I’ve been listening to Dave Eggers’s appearance on Tetragrammaton over the last few days. I’ve only read two of his books—A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Circle—but I’ve been a fan of his other work for a long time. I subscribed to Might and McSweeney’s when he started them. I think I might even have some McSweeney’s issues sitting in a box somewhere in the garage. They really were special, often exceptionally intricate, artifacts. I loved what he had to say about spending the extra pennies (literally) to make physical books special objects.
I went to Reykjavik and walked the floor of the printing plant. It was all these blonde men with blue jumpsuits. I mean, it was like an Oompa Loompa type of thing. But I could walk around and i’d see they printed all the bibles in Iceland and I could see the Dgilded edges and foil stamping and a leather cover and a ribbon marker and all these beautiful add-ons. I was like how much does that cost to do? Two cents. How much does that cost? Three cents. And you realize that all of these things that make beautiful books really beautiful cost pennies to do and how it’s such a shame when somebody’s not spending the extra six cents to take it from a cheap looking thing to make something really beautiful. And so we became determined to just invest in cloth and color art inside and foil stamps and all of these things that all the printers are ready to do and willing to do. Foldouts and pop-ups and, really, anything that you can imagine, some printer will be able to do it.
Then he gets to heart of it.
I think if we’re going to have physical books survive, you do have to take that extra step. You gotta make these things radically better than looking at a screen. It’s an existential moment where if we don’t do better, then bit by bit people will choose screens because everything is channeled through one object as opposed to having to hold all of these different things and pay for them.
He’s so right. I remain optimistic about physical objects. I think people, especially young people, are so tired of renting everything on screens.