“My hat and wig will soon be here, / They are upon the road.”

It can be a dangerous thing, wishing. Literature since Aladdin tells us so, and yet we do it anyway. And even when our wishes are granted, we may not be worthy of them. I've had one fall on my head just now, and I blush to think what it cost, though it has made me very happy.

Shameless baggage that I am.

One of the byproducts of the bookstore's Espresso Book Machine are the "trims" that get cut off to make each book comport with the size requirements of the text and original design. Most of the little 19th Century books I've had printed, for example, would be made quite ridiculous if simply printed on the large uniform stock used for both pages and covers. The text would look like postage stamps on such big sheets, and all the charm of a small book would be lost if left the size of an annual agricultural report. It is actually my favorite part of the process: watching the mechanical armature manipulate the all-but-finished book into the proper alignment, at which point the heavy blade is slowly deployed to prune the edge. There's a lovely, tearing thunk with each cut. Always three, obviously. The book is turned ever so gracefully for each successive clipping. After the last, the book is turned one last time and dropped down the shoot, a finished article. Each cut produces a blank, fully bound, paper-pad -- narrow or wide, short or long --which then drops into a plastic bin bellow. These "trims" are eventually collected up and left out in a decorative bucket, at least in the bookstore where I work, for any that might find a use for them, like so much butcher's offal, or kindling, more like.

These things make wonderful flip-books, among other obvious uses like scratch-pads and the like.


A coworker of mine, with an eye for otherwise unanticipated fascination, has taken to folding the pages of these things into ever more elaborate shapes and variations. Everyone might have seen old coverless books put to similar use: the pages folded into the spine in alternating patters until the whole is made to resemble a complete column or ornaments of various patterns and sizes: some like old fashioned tops, or crude spheres, lightless Japanese lanterns or old fashioned Christmas trees.


Well, what this amazing young woman I work with has done with these "trims" surpasses anything one is likely to have seen done with bound paper before. Simple or complex, large and small, she has made so many intricate forms as to stagger lesser imaginations like mine. There's a marvelous mobile hanging now in the Mail Order Office that she made of these previously unseen flowers and stars and zygotes and looping, twisting wonders. Great Ziggurats has she built, and bouquets and silos. Whole cities in miniature, of the most unlikely and startling impracticality, and beauty, might be constructed from the products of her busy fingers. And all this, just to pass the time, while waiting for customers at the Information Desk!


Off-handedly one day, having more than once held one of her dainties behind an ear like a Camellia, or set it at a rakish angle atop my big bald head, I pointed out how like a great wig these curls might look massed. We giggled and fantasized elaborate variations and she said she'd make us both proper, paper wigs, come Halloween. She meant it, at least for me. She sent away to her mother for real old wigs, and clipped them down to the netting. She showed me one and had me try it on. Comfortable enough, if not specially flattering. I was excited, but could not imagine she would ever go through with such a project, specially as she is now a dame enceinte, doubtless with much, and more important matters on her mind.

Wonder of wonders! Here you see the evidence of my wish granted! Inspired not only by the great wigs of those English Whigs we first discussed, but also, at my instigation, by the glorious and bizarre headdress affected by Elizabeth Taylor in the otherwise painfully unmemorable movie "Boom!", this artisan of the wastepaper-basket, this recycler of apparelled refinement, this craftswoman and sculptor, has added wigmaker to her accomplishments! And for me!!!

Look at it. It is a marvel, is it not? Beautiful. Amazing. Mine.

"I'll never do it again... for free." was her quite sensible comment on the whole undertaking. Quite right, too. I will have to find some means to thank her. No idea how to approach expressing my astonishment and gratitude in any real terms. Imagine the hours, the care, the skill involved. I stand before the thing in awe.

Perhaps the best present I've ever had from a lady's hand.

Now on me of course, the effect is more Pasha than posh, more dolt than dandy, but I will do my best to carry the thing off in something like style. (It's quite airy and light on the head, by the way, another wonder.) Meanwhile, all I can do is gaze at it blissfully and wonder no one thought of this before.

When I was parading around the store with it on, I made a point of stopping by the office of our Executive Supremo. "See," I said, "we waste nothing in the bookstore."

(Except perhaps talent.)

Bless you, dear friend, for my present. I'm ashamed now that I let you. It is too marvelous. I wish I was worthy of so magnificent a wig. I shall have to read Dryden to you when I put it on.