Meet the Editors

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Juliet Auby (She/her)

By: Stephine Tsoi Juliet Auby is a Norwegian freshman at LASA high school. Some of Juliet her hobbies include hiking and backpacking, and she enjoys doing these things because it’s a great way to exercise and you get to see some beautiful nature along the way. In fact, this summer she went on a 12-day backpacking trip in New Mexico with the Philmont boy scout camp. Juliet loves learning and memorizing strings of letters and numbers. “I really, really like writing in codes, like morse

Ling Thang (He/him)

By: Jack Powers Ling Thang is unapologetically straightforward. He says that if he thinks Ling of something to say, good or bad, he’ll say it to you. He says that this is something you should know about him. He has done sports since he could walk and often plays soccer, and works out to stay in shape for the game. He says he’s excited to work on his group’s magazine and to write about the life of an author, and even he himself has dabbled in fantasy writing. He hopes for a career in computer science, and has worked in it for about a year. “I’ve always enjoyed computer science… especially because it would make a lot of money.”

Jack Powers (He/him)

By: Juliet Auby Jack Powers was born in Austin, Texas. He is very passionate about theater and would like to be an actor one day. Powers came to Jack LASA to be with friends and for educational classes. Jack is writing about book recommendations for his E-Zine project. Jack also enjoys creating music and playing video games. Some of his favorite movies include Star Wars and Inception. He really enjoys Rick Riordan’s books.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Stephine Tsoi (She/her)

By: Ling Thang Stephanie Tsoi is an adrenaline junkie who, with no regard to safety, loves doing exciting things. She’s stood on the ledges of canyons Steph and hiked the rocky mountains, and says it’s a hobby she likes to indulge in whenever she gets the chance to. She wants to become an FBI agent who specializes in solving crimes because of her love for mystery. What’s never changed about her is her love for books, specifically action-based ones, as it itches her inner adrenaline junkie. She imagines scenes in books as movies in her head.

Cale Acker (They/them)

By: Cale Acker Cale Acker is a book and game-loving LASA freshman born and raised here in Austin, Texas. They love playing video games and hope to pursue Kale a career in Computer Science. They express great interest in the history of books and their publication, so of course, their favorite book is the Odyssey. Their only goal after high school is to go to a college that they can afford. They came to LASA because their parents made them and they would prefer not to go to McCallum. They have released one game in the last year and are considered a “sadistic monster” when it comes to design.

By Cale Acker

ooks go back thousands of years. As long as any of us can remember, we have received information from books. But, how much do we know about books themselves? How many people can say they know how books are made? The history of books and their making is a com“Ink is made with the tree. The tree creates around a place where an insect has damaged the tree. People used to collect those, mix them with iron, and make ink from them.”- Mary Baughman, an Austin bookbinder

A photo of old texts, demonstraing the durability of old books, photo by Petr Kratochvil plicated topic. Not much can be said about when people started writing. Examples of rudimentary information storage systems known as “proto-writing” date as far back as 5000 years ago. However, the first real written documents originated with the Egyptians in the form of papyrus scrolls. The Egyptians would record information for legal and financial purposes. However, there was very little in the way of written stories because papyrus was expensive and stories were mainly spread by word of mouth. As centuries passed, writing spread to Europe and Asia. Many people were too poor to afford paper or books because they were extremely expensive because, unlike today, printers had to either go out and gather materials to produce ink and paper or pay an exorbitant price to have it delivered. The ink was produced through a difficult process. According to Mary Baughman, an ex-

pert bookbinder in Austin, Texas, “Ink is made with the tree. The tree creates around a place where an insect has damaged the tree. People used to collect those, mix them with iron, and make ink from them.” By paper, I am referring to animal skin parchment or papyrus, in those times it was very difficult to make what we think of when we Aaron Pratt, Photo by Aaron Pratt hear paper in this day and age. According to Anne Veerkamp, a bookbinder in Georgetown, Texas, one thing extremely important to bookbinding is, “the grain of the paper, which way the fibers are going in any given paper.” To explain, if you look closely at most types of paper you’ll see very tiny grains. These grains are essential to the book opening and closing properly. If the fibers are misaligned or go in the wrong direction, it could damage the book and prevent it from closing. The Illustration of printing press, Image by same is true with paper from animal skin often Linnaea Mallete

