I spend a lot of time putting little pieces of paper in order, sorting stacks of paper into other stacks, slowly arranging. The rock flip books are each fifty pages long, and I printed about fifty copies of each one, so I’m rearranging fifty little stacks of images into fifty new stacks. Again and again and again. The trick is not to wind up with any pages left over — if I do, that means I either missed a page or added an extra into one of the books now sitting in a haphazard heap to my right. Then, good luck figuring out which one has the missing or extra page, when the pages before and after pretty much look almost exactly the same (these are flip books of a rock slowly rotating, the difference between one image and the next are small). Collating in small chunks helps — I do nine pages at a time, and have learned to squeeze my fingers gently along the edge of each page to make sure there aren’t two stuck together.

Yes, I have been told that there is a collating service and it is right up the street from my apartment. There, they use machines to quickly sort sheets of paper into order. But this is something I want to do by hand. I want to look at and touch every page of every book. I want something to do with my hands while I listen to an audiobook or watch TV. I want to do something that takes a long time, to delay finishing, maybe to delay having to come up with something to do next. I want to make my body into a miniature factor. I’m not looking for a more efficient or faster way of doing it, right now.

Sometimes I feel like the finished object is just a byproduct, and the real work is the work, the process.

As many hours as it takes!¹

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do slowly, laboriously², what I want to spend hours and hours on, and what I want to do quickly. Other questions: What are people really saying when they ask, “how long did it take you to make that?” Is the work really “meditative” if I’m doing it while watching TV? When is it time to let go and just finish the damn thing?

Now that I’m done collating (pretty much), I’ve been standing in front of the perfect binding machine, binding these books one by one. I move the machine in front of an open window and turn it on, waiting while it heats up and melts the glue. I jog the book blocks by tapping them on the table to line up the pages, and then put one into a clamp on the machine, spine facing down, and press a button. The clamp holding the pages moves over the top of the melted glue, and then onto the book cover that I’ve placed at the other end of the machine. I pull the handle there to pinch the cover up against the spine of the book and hold it while a bell dings for seven or ten seconds, while I stare out the window at the traffic on the 18th Street bridge, at the clouds on the horizon, at the west side of the city spreading out into a hazy horizon. Then I release the handle, open the clamp, pull the book out, and push a button to send the carriage back and begin the process again. This is faster, I guess, than doing the perfect binding³ by hand, and definitely less of a pain in the ass. Back in 2013 or so, we did the perfect binding on John’s book for Meekling by hand. It was a long time ago, but I think I gathered up whatever friends wanted to help around the table in my apartment (the table Patty gave me when she moved) and we took little paintbrushes and glued up the spines of the 50?100? books we made. Anyway, I remember not enjoying the process. It felt tedious and the results were messy. And what is the point of trying to make something that looks machine-made or mass-produced by hand, instead of sewing it or something? But now I’m getting to my perfect binding rant, and this rant is meant to be about collating.

1. This is the motto of the Impractical Laborers in Service of the Speculative Arts, and I think about it constantly. ↩︎
2. I have also been thinking slowly and laboriously about what I want to do. ↩︎
3. Perfect binding is a glue-bound spine, like a paperback novel for example. ↩︎