Non-Fiction – Page 8 – Jill's Book Blog

My favourite nonfiction subject is publishing. I love reading about the history of books and how they are printed. I was so excited to have the opportunity to get an ARC of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint from ECW Press.

Merilyn Simonds writes about the process of publishing her book The Paradise Project, a collection of flash-fiction stories. She chose to have this book printed by Thee Hellbox Press, a small press in Kingston run by Hugh Barclay. Hugh is very particular about his printing, so he took good care of Merilyn’s book. He involved her in the whole process, from setting the type, mixing the ink, and printing the proofs. The endpapers were even created using the flowers from her garden!

Throughout her story of the creation of her book, Merilyn gives some history on how ink and paper are made. These stories made me smile, reminding me of my book history course in university.

The irony that I was reading a book about the history of printing on an ereader was not lost on me. Merilyn created a digital edition of The Paradise Project with her son, Erik. She discusses how ebooks have changed the publishing industry, but print books aren’t going anywhere soon. Printing has evolved from scribes writing on vellum to machines stamping ink on paper to pixels appearing on a screen. Technology is still evolving the way books are delivered to the reader, but it couldn’t be done without Gutenberg’s press.

This is a memoir by Carrie Brownstein, a musician, writer, and actress. It follows her time with her band Sleater-Kinney through the 1990s and 2000s.

I picked this book up because it was one of the picks for Our Shared Shelf, Emma Watson’s book club. I really liked the first quarter of the book. Carrie talks about her life growing up in Washington state, including her mother’s eating disorder and her parents’ divorce.

The details of Brownstein’s band took up half of the book. If you aren’t familiar with it, like me, it will probably be difficult to get through. There were many details about how they wrote their songs, recorded of their albums, and toured the world. Unfortunately a lot of this was lost on me since I don’t know much about the indie music scene in the 1990s.

At the end of the book, Brownstein returned to stories from her personal life, after the band had broken up. This part brought me back into the story of her life. She is an excellent writer, which pushed me to keep reading even when I wasn’t interested in the topic. I liked her feminist commentary on how her female band was treated in a male-dominated industry. I can see why it was chosen to be a book for Our Shared Shelf.