By Emily Matthiessen
The 21st Port Townsend Film Festival (PTFF) went online this year, out of respect for the COVID-19 situation https://www.ptfilmfest.com/ . My family enjoyed watching a multitude of excellent films from the comfort of home that we would otherwise not have seen. Now we want every week to include documentaries of unusual people and businesses.
The festival planners paired the 10 minute short, “Ink and Paper,” https://breakwaterstudios.com/film/inkpaper/ with “The Bookmakers” https://www.thebookmakersfilm.com/an hour long documentary. This was a wise pairing, as both are about people who work with paper, type, and books, but their outlooks contrast.
“Ink and Paper” (2012) is a somewhat gloomy story of two neighboring businesses that feel out of place in the modern world. One is a letterpress printing business and the other a handmade paper business; both are struggling to keep afloat economically. The documentary presented the owners as visionaries, using tools of the past, afloat on a tide of uncertainty about the future. I looked them up, and 8 years later, they are both still existent. Aardvark Letterpress http://www.aardvarkletterpress.com/ has a beautiful website and appears to still be catering to the elite and those who want the finest quality in their printed products. McManus and Morgan http://www.mcmanusmorgan.com/ appears to be doing well enough on location to not be selling through their website. It is a one page source of information on the store.
By presenting these unique businesses as dangling on a thread, there is a good chance the documentary makers did them a favor. After listening to the owners talk, and watching the fine quality of their work in process, this viewer wanted them to survive and thrive. They were presented as an example of the value of modern craftsmen sustaining the techniques of the past.
“The Bookmakers” (2019) is an exuberant take on the world of bookmakers and preservers – and what a varied world it is! Their motto is: “The book is dead, Long live the Book.” Just as photography freed painters to explore new realms of art, the internet has freed bookmakers to re-envision books.
The filmmakers document a wide range of artists and craftspeople involved in aspects of bookmaking. The film culminates in San Francisco with a massive conference that draws book lovers and makers from around the world, including most of the people documented. Shelves full of traditionally published books donated by the Internet Archive are arranged outside of the conference for people to take home, while inside, some of the most innovative and creative new forms are offered up for admiration and sale.
The Internet Archive “is a non-profit with a huge mission: “Universal Access to All Knowledge”. Based in San Francisco, CA, with satellites around the world, Internet Archive staffers are building the digital library of the future – a place where anyone can go to learn and explore our shared human experience from books, web pages, audio, television and software. Forever.” https://archive.org/ In the film we had an inside look at their center of operations – a former cathedral that conveyed the sense of sacredness its workers feel for the preservation of past words. “The Library of Alexandria” in its modern form, as its founder said. The difference being that after the workers scan a book, it can no longer be lost to fire and the ravages of time (unless we want to argue about the longevity of the internet).
The Internet Archive is just one illumination of the modern world of book-lovers that this documentary contains – an amazing amount of content is squeezed into an hour, and all of it is inspiring. My family came away with the feeling that books are not endangered (as we sometimes fear), rather they are in the process of transformation because of new technologies (whether the individuals involved embrace or flee the modern methods), as is society as a whole.
