The Makings of a Book

The idea that something as simple as a book itself began, literally, as a piece of nature is something we can all too easily forget. Today’s books, admittedly, began with trees and water, but throughout the process of transformation from branch to book, so many unnatural elements are introduced that it is difficult to bring ourselves to have the same connection with the natural element of everything we come into contact with than it would have been, say, 600 years ago.
In her poem “Parchment”, Michelle Boisseau recounts the now ancient process of creating a book from beginning to end using only natural ingredients. She accounts for every detail from page to ink and the process of each element’s transformation. She recalls a list of animals that would have lost their lives to the production of the book, including assistants to the illuminator who dropped “like flies” after preparing the arsenic for the yellow die. Each color, not only time consuming and labor intensive, comes at an additional cost.
The irony of the lesson? All of the hours of work, all of the sacrificed lives, all for the eyes of one lone observer. This book is labored over by the common people who will never have the joy of gazing upon the completed project for the enjoyment of one person with enough money and power to sustain the project.
The beauty of a poem like this, however, ties very nicely into the class topic “Our Place in Nature”. It serves to remind us that every single thing we use in our daily lives originated from a natural process or a natural place. Now in today’s world, most everything is synthetic, but the idea that, at one time, every single thing we take for granted, things as seemingly simple and commonplace as books, originally took this much effort and came from an entirely natural source is astonishing.