Spine Wrap and Jesse James

An art file and history

 I went to a funeral and I took the book with me in case I arrived early. I like to have a book on hand because you never know with traffic. On this occasion I arrived just in time. I was getting out of the car and I shoved the book into the crevice on my dashboard and noticed the paperback had spine bounce. What is this you ask?

It’s when the background color of the spine of the book doesn’t fully cover the spine and wraps around to the front or back of the cover. It’s a solid idea because it gives you the ability to make the title and author’s name really show up in stark contrast with the text. It looks fantastic in a PDF on your screen. The brutal efficiency! The exquisite precision. The crisp lines of demarcation! Front! Spine! Back! 

But this does not account for the fact that with real machines things move. The machines bounce a bit when the 10PT C1s cover material is going through the sheetfed printer. A mm here, a mm there and before you know it you have some bounce. If you print 100 books, then 20 of them might be perfect but the rest will lean to the left or the right. 

It might be that the printer changed the paper weight on the paperback format and didn’t issue a new template. That’s unlikely and it’s possible the Production Manager said to let it go. Which is totally fair. You have 450 books to order and you're on just in time inventory? Bounce is not wrong. It doesn’t make the book bad. It doesn’t make it not work. Does waiting a week on a designer to redo the cover with a new template putting the book out of stock make sense? Depends on a lot of things. Namely, how many sales you might miss in revenue and what being out does to the book’s Amazon positioning. 

How do you fix this? You can have the color overlap the front and back a scoot but then that makes the front or back cover look like something is bleeding around the edge. It also can look like a really cheap attempt at faking a capped spine and remember it’s still going to bounce but your spine might end up looking perfect-o!

You can avoid it by using a bleed of your cover image to a darker color, like a gradual fade to black with an image.  You can pick a cover color that is bright and light and will contrast with darker text for the spine and use that over the entire cover, negating the need. You can fake a spine cap, like where a book has a paper or fabric material juxtaposed with the rest of the case on the spine. This always looks a little silly to me but it’s safer. Or, you can just do it and be ok with it. It works, some of the time, just not all the time, just like life. 

I want to make clear, this in no way determines how good the book is. Ugh, my pet peeve is Amazon Book Reviews that are, “Book arrived damaged, 1 star!!” Sigh. No, that’s not how good the book is sir.

 

You can leave the article right here and have all the Why and How Book Project content you came for. The rest of this is me talking about how books make me feel. 

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by TJ Stiles removes Jesse James from his Wild West Gunslinger persona and reveals him as a Southern Civil War Confederate post war hold out. If you like reading American History heavy on the Crime it’s going to spend time on your night stand. Stiles does fascinating work taking the myth out of Jesse James. Still, he’s pretty mythological. His Dad was a Baptist Preacher and hemp farmer in Missouri. Then came the war appetizer. The midwest, Kansas and Missouri, became a dress rehearsal for the Civil War. The Southern Baptists split off over slavery. His dad got  Gold Fever, became a 49’er and died out in California . Jesse’s mom’s life got harder by the day and by 16 Jesse was a guerilla fighter on the outskirts of the war.

His step dad was hung up from a tree, cut down and tortured. Jesse was beaten up and pushed around in his early teens by Unionist troops. His older brother, Frank, was a terrorist striking fear in Union soldiers, African Americans, and abolitionists that came to power in Kansas. Once Jesse was old enough to join Frank, he was full of fury. One veteran of their group said, “You're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year old American boy.” Frank and Jesse spent their youth following William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, a stone cold killer. They were forever molded to violence. 

I had a professor in college tell us every generation will write about the Civil War. Every generation will think about it differently and see something that earlier generations didn’t. Of course, there is the presentism approach but this isn’t that. This isn’t judging Jesse James of the 1870’s by the values of the 2020’s. There isn’t even a whiff of “Well, actually” to this book. Its research is seamless and invisible in the telling. The politics of the 1870s was a mix of violence, incredible rancor between political parties, and new found concepts of fame with greater communications and press. Constant bickering and assertions of lies and misdirection made up a blistering new media. We haven’t changed much have we? Accounts state that Frank James liked talking about Shakespeare and Jesse would talk to the train passengers he was holding up regaling his captive audience with his southern gentleman schtick. They knew the newspapers would write about them and they used it. 

Add to this the technology of the pistol made a big leap during the Civil War. War is often an accelerant to technology and change and the war between the states resulted in massive amounts of military and medical technology. I suppose that’s a silver lining in some way. The tactics of war made Jesse and Frank a totally different criminal. Brazen and full of surprises, the James gang likely held the first daylight robbery in US History. Surprise was often the element that they used. No one expected a train to stop and be held up. No one expected a bank robbery in broad daylight. But boys raised in the Civil War no longer had any expectations. 

Anytime I see a new take I consider that we like to think that now, in 2023, with iphones where we can look anything up that we now know the real story.

It’s true that scholars now have more access to information, data, records, and documents than ever before. 

