Binding in Progress

On to the binding phase…

I read this the other day:

Even if, seen from the outside, or from some higher vantage point, this sort of life looks pointless or futile, or even extremely inefficient, it doesn’t bother me. Maybe it’s some pointless act like, as I’ve said before, pouring water into an old pan that has a hole in the bottom, but at least the effort you put into it remains. Whether it’s good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what’s most important is what you can’t see but feel in your heart. To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts.

–What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami

Setting type and binding books by hand are up there with running long distances as far as inefficiency goes, I think. Speaking of which, I ran a race on Sunday! Slowly. It was fun but cold. The water froze. There were bagels at the end. It’s sort of amazing how many people are willing to show up at 9 am in the freezing cold to run.  Way more people are willing to do that, it seems, than to learn bookbinding.

But hey, so what.