One Footnote and Then Four Hours

April fifth. It started with the letterpress flyer.

The photo has been sitting in my camera roll for two weeks, the flyer from the community center board, the one about the intro workshop in April. I photographed it meaning to look it up later and then did not look it up later, which is exactly on brand for me. But last Sunday I finally pulled it up, and the flyer mentioned something about moveable type, and I did not know enough about moveable type to know if I cared about it, so I looked that up, and that sent me to a library book I requested about printing history, and the book arrived Thursday, and Sunday afternoon I opened it to the introduction.

The introduction mentioned that before wood pulp paper, European papermakers used rags, linen rags, cotton rags, collected from households and repurposed into sheets, and that there were specific regional rag shortages in the seventeenth century that actually slowed down the spread of information. I put the book down for a second.

the look of a person who just learned something useless and feels great about it

I did not put it down because I was bored. I put it down because I needed a moment to think about the fact that what information traveled and how fast depended, in part, on whether people had old shirts. That kind of thing gets me every time.

I read for four hours. I took no notes, made no plan, came away knowing significantly more about vatmen and watermarks and the Fourdrinier machine than I will ever have occasion to use.

margin notes and a rabbit hole that started with one footnote

The letterpress workshop question remains technically unanswered. I still haven't registered. But I have a much better sense now of what I would be touching if I did, how old the chain of it is, how physical, how stubborn. That feels like something. Maybe that's enough to go on.