I just took a pair of scissors and cut out a new favorite quotation from a paperback book I finished reading for class. I liked the typography of the paperback, rather than just my own handwriting on a piece of drab college-ruled notebook paper.
The little cut-out taped to my wall looks as if I used a typewriter.
I love that rustic, yet simple touch of typewriters and fonts from the past – those days before this technological age where people didn’t rely on computers to communicate. The first newspapers of America relied on a printing press that resembled a wooden wine press of the fifteenth century.
Where are we now? Nowhere near a wine press, that’s for sure. Thank goodness I’m not printing a newspaper with a wine press, though. I hear that’s more work than the outcome is worth. (The ink would sometimes smear or the ink wouldn’t press evenly.)
Some would consider me a heathen for taking scissors to a paperback book and will probably ask me to pay alms to the book gods.
But, hello. Most forget we copy and paste from the Internet on a daily basis without a second thought (only with giving proper credit and citation, of course).
Sometimes we have to step out of the box we build around ourselves and break those invisible rules that merely chain us. To what, you ask? Well, I’m not even sure.
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Peter of the Atkinson said:
However the next time you look at that book in fifteen years you’ll wonder why you cut it out, eventually to throw it away, and not just left it in the book to let it age nicely in pleasant comfort keeping the book’s message intact, with all of the typography and inspiring words. Perhaps, though stepping out the box is admirable, you should copy it in hand. Just like copy and pasting online you neither ruin the image of the original work but rather enrich it by spreading the message, with no harm to the actual page, physical or binary.
Imagine if every time you copy and pasted you took it from the page and not just copied it. Though those invisible walls may seem to be inhibiting, perhaps it’s just as well to leave them alone so they can provide their support.
March 10, 2008 @ 12:57 am
Mrs. B said:
How often I read and find just one sentence that touches me somehow and I want to tell the world. But it seems the moment quickly is lost for when I go back to find those words again somehow they are not there for me but buried inside my head and heart only to recapture. Maybe if I took the time to cut and paste like you I could preserve that oh yeah kind of moment and relive my inspiration?
If I were a writer I would enjoy knowing someone valued my words and the best would be they were captured and used. To cut and paste them to another place is sharing it’s message even further in my mind. How they are expressed visually is as important to me as the written word. So I can understand and appreciate the need to transplant them.
March 10, 2008 @ 11:36 am