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I scavenged my books at home for library pockets. I wanted used ones on one side, new ones on the other. I found 13. I went to three libraries looking for extra pockets. I took a picture of the Montpelier Library for later. The nice folks at the Barre Library gave me 20 new pockets and a stack of cards to put in them. I asked friends if they had any pockets. Lydia brought over one and Matthew came through in the clinch and mailed me seven more, I was over the top. Thus began my love affair with the rubber cement.

If someone invented a Rubber Cement Ray that dissolved rubber cement somehow and left everything else intact, this project would immediately become a stack of dissimilar papers. I put the rubber cement on the backs of all the pockets and then left them to dry while I worked on the rest of my project. Needless to say, they got stuck to me frequently. If you would like a list of the pockets that I used in this project, you are welcome to click here.

So, another list -- this obsessive list making calmed my soul in a way that I hadn't previously expected -- was what would go in the pockets. I figured I had to stay reasonable, stay cost-effective and stay sane while making whateveritwas. Final inclusion list: home made bookmark, little library card with the "edition" number typed onto it, bibliography & colophon, a few home made bookplates, a recipe for wheatpaste, a hand-typed Brautigan poem and a Barthelme story. I was going to include a list of links, all typed out, but figured the hassle involved in typing it twenty times, compared to the liklihood that anyone would type them again to view them made it less amusing that I had previously thought it might be. So, I decided on a supplementary web site in case there wasn't enough to keep anyone occupied with the little book.

At no point in time has this project ever really had a name other than "the little book" I don't really know why this is.

Then I decided -- for sheer Risk Factor -- to include something I had never done before: paint thinner pseudophotocopies. For more info on how that works, you can go look here.

Other risk factors included two very undependable vehicles, making this project on the same table [the only real table in the house] that I ate all my meals on, and the everpresent threat of loss of faith.

Every piece of this project needed to not only be created, but also pressed so that it would all fit into a somewhat flat package. Once I had gotten a goodly way through it I also realized that scenting might need to happen if I didn't want it to smell like silly putty.

Books I used for pressing the whole mess include a copy of the 1910 census, O'Reily's Dynamic HTML book and a book on knife throwing I got at the local library sale.