Spring 1986 RAIN Page 37 ACCESS: Good Reading Always Coming Home, by Ursula Le Guin, 1985, 523 pp., $25 (including cassette tape) from: Harper & Row Publishers 10 East 53rd Street New York, NY 10022 In a recent reading in Berkeley, Ursula Le Guin contrasted Always Coming Home with the kind of story that whisks you away, as if the author were driving the car. Instead it's like a house you walk into—you have to decide where to start, in what order you want to go, and what you'd like to take home. Inside you'll find stories, poetry, drawings, and notes about the invented people (the Kesh) and place that Le Guin has offered as a possible future. This is not an encyclopedia of clever fantasy, but a vision of a people that compel us to imagine how we could invoke aspects of their culture in our own. “The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California,” after the destruction of most of our present culture. Land masses have changed drastically and outlying lands are still poisoned from past industrial waste, but the people in the valley have learned to be part of the natural world around them, taking sparingly of its resources and sharing with the non-human “people” (the birds, animals, plants, rocks) there. In the valley towns the people belong to one of five “Houses of the Earth”: the Obsidian, Blue Clay, Serpentine, Yellow Adobe, and Red Adobe. Although they do not all live together, members are considered extended family. “In a Valley town everybody had two houses: the house you lived in, your dwelling-place, in the Left Arm of the double-spiral-shaped town; and in the right Arm, your House, the heyimas. In the household, you lived with your kinfolk by blood or by marriage; in the heyimas you met with your greater and permanent family. The heyimas was a center of worship, instruction, training, and study, a meetinghouse, a political forum, a workshop, a library, archive, and museum, a clearinghouse, an orphanage, hotel, hospice, refuge, resource center, and the principal center of economic control and management for the community...” Their towns provide a framework for living in which people are considered wealthy if they can contribute much to the community. It is not a Utopia; they must learn and re-leam how to live in a sustainable manner and deal with militant outside influences. They are not one-dimensional and so are more interesting to meet. The first valley person we meet is Stone Telling. Hers is the history of a young woman caught between her Kesh mother and outsider father in their inability to reconcile each other's cultures. She loses her community and freedom when she journeys to the warring, patriarchal land of her father. The stones that speak their message to her, and the images of water running and pooling make this story feel like a spiritual dance. Other stories range from the hilarious exploits of Coyote, in the war between the humans and the bears, to the cosmic funk of “A Hole in the Air.” The book encourages non-linear reading, reading aloud, and chanting with the beautiful tape of “Kesh music” that accompanies the book. You will be missing an inspiration, a lot of fun, and a culmination of many aspects of Ursula Le Guin's brilliant writing if you miss Always Coming Home. —^JM ACCESS: Communication Getting it Printed: How to Work with Printers and Graphic Arts Services to Assure Quality, Stay on Schedule, and Control Costs, Mark Beach, Steve Shepro, and Ken Russon, 1986, 236 pp., $29.50 paperback, $42.50 hardbound from: Coast-to-Coast Books 2934 NE 16th Avenue Portland, OR 97212 Finally an all-in-one tool covers everything about “getting it printed” from start to finish. For those who have used Coast-to-Coast's Editing Your Newsletter: A Guide to Writing, Design, and Production, (reviewed in RAIN circa 1982), Getting It Printed follows as a comprehensive volume for anyone who plans, designs, or buys printing. The “It” here refers to printed products ranging from brochures, newsletter, and posters to magazines and books. Intended for those who work with printers or graphic arts services, this well-written volume serves as a tool for learning about the design, technical, and business aspects of the printing and graphics industries. The authors' cumulative experience as publisher, printing sales representative, and graphics arts consultant, respectively, contributes to the depth and breadth of the subjects discussed. The book is organized in ten chapters spanning the life of a printed product— from planning through delivery. Concepts, processes, and services including halftones, typesetting, laser printing, and paper characteristics are explained. More than 100 clear and detailed illustrations, charts, photographs, and checklists are included as well as a 500-work glossary, a guide to producing 110 printed products, metric conversion tables, a thorough list of trade associations, an annotated bibliography, and an index. The initial chapter on planning presents measurable quality standards for printing: basic, good, premium, and showcase. These standards, referred to throughout the book, guide the reader on making plans and decisions about quality, cost, and schedule from color separation to binding and packaging. Camera-ready forms to help write specifications, request quotations, and organize schedule are available in the appendix and can be copied for the reader's use. The final chapter discusses “honest business” and common sense approaches to working with printers whether they are in-house, commercial, or specialty shops. For example, this section provides a chart detailing “How to Analyze a Job for Payment,” and includes sound advice on how to negotiate with a printer. The 1985 trade customs for the printing industry are presented with each of the 18 customs analyzed from both the printers and buyers point-of-view. —Mimi Maduro Mimi Maduro is part of the RAIN Reading and Dining Salon arui helped with the content editing of Getting It Printed.
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