Printing produces large quantities of sheets that are no longer required: trials and drafts and mistakes and various kinds of paths not taken. Printing is wasteful, or generous, depending on your point of view, and it’s usually one of the functions of a book to conceal this messy pre-history. The pamphlets and sheets that
Those of us acquiring books in the late 1940s saw plenty of Waste without having to wait for the book to fall apart. I still have a school prize - Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, 2nd impression, George Allen & Unwin, 1947 - the dust jacket of which has part of an RAF map of Nieder-Kassel on its reverse. Being little read, the book and the jacket have both survived.
http://www.robstolk.nl/drukwerk/2018/stuff/ Following this link will take you to the website of the Amsterdam based lithographic printers robstolk, and specifically a little book or 'surprise offering', called Stuff, which has no ISBN, because it is the literal by-product of a larger book of the same name, lavishly documenting archaeological trove salvaged from the city's river Amstel, during the construction of a new Metro line. Given away for free at Tate Offprint 2018 to promote Stuff per se, the rubric is as follows 'This little book was made from sheets fished out of our bins. Before the press starts rolling at full capacity it is "warmed up" with makeready sheets that are then discarded.' Measures 25 x 72 x 104 mm
Fascinating. Did you catch the write-up of the Donatus fragment on offer at Patrick Olson Rare Books: https://www.olsonrarebooks.com/books/donatus? Of more recent vintage is the new journal “La Perruque”, which anticipates the waste paper and prints its issues entirely in the offcut space beyond the margins of commercial jobbing works. The binding solution might appear to be a “wind-up” but is just as pragmatic as the use of waste paper: http://books-on-books.com/2020/10/31/books-on-books-collection-la-perruque/.
Those of us acquiring books in the late 1940s saw plenty of Waste without having to wait for the book to fall apart. I still have a school prize - Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, 2nd impression, George Allen & Unwin, 1947 - the dust jacket of which has part of an RAF map of Nieder-Kassel on its reverse. Being little read, the book and the jacket have both survived.
http://www.robstolk.nl/drukwerk/2018/stuff/ Following this link will take you to the website of the Amsterdam based lithographic printers robstolk, and specifically a little book or 'surprise offering', called Stuff, which has no ISBN, because it is the literal by-product of a larger book of the same name, lavishly documenting archaeological trove salvaged from the city's river Amstel, during the construction of a new Metro line. Given away for free at Tate Offprint 2018 to promote Stuff per se, the rubric is as follows 'This little book was made from sheets fished out of our bins. Before the press starts rolling at full capacity it is "warmed up" with makeready sheets that are then discarded.' Measures 25 x 72 x 104 mm
Fascinating. Did you catch the write-up of the Donatus fragment on offer at Patrick Olson Rare Books: https://www.olsonrarebooks.com/books/donatus? Of more recent vintage is the new journal “La Perruque”, which anticipates the waste paper and prints its issues entirely in the offcut space beyond the margins of commercial jobbing works. The binding solution might appear to be a “wind-up” but is just as pragmatic as the use of waste paper: http://books-on-books.com/2020/10/31/books-on-books-collection-la-perruque/.