When I was a little girl, my parents owned a printing shop downtown. With its giant humming and whizzing machines, grubby floors, ceiling-high stacks of paper, and spooky dark room, it might have been intimidating. But it wasn't. It was like a candy store. Books full of clip art! Pens in every color known to man! A glue binding machine! What's not to love, right?

I can remember sitting up on a high stool at a work table peering over a lightbox as one of my dad's employees laid out a job. She worked with deft precision using only an exacto blade and rubber cement. She wore striped socks with toes in them, and she had kinky blonde hair.

I can remember rummaging through cases of type in the back room that was my dad's office. Mismatched letters and odd bits of leaded ephemera. How I wish I could get my hands on those now!

And I can remember watching the giant Xerox collator deliver each page to its home wondering why nobody had built something like that to help keep my closet tidy.

***

I am a reluctant pack rat. I hate having gobs of uncategorizable stuff tucked into every nook and cranny of my life. But I find that it is the uncategorizable things that are most evocative and meaningful. So I go on frequent purges, but I always end up with odd bits here and there that recede back into their old corners and cubbies.

What Can We Do Today, by Alice Janet HopkinsMy son's closet has been a receptacle for stuff of this nature that is more or less relevant to childhood. I was cleaning it out a couple of weeks ago, and I found this little book. It's a slim little volume of black and white drawings accompanied by snippets of conversations between two little girls trying to find ways to pass the time on a summer day. The copyright is 1980 to Alice Janet Hopkins. My dad brought it home to me when I was five or six years old.

Printed on white heavy paper that has now discolored to a lovely shade of tea, this slim little book may not look like much. But to me, at five, it was magical. Because my dad had helped put it together. I don't know how much, if any, of the printing he did (there was a typesetter and offset printer next door), but he did the binding, a kind of crude (sorry, Daddy!) perfect-bind, and I guess maybe he trimmed it. I didn't care about all those specifics. Because before that day, it had never occurred to me that a book was something a person--much less a person I knew--could make.

***

"Camerom." I love that little girl I used to be.To this day, much of what animates my urge to make things--whether cards or candles, soap or sweaters, necklaces or notebooks--is tied up in that first realization that every thing has a maker. For some people, I guess figuring out the tricks of how a thing is made takes the mystery and magic out of that thing. Not me. Like: for me, learning how to knit six years ago was partly about tackling a goal. Part of it was enjoying the rhythmic click of the needles. But the best part of it--the part that is still with me even though I don't knit much know--is the enjoyment I derive from pulling a sweater from my shelf, admiring a well-designed cable, and thinking, "I know how you did that!"

The day my dad brought home a book he had helped to make, my eyes were opened to whole vistas of possibility.

***

While I was thinking about what this little book has meant to me, I found a number of great tutorials for making your own perfect-bound books. Perfect binding is the kind they use in paperback novels ("the kind the drugstore sells"*). It's pretty simple: glue holds the signatures or individual pages together, and the textblock is wrapped in a single sheet to make the cover. Pretty perfect, eh? If you'd like to make your own perfect-bound book, these are great resources: 1) Instructables; 2) No Media Kings ; and 3) DIY Bookbinding.

*I tip my hat to you, Gordon Lightfoot.