Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

 This almost never happens to me! I have accepted a challenge from Nancy Underwood Honeycutt to post seven books I love; one book per day, no excuses, no reviews - just covers. Each day I will ask a friend to take up the challenge to promote literacy and create a book list.

1) I hate that this cliffie is all we have until January.

2) I think not where, but when.

3) Right now I want nothing more than a cameo of Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko.

~

Bonus: Outlander "Doldrums"

Thank the GODS the writers continue to improve on the Willoughby storyline. I thought his entire speech/performance was well done both in terms of the actor's performance and for the character. Also, I approve of how Claire continues to call him Yi Tien Cho, because respecting names is fucking important.

The First Outlander Printing Post No One Wanted.

All screencaps are from 3x07 "Creme de Menthe." So, remember how the last post was about everything they got right about printing? Well, this one is about everything they got wrong.

So the big plot point in both the books and the show is the excisemen connecting "Jamie Roy's" smuggling business to "A. Malcolm's" printing operation. In the books this involved a lot more off-screen discussion of the excisemen going around Edinburgh taverns tasting brandy to locate the stuff Jamie's smuggling and then getting to the print-shop where they also find his seditious pamphlet trade. As happens.



Step one to seditious printing: Don't put your fucking name on it, for one thing.

And in fact, most seditious material would have neither a name nor an address on it, which would be illegal because 17th c. printing ordinances actually REQUIRED all printing to have physical addresses on it for these reasons. If you had a "press in a hole" it meant you were moving your press around pretty regularly to avoid the authorities, and often doing shitty printing as a result. When you look at something dodgy in the 18th c., though, what you see is printing with FAKE addresses and imprints on them instead. There's actually some neat scholarship on this topic, because it turns out, it's easy to put a fake address on something....but you can look at the type, ornaments, composition (which is to say, how the compositors placed page numbers, assigned gathering signatures and catch words, etc) and successfully identify true origins of these things.

But anyway. Lemme show you a scene that has bugged me for YEARS. So Young Ian confronts the exciseman in Jamie's printshop and a fight scene ensues. The exciseman pulls a gun and tries to shoot him, hitting a wall of clear jars behind him, the liquid of which falls down and starts a fire. In the books, Gabaldon says this is alcohol for making printing ink, except you don't use alcohol in printing ink, you use oil varnish. (Oil varnish is pretty flameable though. Fun fact: There were in fact laws requiring ink makers to not do so within five miles of city limits because you make oil varnish by boiling oil which has a tendency to combust when oxygen hits it, so you have to try to control the boil by leaving the lid on the cauldron and adding bread and onions to mitigate the temperature and make a nice luncheon. Anyway.)

Okay, so the "alcohol' drops down onto the banked stove-looking set-up which we also saw last week. In the book, this is described as the little "forge" where damaged type could be melted down and recast. You'll see here that young Ian grabs the small ladle of lead (and tin and antimony) and throws it into the face of the baddie which is enough for him to drop to the ground writhing in pain and then falling unconscious like he's Prince Viserys or something.



LOL, no.

Okay, so, small things first: The lovely thing about type metal is that it has a low melting point (about 800 degrees F) and a high cooling point. If you throw the tablespoon of molten metal at someone's face, they are going to yell "Ow! Motherfucker!" and that's about it. I've seriously gotten worse heat blisters from pot handles or hot tea than with molten type metal. To really damage someone, you'd need to pick up that WHOLE POT YOU GOT THERE and dump it on someone, but it would be pretty heavy, so you'd have to ask said someone to hold still while you poured it. Basically this is just a dumb dramatic scene, which is also ahistorical, because by the 18th century, no one was really doing this anymore.



Now, this is probably the scene Gabaldon had in mind; this is a woodcut by Jost Amman, Frankfurt, 1568. In the early days of printing, there was a closer relationship between printers and typecutters/typefounders, so you COULD do this in your shop. by the 18th c., however, the professions had diverged significantly. Typefounding, making type and the matrices for the fonts, required a very different skill set and what is basically a proprietary technology. Think of it like you working at your computer--sure, you use Microsoft Office all the damn time, but can you write to code for it? Nope. That's why you download updates and buy new software packages and so on. Although fun fact: Ben Franklin managed an early "hack" when he was working as an apprentice in his brother's print shop, rigging some matrices to cast some type (likely from sand moulds) until he was able to make the NECESSARY TRIP to Europe to buy some.

