Ugh, now I have to write this boring part, I would think. I would spend a few days in active rebellion against this directive that I imagined the book was imposing.
Then I would realize: this is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would think, if I’m bored by something that I believe I need to write, the reader undoubtedly will be too, if not because the subject is inherently boring, then because I myself find it so unbearably tedious to imagine discussing it for five pages. Often as not, I would remember some aspect of the subject that deeply interested me, something a little outside the way it’s usually perceived or written about. Then I would meditate on that, and soon I would be scribbling notes from an increasingly excited place until I found a way forward. A form of beginner’s mind.
The virtue of thin sheet metal in giving the greatest glitter for a grain of gold was exploited in the earliest days of metallurgy. However, before the days of rolled sheet and drawn wire, most metal objects were made by hammering and were basically three-dimensional in form.
[In contrast] look at the simple drop press — it’s unmodulated blow striking in a single direction symbolizes much of nineteenth-century mechanized production. To make multiple stampings, stacks of very thin metal sheets were superimposed under the hammer, and the final profile with moderately high relief was gradually achieved as finished sheets were removed from the bottom and new ones added at the top.
When the drop press was used to shape large areas of thin sheet metal, the aesthetic qualities of the surface became divorced from the underlying substance, and decoration became independent of the body needed to support it. In any object there is a natural relationship between the surface and the bulk, that is, between its one-, two-, and three-dimensional aspects. The fakery involved in applying gold or silver playing on a solid copper object is quite different from the deception of an ornately stamped piece of thin sheet brass. Compare a magnificent ormolu furniture fitting or even a gilded plaster picture frame with a cheap lamp base embossed in thin sheet brass. In the former, the surface is simply and honestly applied for its optical effect alone; in the latter the fakery is fundamental for it is dimensionally misleading.