But if we think we know the whole story or the real story, we have to know, that’s unlikely. I tell my kids to always look at when a movie is made to see how it treats its topics. For example, Spy Movies made before or after the Cold War have different villains and different dangers. The same with movies or before or after 9/11. Time changes the players. Time is going to change again. 

And sometimes, I feel like this. I don’t like knowing everything, I don't like the lack of mystery and weirdness in the world. We can data ourselves to death. We can “know” a subject to which we don’t know anything. I saw this quote today in the New York Times from Keith Ricahrds, “Rhythm is the most important thing in your g**damn life,” Richards said. “A lot of what you hear ain’t what you hear — it’s what you feel. And that’s a matter of rhythm.”

There’s a lot to a story or to history that you know or hear but that isn’t written. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense. Maybe that’s what tradition is. But anytime you read history, you have feelings along for the ride, facts be damned. 

 It reminded me of another thing I tell my kids, that before you could look everything up, people talked a lot of shit. You went on hearsay, myth, and legend.  You couldn’t pull out your phone and in real time verify every thing anyone said, killing the conversation.  I don’t like thinking about every move someone makes as if they are plotting for a political motive or goal. I think most people are just being dumb or smart day to day, moment to moment. I think of historical figures like that. I like to wonder what Truman read when he was on the john. Maybe comic books? 

Have you ever read Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The: A Novel that the movie of the same title is based on? By the way, the movie is beautifully shot by Roger Deakins. The book is  poetry. 

I don’t want to lose that  poetry to the “Well actually, he was not Robin Hood. He was robbing small banks, and was representing the themes and failings of his time.” But then, I am well aware James was a stone cold killer. Do I want merciless cruelty masquerading as beauty because of myth? I don’t want that either. Do I want to lose an argument that the Civil War ended in June of 1865 when I could look up that it ended in April when Grant and Lee met at Appomatox? But I googled the end of the war just now and the last battle was in May of 1865 and Andrew Johnson formally ended it in 1866. We are never going to know everything again, are we?

We took a road trip out to Colorado once and I wish I’d had time to make the detour to St Joseph Missouri where James was killed. It was a long way from home and we had a long way to go. When I was in Kansas I thought about John Brown. I’ve always wanted to write a Western where the two of them, James and Brown, have a show down. Sounds great doesn't it? But Brown is executed in 1859 when Jesse is 12 years old. See, there I go letting the facts get in the way of a good yarn. 

I live in Nashville. Jesse James did for a while too. Everytime I drive on Boscobel I think about Jesse. Apparently, he lived the longest at 711 Fatherland. I’ve driven by this one before but for some reason Boscobel sticks out in my mind. I had a friend who lived on Boscobel for a while so maybe that’s why. I always can see Jesse James, pretty much as played by Brad Pitt, standing in the road looking toward downtown and walking slowly. I wonder if now I will think about his editorials in newspapers and decrying Ulysses Grant as a tyrant? 

Google Maps

My Kentucky aunts used to say he was shot from behind when he was straightening a picture. I think they said this every time anyone got on a chair to straighten anything. I’m working on installing a light in the bathroom this week and I think about it when I get on the step stool to prep the area.  I think of it any time I do anything standing on a chair. 

Remember this Time Life commercial? I can still remember the narrator saying,  “John Wesley Harding shot 44 men, one of ‘em just for snoring too loud.” I think of that every-time I hear the word, “snoring.” Accused, accusing or otherwise. I poured over these books from when I was in middle school. I think they are still at my parent’s house. 

I do like facts. I don't want my health report to be a water color. But our health really is a watercolor isn’t it? Your blood pressure is this, your calcium score is that but if you get hit by a bus you might as well have been smoking Cuban Cigars and hydrating with Bacardi. We can’t live like that can we? Because we know the data says if we do X, Y, and Z we will live longer. Probably, right? Unless you get hit by a bus. So we replace the richness of experience for the safety of data? And funnily enough watching the commercial it says the Old West Time Life books are, “Straight with the Facts.” Maybe they are. But isn’t that what the Jesse James The Last Rebel book claims to be as well? The facts are straight depending on where you are in time? Am I saying there is no such thing as a fact? No, not at all. I’m a firm believer in right and wrong. If you're not you've probably never been punched in the face. But I also know that the facts change with time, at least how we think about them. Maybe it’s like music? Heavy Metal sounded so menacing in 1984 but now it doesn’t sound so hard but maybe that’s because I’ve heard death metal and maybe death metal will sound like a lullaby in 40 years? I tell my son most video game music sounds like Meth Polka. Maybe it’ll sound like classical music in 40 years. Is this the same thing history does? 

Part of the strange thing about living is that I am sharing this and I know that there are a thousand essays and books out there about how our perspective changes with time. Personally, historically, individually, wholly. I have nothing to add to this conversation, just that I saw it happen in real time in front of my eyes, reading and remembering. It’s like a car wreck or a lightning bolt or Jesse James standing on the corner of Fatherland and 7th waving at cars driving by on a crisp Fall morning in 2023. It probably changes a little like a book’s spine printing and bouncing.