Bookmaking Quotes

If I were to give myself a pat on the back, it would be for sticking with bookmaking as my primary way of expressing myself over the span of fifty years. ~ Jerry Pinkney

Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I'd been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent. ~ Rebecca Stead

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe.
And that is how the Irish saved civilization. ~ Thomas Cahill

Do behold the king in his glory, King Sequoia. Behold! Behold! seems all I can say ... Well may I fast, not from bread but from business, bookmaking, duty doing & other trifles ... I'm in the woods woods woods, & they are in mee-ee-ee ... I wish I were wilder & so bless Sequoia I will be. ~ John Muir

The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer's tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and a recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller's breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.

But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer's voice, and are thus shunned.

In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies. ~ Ken Liu

A book's a strange thing. It's ideas, feelings. It's fragile and complicated. You can't make them like refrigerators or cars. ~ Etienne Davodeau