My friend Judy ordered 2 books. One is Franny and Zooey.
The other is Nine Stories.
She will pick them up tomorrow and I am reading them until she gets here.
I immediately noticed that with Franny and Zooey, the Centennial edition, the pages were not cut evenly. Looked it up and here's what the Internet said:
It used to be deckle edge was unavoidable due to the cost of manually trimming. Then they found a way to automate the trimming and for a while both deckle and trimmed were common - the trimmed was considered high end, the deckle cheaper quality. Then everything was trimmed and people became nostalgic for the old days and deckle was marketed as high end, even in the later 19th century. This notion of deckle as high end has stuck and is still the case.
follow-up question -- I read an Italo Calvino novel where he says something to the effect of using a penknife to separate pages of a book. Do books sometimes come with unseparated pages, or did I misread stuff since I was reading in the original Italian?
Is it possible to write a short poem right now? I await 8 pm when a multi part show will be on about Ernest Hemingway.
Not enough time. Go, girl, and watch Hemingway.
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