of my life. I know I can still have an interesting life without it. I don’t want to be someone who is completely reliant on money, someone who is used by money. That’s why I neither borrow nor lend.” 

The hard-edged world of the slums he grew up in seems such a contrast with the antiqued beauty of this two-hundred-year-old house—with its massive handhewn timber rafters, mustard-colored walls, and beautiful tansu cabinets—where he lives with his wife and three children today...  

[continued, in the book!]