Book of Days

The month of May has flown, hasn’t it? And with not a word from me. I’m still here, though, quarantining at home, doing well. Each day is full, what with working from home and tackling some dormant projects and adapting to the cat’s new feeding schedule. She seems to require meals beyond her traditional breakfast, dinner, 9:30 snack, and midnight snack. Now there is also lunch, the 8:30 snack that precedes 9:30 snack, and the 2 AM snack, too, should I be up that late. Most nights I am.

Most of the projects I am working on I am not quite ready to talk about. At least one of them I’d classify as something I never thought I’d ever do, and yet here I am, doing it, and it’s been a bit all-consuming in the nighttime hours when I am not working.

Another is something I’ve been doing for work, since March, I think: it’s a live broadcast each Wednesday at 3 PM Eastern time on our Facebook page. It’s called Book Arts 101: Home Edition––a weekly ramble through the book arts, craft, design, and whatever else drifts through my head. The broadcast this Wednesday will be about that place where the book arts intersect with the culinary arts, and I’ll be talking a lot, I’m sure, about the things that influence me to write this blog. The fact is Book Arts 101 is unscripted and only loosely planned and most weeks I do it by the seat of my pants. Seth likes to show me bloopers of live news casts just before each episode. I do have a healthy dose of stage fright before each broadcast, but the fact is that 3:00 comes and there is nothing to do but click “GO LIVE.” Each week I promise I’ll be there, and so I do it.

And so tonight I have nothing to remind you of, no holidays, no holy days. I just wanted to check in, say hello, how you doing? Very well, I hope. If you can join me Wednesday at 3, I’d love it if you could. You can watch the video later, too; it’s usually posted to our Facebook page right after the live broadcast ends. You can also view the first eight broadcasts in the archive that’s kept at the Facebook page of the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. Clicking that link now makes me realize I wear an awful lot of plaid. So be it.

Image: Some of the books that have had a major influence on me (and this blog), as well as one of my first handmade books: U Cutto: An Old Family Recipe, which I printed and bound in an edition of 65 copies in 1996. The title reflects my grandparents’ regional dialect. They were Italian, but the language they spoke was Lucerine, an Arabic influenced dialect from their region of Puglia.