in the form of small furs. After the bookmakers gathered materials, they would painstakingly copy an original text, letter for letter, and if there was a mistake, you had to start over. As you can imagine, this process was slow, expensive, and difficult, and prices reflected that. Then, came the rigorous task of binding. With early binding methods, leather was sown around the pages, but in some cases, they used boards as a sort of hardcover. The first real books (non-legal/financial documents) were religious texts such as the Bible or the Torah. People in those days were very religious and if they owned a book at all, it would be a sacred text that they would proudly pass down for generations. To illustrate how important religion was to the development of books Aaron Pratt, a researcher at The Harry

Ransom Center in Austin, Texas stated, “The spread of the codex form we rely on today-with individual leaves held together at one edge, allowing them to be turned--is connected to the rise of Christianity and the Christian Bible.” In 1436, a man named Hans

Gutenberg invented a world-changing de

vice, the printing press. The original printing press process starts with the printer creating a reverse image of the type for the entire book, usually out of wood. Then the negative would be coated with ink, and aligned with a giant sheet of paper before being pressed down “More ‘middling’ people to print the words on start[ed] owning and reading paper. The paper would books in the later 16th and then be cut or folded 17th centuries, but I think into individual pages, before being bound. With this new device, books were more readmost scholars would say that the most significant demographic expansion of book ily available than ever ownership happened in the and authors started 18th century.”-Aaron Pratt writing more books. The printing press, though revolutionary, was still highly inefficient, because although it was made for cheap books, the press itself was not. As a result, many shops could only afford one. According to Aaron T. Pratt at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, “More ‘middling’ people start[ed] owning and reading books in the later 16th and 17th centuries, but I think most Anne Veerkamp, Photo by Anne scholars would say that Veerkamp

the most significant demographic expansion of book ownership happened in the 18th century.” The reason? The Industrial Revolution. People discovered ways to mass produce products, not just ink and paper, but thread and leather (for binding). Additionally, new printing methods were discovered such as adjustable typefaces. Printers would now line up reusable blocks in different sizes and fonts instead of using massive one-time-use plates. The development has continued to the modern day with plates being etched out of metal with precision lasers. This made books a lot cheaper, leading to literacy rates skyrocketing as books and materials became more affordable. In fact, in our current modern time, you can now go to workshops, and print and bind books yourself for a low price. The new printing methods led to the creation of genres as authors had more freedom to experiment. According to

Pratt, “There had been considerable experimentation with fiction writing in the later medieval world and in the 16th and early 17th centuries, too, but there was a real crescendo in the 18th.” To elaborate, in the beginning, books were expensive and if things failed it would be hard to bounce back, so

Mary Baughman, Photo by Anthony Maddalloni this made the book industry capitalistic with authors and publishers do“It’s not meant to las ing whatever they could to make their books sell the best. The experi- very long. And that’s kind of reflective in our mentation resulted from writers trying to appeal to the public’s interest society about things being more disposable and to see what would make temporary.”the most money. To this day, book technology has continued to devel- -Anne Veerkamp op, making materials cheaper than ever and opening up new possibilities with digital books. However, the increase in books being made has caused the quality of most printed works to plummet. In the early days of books, they were bound with leather and strong thread with strong paper, but now most books are held together with thin cardboard and cheap glue around a sheaf of thin, translucent paper. Paperbacks in particular have short life spans due to having no hard binding, just glue, and paper. Even hardcover books have suffered. Gone are the days of strong thread and leather, now hardcovers are much more fragile, often more so than paperbacks, despite higher prices. With modern technology, we can make paper and ink at high speeds without considering how they are made. We must acknowledge how one of humanity’s most important resources is produced and how they’ve changed. It’s also important to speculate on the future of books. As more and more books go digital with the proliferation of e-readers. The physical book market has taken a hit. E-readers can hold hundreds, if not thousands, of books in one handheld device, and these books can be produced at no cost. Additionally, e-readers never change in physical size no matter how many books they have loaded onto them. These factors make them far more convenient than print books. This poses an ominous threat, the rarification of printed books. While this wouldn’t be the end of the world it would result in Book Printing as a lost art. As I said before, it is important that we acknowledge the origin of our source of knowledge. This is because books, like everything, must be respected.