Anyway, the one thing the show got right with this whole sequence is a scene not in the book, where Jamie physically moves a press so they can escape.



That's right: one big dude, moving a press by himself. I like this bit because there's some conventional wisdom by non-printing scholars that presses were ~so heavy, and especially ~so heavy that the womens couldn't use their feeble women strength to work them. LOL, NO. A wooden press is lighter than my beat-up Ikea couch, man.

Anyways, then the printshop burns down and then the other plots have to be set in motion. We won't see a printing press again until they adapt book 6, assuming they do so. *sighs wistfully* In which case....see you in three years for more rants?

 I have waited three years to make this post, ISTFG.

This one is from 3x05 "Freedom and Whiskey." Apparently they made two common presses and sent Sam Heughan to "printing school" so he could operate them properly. (They had a consultant at Reading University, so I wonder if they sent him there?) Apparently a lot of the prints you see onscreen he actually did himself. Good job, boyo.

Anyway, this is a nice set-up here. My only complaint is piling that much stuff onto the closed tympan; that much printing paper is **heavy.**



This next series of 'caps are all from 3x06 "A. Malcolm." Here's Jamie checking his prints first thing in the morning, probably to see if they dried properly. Note the combination of wooden dowels and hanging ropes to hold all the printed sheets. Absolutely correct.



Jamie's got his apron on (and I covet that beautiful leather apron that is....absolutely spotless. *thinks about the distressed aprons in my 'shop* *sighs*) A minor blooper here; when we see the bed of the press the chase is totally empty, but when he gets to work a few minutes later the type is locked up. 



This is a shot from the "Inside the World" featurette after the episode. Note that they did the lock-up properly with all wooden quoins and furniture rather than cheating and using modern (metal) speed quoins. My one hiccup here is that the bed is half-empty, and he's shown printing small bi-folios rather than quartos. It just wouldn't make any sense to print that way when you're doing pamphlets. Anyway, I think they may have done proper handset type here instead of cheating and using zinc plates, which is what you ordinarily see in print scenes in movies and whatnot. Although minor complaint: Throughout the shop you see all the equipment, all the paper stock, etc. etc., but you don't see any typecases or cabinets. And fwiw I have a small hobby operation and I have four type cabinets, so. They take up space.



Now what impressed me here is they got almost all of the inking correct! However, Jamie grabs the pair of prepped inkballs off the cheek of the press, where....they shouldn't be first thing in the morning, or they should be capped with a damp rag if they are. Why? Turns out the leather pelts used can dry out over night and makes it harder for them to pick up the ink; really you should start up first thing in the morning by taking the pelts out of a bucket of water where they would sit over night, wringing them out, then freshly stuffing the ink pelts with carded wool, then nailing them to the stock, and THEN prepping your ink. 

You do see Jamie working the ink with an ink knife from a jar on the inking stone. However, when they cut back to it its all spread out properly, which means someone likely worked it over with a modern brayer to get it perfectly ready to go. But he applies the ink to the ink balls correctly, then applies them to the press correctly. My heart went bat-bat-bat-bat just like the ink on that type, I tell ya.



Okay, here we see him pulling the bar:



My one hiccup here is--he doesn't pull back at an angle, which means he's not using a footbrace. Contrast with my bro Todd at work: 



See how he's got his knees bent just a bit? You got to make the press's leverage work for you when you're doing your pulls.Now, both Sam/Jamie and Todd are big guys, so they don't really need to. But back in the day, people were shorter. So, there's that. Now, back to Jamie:



Jamie checks his impression. Nice and even, particularly given he was using undampened paper from the post behind him. A couple more nitpicks: We don't see tables for the fresh paper OR the stack of prints that they would be producing (and you wouldn't hang them straight away--they need to dry off a bit). You also need to dampen your paper overnight because printing ink is incredibly thick stuff, and the wet paper picks it up much more easily and evenly than dry paper does. But as I said in my live-blogging, It's okay, Jamie. I've fucked that up too!

I didn't get a decent screencap of it, but he's also printing using "duckbills" or small folded bits of paper attached to the tympan to hold the paper in place, rather than "points" (thumb-tacks, basically). As far as I know the duckbills are a 19th or early 20th c. thing rather than 18th, but I've also never been able to confirm this, so who knows. 

