Coffee Record

Learned Vol. 4, Issue 48

This week: Which came first, the physical format or the abstract concept? Kinda depends which one we’re talking about. We’ll figure it out. Then we’ll have a quick side note about a Reddit thread, some housekeeping from me, and then a couple of anecdotes I lost in the footnotes to close us out. Here we go!

Like a lot of writers, I’ve got somewhere around 50-gajillion books overflowing the walls of my tiny, little office.  Most of them are what you’d expect from a teacher - textbooks and dictionaries, paperbacks and softcovers.  But, buried in amongst the pulp and debris are the special books, the ones that get hidden from sunlight and ensheathed in archival-grade plastic.  And of course, these books come in exactly two sizes:  tiny and freaking massive.  Nothing in-between.

I mean, you tell him he’s wrong.

Of these latter tomes, my favorites are the coffee-table books

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.  Wikipedia:

oversized, usually hard-covered book whose purpose is for display on a table intended for use in an area in which one entertains guests and from which it can serve to inspire conversation or pass the time. Subject matter is predominantly non-fiction and pictorial (a photo-book).

But coffee-table books are on my mind this week because they occupy a liminal space between physical and abstract.  A coffee-table book can be defined as a type of book - oversized, hard-cover, etc. - but can also be defined as an arrangement of art or photography with accompanying explanations and context.  So, a coffee -table book is a thing, but it’s also an idea.

Now, obviously, that is not a phenomenon limited to coffee-table books.  We do this all the time, generally by using the abstract name of something as a synonym for its physical object, like when you refer to the paperback on your shelf as a novel instead of a book.  But where this gets interesting for me is, which came first?

A Digression

Let me take a second and pull a Billy Budd

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and digress into a different medium for a second:  what do you call a new collection of songs?  Record?  Album?  For most of us of a certain age, we probably use (or used) the format as a shorthand - CD, tape, record, etc.  But these days it’s all about the drop or the release….

As radio came into its own, music was sent to stations on 78

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rpm vinyl discs.  78s usually had only one track per side per record and the group of records were sent out in collections - each record in its own sleeve, the sleeves bound together into…wait for it…an album.  The physical format became a synonym for the content contained within it.

These days, I use Apple Music as my streaming service (not bragging, just a better match for me, personally) and I’ve noticed that they use album as their synonym of choice for a collection of songs.  But, of course, no one is actually pulling vinyl records from album sleeves to play on a radio station.  Instead, when I press play, their computer receives a request from my computer to stream a playback of a recording through the speakers connected to my computer.

But it’s easier to say I played a record.  Or album.

Tea-Table Books

The idea of a coffee-table book predates the development of the coffee-table by a couple of centuries

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.  As the definition above states, coffee-table books as we know them today were first conceived as display books, a concept that dates back to the 16th century.  Over time, as the tea table lost height and moved from the back of the sofa to the front, it became known as a distinct piece of furniture, perfect for holding your coffee service and, also, that beautifully bound photo book you just happened to have lying around.

Stay curious,

J

Further Reading

Since you asked

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, here are a couple of coffee-table books I recommend. (These are not affiliate links, just really good books.)

• LeRoy Grannis. Surf Photography of the 1960s and 1970s — I mean, if you’re the type of person who watches The Endless Summer as an aspirational travel documentary, then this book is for you.

• The Art of John Berkey — If you read science-fiction in the 80s, you saw Berkey’s work on a hundred different covers. With just a few lines, he could suggest entires eons of history and conflict; his spaceships looked equal parts arcane and technological. Just amazing work.

• Hawaii, Daido Moriyama — Moriyama is a Japanese photographer who helped define the candid, grainy, street style of photography in the 60s and 70s. Then he went to Hawaii and created something moving and serene, desolate and lush. If you’re a photo buff, you need to see this book.

Sidenotes

What’s on your bucket list?  I’m asking because, over in the etymology subreddit, someone noticed that “Redditors over in r/movies are getting very argumentative over whether the term ‘bucket list’…originates with the 2007 film or not.”  The short answer is, it does.  Which seems to have surprised just about everyone.  But, while the redditors in r/etymology have done some very thorough detective work, it is just as fascinating to see the process of research and elimination they went through in trying to determine the origin of the phrase.

Housekeeping

One of my favorite weekly newsletters is called The Chalkboard Life.  It’s about the state of education and the art of teaching, not always in that order.  And, uh, I have a guest post over there this week!  David Thomson, the author, was kind enough to offer me a chance to talk about some of the attempts I have made to move beyond a textbook model that in no way lines up with teaching during a pandemic.  I enjoyed writing the post and I hope it creates some good discussion about just how we should be using textbooks in the modern age.

1. I remember leafing through the coffee-table books at my grandparents’ house when I was a kid;  theirs tended to be atlases and almanacs, while mine tend to be photography collections, along with a few volumes of art and design, just for variety, but the joyous feeling of leafing through them remains the same.

2. My freshman year of high school, I joined a writing group.  We had a half dozen student members and our faculty advisor.  We were challenged to write a short story.  In the middle of mine, I had “A Digression” as a chapter title.  “You know, you’re really supposed to have digressions.”  “Oh, but last year when I read Billy Budd…”  “Yeah, unless you’re writing about the sea, you shouldn’t base your writing off of Billy Budd.”  Words I still live by.

3. Way back in the early 90s, I was lucky enough to have a part-time job at my local college radio station.  The place had been in operation since the mid-70s and a lot of the staff had been in operation for considerably longer than that.  I have a clear memory of the chief engineer, a man named John Gaboury who had been working in radio in my hometown long enough to have literally built some of the more prominent stations, showing us through the record library.  He walked us through the stacks until he got to the back corner where there were collections of recordings on 78 rpm vinyl records. “Isn’t that cool?”  Gaboury beamed at us then yelled at us to get out of his library and leave him alone.  I miss him.

4. Depending on who you ask, the coffee table was invented in the late 1800s or the early 1900s.  The coffee-table book, as a named marketing category dates to the 1960s.

5. I mean, I’m assuming, but I’m right. Right?