Last week I bought a book entitled How to Make Books by Esther K. Smith, and, yesterday, I bought an awl \ol\. An awl is a "a pointed tool for marking surfaces or piercing small holes (as in leather or wood)." This device has been around since before the 12th century. It is used, as the definition suggests, to pierce small holes into surfaces. In my case, I will be using the awl to pierce holes into paper in order to stitch pages together to make a book.
Such is my love for books. Now I want to do more than read them, or write them, or look at them or assign them for reading. Now that books are beginning to go out of fashion, or, more accurately, to be refashioned, I am returning to an art that was aided by an instrument that dates before the first printing press. Armed with my awl, I plan to make a chapbook and fill it with pictures and verse that I might leave surreptitiously on the counter of a bookstore--if I can still find one--or a bank, or maybe on a table at a coffee house, somewhere, in other words where it can be picked up and read.
As our whole notion of literacy changes, along with just about every form of communication, I began to think about this art of bookmaking and publishing from the perspective of the awl...and Robert Louis Stevenson. Bear with me as I connect the dots. When President Obama was first elected to office, I heard this story of Robert Louis Stevenson as a boy, sick in bed with tuberculosis, watching the lamplighter light the gaslights in his street. The story was retold and shared as an analogy for the challenges ahead for the newly elected and first Black president. Young Stevenson, from the vantage of his bed and the time for reflection, watched intently the lamplighter as he went about his work. When Stevenson was asked by his caregiver to explain what he was looking at, Stevenson said he was watching the lamplighter "punch holes in the darkness." It occurred to me that this is what authors have always done, and bookmakers and the publishers who believed in them: They have punched holes in the darkness. And, like the lamplighter with his matches against the dark night sky, the awl, this small instrument made of wood and sharp metal, likewise is capable of punching holes of a different sort into an altogether different form of darkness.
