Introducing the Sandglass

A note on where this idea came from

My father was a reader. 

Not casually, the way most people are readers - but devotedly, in the way that some people are gardeners or musicians. Books were not decoration in our house. They were companions, arranged and rearranged on the shelves with quiet reverence, handled with care, chosen with intention. 

For many years he belonged to a book club called the Heritage Club - a remarkable subscription publishing house that produced acid-free editions of the classics. Dickens. Marcus Aurelius. Le Morte D'Arthur (my personal favorite). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Bram Stoker (with blood red text accents). Each volume was a considered object - the paper chosen for longevity, the illustrations commissioned with care, the binding made to last. 

And tucked inside each magnificent volume was a small newsletter called the Sandglass. 

Four pages, perhaps. Modest in size, extraordinary in content. The Sandglass explained the decisions behind each book - which edition the editors had chosen to work from, who had made the woodcuts, why this paper and not another, what the illustrator had been thinking. It was, in the truest sense, the story behind the story. Written for people who didn't just want to read a beautiful volume, but wanted to understand each step in how it came to be beautiful. 

I grew up playing amongst these books. Arranging and rearranging them on the shelves. Pulling out the Sandglass inserts and reading them with the same attention I gave the books themselves. 

Most of the books thankfully survived a house fire not long before my father passed. He always told me they were my legacy from him. And I am forever grateful. 

The Heritage Club is long gone now. But the idea of the Sandglass - that the decisions behind a beautiful object deserve their own telling - has never left me. 

Dove & Ink exists because words are worth wearing as well as reading. And some of those words, and the art that carries them, have stories that deserve more than just a product description. Stories about poems published anonymously in 1848. About Japanese woodblock masters and accordion-style books thirty-one feet long. About third grade teachers and mothers who loved books and fathers who kept them carefully on shelves. 

Those are Sandglass stories. 

I'll be telling them here, one piece at a time, for anyone who wants to know not just what a thing is - but how it came to be. 

Welcome to the Dove & Ink Sandglass.