Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

In Sunday’s New York Times, two reporters did something quite brave. They signed their names to articles reporting that the Basra police department has been infiltrated by fundamentalist Shiite militia who use it to carry out crimes, including assassinations, and suggesting that these militia may well have ordered the killings of freelancer Steven Vincent on August 2 and New York Times stringer Fakher Haider on September 19 because of their efforts to report on this infiltration earlier. If the reporters are correct, they will have drawn a very dangerous attention to themselves. The implied tribute to their murdered colleagues is moving, and the devotion to journalism is heroic. No doubt almost all reporters in Iraq run similar risks daily, and perhaps their courage is obvious to everyone who read the articles, but it jumped out at me and seemed worth underlining.

I would like to put on record my hatred of deckle edges. I only learned the word a few months ago, but I have hated the thing intensely for years. A deckle-edged book is one where the outer edges of the pages are untrimmed. Publishers almost always slice smooth the tops and bottoms, but in deckle-edged books, the industrial rotors omit to cut the edge opposite the binding.

Why? It seems to be for the sake of effect, to signal that a hardcover is particularly distinguished. I imagine that it’s thought to look old, and here the implicit metaphor shows its falseness. Once upon a time in the Anglo-American book world, a customer sometimes bought the pages of a book or pamphlet as a stack of printed but loose fascicles, and then had them trimmed and bound himself. (New books in France are issued as paperbacks on this understanding, though I doubt that very many French readers still get around to binding anymore.) To leave the outer edges untrimmed evokes this era, when a customer could choose to leave one edge rough . . . if he were pretentious and not in the habit of actually reading his books.

It’s wretched nostalgia, and it should be stopped. All binding is centralized today, and so no customer chooses deckle edges anymore, and no one can opt out of it, either, except by waiting for the paperback. Deckle edges absorb and retain dust with fantastic efficiency. But the truly demonic thing about them is that they turn a book into a trick deck of cards—the sort where if you flip the cards over one by one, you see all suits, but if you riffle along one edge, you see only clubs or only diamonds. If you riffle through the pages of a deckle-edged book, only certain pages flip open to your eye. Should you be hunting for a quote that happens to appear on a page whose width is not a local maximum, you’re out of luck. You can try putting your thumb along the clean-cut top or bottom, and you’ll get a little functionality this way. But not much. It becomes hard even to figure out what chapter you’re in. O publishers of America, stop it. If you must deliver hoity-toityness, how about a nice daub of gilt on the tops of pages, or a dash of blue paint? Or you might sew the signatures together instead of gluing them. A frisson of “quality” always comes over me when I see white thread. Of course that would cost money, and I suspect that deckle edges are as cheap as they look.

For the journalist Douglas Ireland, my friend Houman Sarshar has translated from Persian a twenty-two-year-old gay Iranian’s account of entrapment and torture by Iranian security officials and vigilantes. The man is now a refugee in Turkey and is seeking asylum. His testimony suggests that the lives of gays in Iran has become very grim since the hanging last year of two gay teenagers.

I am having trouble comprehending the tragedy in New Orleans, dismaying in any number of ways. Yesterday, September 1, FEMA director Michael Brown admitted that the federal government didn’t know until that day that people had been waiting for help at the New Orleans Convention Center, and in another interview seems to have insinuated that the scope of the tragedy had something to do with the “people who did not heed the evacuation warnings.” I hope he didn’t mean to insinuate that, because it would be beneath contempt. (Update: CNN has compiled a wonderfully straightforward exposure of the lies of Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff.)

For better or worse, there is a nineteenth-century angle to this week’s events. Last weekend, the City section of the New York Timesprinted a list of unsolved mysteries about New York history, and historian Kenneth T. Jackson contributed the question, “Why has the waterfront in New York historically not been the residence of the elite?” This week’s reporting suggests a possible answer, in the form of this map, which probably also explains why the nineteenth century didn’t get around to developing Red Hook to any great extent.