Anyways then Claire comes in and drama ensues and he never cleans the type or anything, which is totally gonna bite him the next day if this were real life, but whatever. Also, he has a 2 press shop with like 1 dude working for him, which is INSANE. A 1 press shop would have 10 people at a minimum (overseer who can double as corrector, 2-4 pressmen, 2-4 compositors, 1-2 apprentice minions for cleaning, gophering, etc.), so really Jamie have like 19 dudes & ladies going full-time, but whatever. (Gabaldon fudged her research on the printing in ways that totally went over my head the first time I read the books TWENTY FUCKING YEARS AGO, JESUS, but now I'm just like, "where did you even GET that?!" when rereading. For instance, she consistently claims that printing ink consists of powder and alcohol, which, no. That would get you some writing ink, though mostly you'd use water instead because alcohol was expensive. She also does some funny stuff with typecasting which I can comment on next week, assuming they do that scene.)

Anyways, there's my feels. SORRY NOT SORRY.

(Note to self: Get a Jamie icon.)

So the library did a fundraiser dinner with Diana Gabaldon, and I got us tickets. :D I stressed about an outfit for a while because the "suggested attire" was "Cocktail/Scottish." I ended up wearing dressy black pants, a flowy white shirt (that's really a pirate costume shirt >_>), and a black wrap. I think it looked cute? Scott got off easy because he could just wear a suit, but I found him a little Scottish flag lapel pin to go with his TARDIS tie. My fav part going in was the numerous emails stressing the importance of bringing ids and that minors weren't allowed and blah blah blah because of the scotch tasting, and like, guys, kids aren't gonna go to a fundraising dinner for the booze? Just sayin'?

Anyway, we ended up totally blending in. We had fun trying to figure out the m:f ratio which Scott calculates was about 1:8, which frankly seems high to me. They probably had 150 or so diners, but only three long tables--Clan Diana, Clan Fraser, and Clan Mackenzie (we were Clan Fraser). The scotch tasting was maybe the best part--I had a delicious mead and a delicious "mead spritzer" cocktail that I'm still a little buzzed from. All of the food was drawn from the Outlander Kitchen cookbook which was kind of useful as I had been wondering about some of the dishes (the gougeres were delicious, the buttery leeks, corn fritters, and lavender fudge were delicious, the cranachan was AMAZING, while the chicken fricassee and the mushroom tartlets were just fine and the mint and lemon lamb sausage was a nope nope nope).

The event was to raise funds for the Library Foundation's Writer-in-Residence program, so the writer-in-residence was there and spoke about her book and self-publishing and the leap to "real" publishing, which was interesting because then Gabaldon gave her talk, and it was like that "shade shade shade" gif that...I actually can't find right now. Like, I have to imagine they specifically asked her to talk about it because Scott and I were analyzing it after and her entire body language was "I don't want to say this/I disagree with this." But she was still a very entertaining speaker, and told the whole Doctor Who inspiration story which made Scott happy because he was in his Tardis tie. But I just thought her talk, especially in the context of the first speaker, who was the writer-in-residence who talked about publishing her book and then how she was gonna put together a book of the writings by the eighth graders she teaches, was just a little painful. "They used to call it vanity publishing, but now it's indie publishing, and the importance is knowing your niche," Diana said, which again, shaaaaaaaade. But I don't think anyone noticed? Or maybe everyone was just incredibly buzzed happy from the booze; the writer-in-residence was maybe eight people down from us and she seemed in high spirits. And I have feels about changing publishing models because I think they are interesting, but at the same time I think this whole "self-publishing is great" narrative is incredibly problematic in terms of an unexamined business model. But that's me being pedantic, so what else is new.

I also thought it was a little awkward how at the end they solicited more donations for the program by selling goodies (little bottles of Guiness, cookies, fudge) at the end. We took a little box of fudge and gave them $20, but I think a simpler model is just to have people pay upfront and then enjoy the evening. (Also, I'm totally biased, but...the GRRM event we did was better. It just was. But we had resources this library doesn't have, but...when you get an A lister for an event, you can just DO more, and Gabaldon is an A-lister and they could have taken better advantage of that. ANYWAY.)

So anyway, here's the link to the cranachan recipe, because I am not even kidding, it was fucking amazing. Cranachan recipe from Outlander Kitchen. Like, the skinny chick in front of me basically had a dainty spoonful of it and then left, and I legit thought about just grabbing it and finishing it off. But I didn't, because people were around and sometimes I have to make use of the little scrap of dignity I have. But damn, I still kinda wish I had done it.

Here because they couldn't be arsed to make it embedded.

Anyway. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. JAMIE BEING JAMIE ASDFGHJKL.

*iz ded*