If you walk through the entrance to Mission Mill Museum, veer past the information, steer clear of the gift shops, and wind your way to the northwestern most end of the facility, you will find Max Marbles, probably the most interesting person I have interviewed in Salem thus far.
My story on Max, called The Fixer, appears in the current issue of Salem Monthly.
Now, if you’ve been following the monthly since Editor Eric Howold took over in February, and since I started writing for them in March, then you might have noticed that I have been tearing up the WORD section, a back-of-the-book column about all things literary and bookish in Salem. So far I’ve covered:
Local romance writers on Obama
And I’m not done yet. A profile of Max Marbles — one of the nations’ premier bookbinders and local all-around intellectual nut and cool guy — is my latest attempt to discover if Salem has not, as I had feared when I moved here, a scrapbooking culture, but an actual book culture. Max is the local go-to-guy for salvaging those most precious books in our collections.
So far so good.
I have a couple of books I wouldn’t mind taking down to Max. There’s my baby book, which my mom left in the basement as it flooded, there’s my German university transcript that my husband spilled red wine all over (in Germany you have to keep track of these flimsy pieces of paper called “Scheins” in a more flimsy book, there is no central registrar…), there’s that copy of Spy Magazine: The Funny Years, which my friend Jason’s daughters scribbled all over.
But none of these books, have really earned their wings, as Marbles says, as a venerable object of time.
Maybe someday I’ll take him my munched on copy of Dr. Suess’s Yurtle the Turtle. I liked that book so much as a child, I used to eat it.
