Sitting in front of my computer writing up a quick little blog post while I eat a piece of cold pizza leftover from lunch. I'm reflecting on how we used to eat at the dining room table. Real meals.
Right now the table is covered with a book press and stacks of heavy books for weight while two more copies of The Emperor's Crystal & Other Lost Tales Vol II by Lord Dunsany are born out of paper and ink, thread and glue, cloth and binding board.
Mike is in the Press Room setting type for The Age of Malygris: Poseidonis Cycle Volume 1 by Clark Ashton Smith . I can hear Pink Floyd's Meddle just barely through the closed door. He times his breaks per album, so he won't just work ceaselessly for hours.
The massage table in my treatment room is currently covered with 6 loads of laundry to be folded, and I can no longer put it off because the massage table is the only surface in the house large enough to lay out binding cloth to be cut.
Yup! This is how we live now. At times it's utter chaos. But at times there is a Zen quality to the life we're living.
For instance when Mike is setting type for a page. Or when I'm binding a book and see it take form. Because the books we make are created with love. We put that into our work so that when people are reading one of our books it comes through on some level.
Naturally the art of the story teller is the reason people read books. But we aim to provide a book that lives up to the work it contains. Our desire is to provide books which will enrich the experience of reading some of the best written works in the fantasy genre.
We hope some day decades from now, when someone opens up one of our books, they will smell that old book smell which is like perfume to book collectors, and it will fire the imagination with what treasure they might find waiting to be discovered on those pages, because that's how it is for those of us who love old books.
And so I leave you with a line from The House Of The Idol Carvers by Lord Dunsany, which appears in The Emperor's Crystal. Please enjoy.
"And he labored for many years and he made a hundred gods; wonderful shapes he made them out of the mountains, for he had the skill of his fathers to give things shape, but he shaped the dreams of his mother."
