S1 EP 25: Allie Alvis Interview, Part 3 of 3

Hello  Happy People, 

Today Dianne brings you the finale to the three part interview with Allie "Book Historia" Alvis. They discuss Allie's numerous publications from professional journals to her personal blog. Allie shares her love of making informative videos on her YouTube channel and how the pandemic led her to get back into sewing and the creation of her Etsy page where she sells book accessories.

After such an incredible career what could Allie possibly want to explore next? 
Check out the podcast and find out. 

Next week, we will have The Social Media Professor, Lisa Sillaway, joining us. She will be sharing her best practices for how anyone improve their social media presence and increase their following. If you are an entrepreneur, an indie author, or just want to reach a wider audience for your personal pages, The Social Media Professor can help you do it! 

So now it's time to listen to the podcast and then go forth ... and be happy. 

Enjoy,
Dianne

Support Our Book Banter Buddies (guest interviews):

• Allie "Book Historia" Alvis website (Episodes 23, 24, & 25: July 20 & 27, Aug 3, 2022)
• Book Historia Social Media:
  • Bite Sized Book History - YouTube Channel 
  • Twitter 
  • Instagram 
  • Etsy Shop 

Future Guest Interviews:

• Lisa Sillaway "Social Media Professor" (Episodes 26 & 27: Aug 10 & 17, 2022)
  • Facebook
  • Twitter 
  • Instagram 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to BookBanter with me, your host, Diane Burkhart. I hope you will join me every Wednesday as we explore all things to do with, well, books. Let's get on with our show today. Hello, my happy people. Today is August 3rd, 2022. Thank you so much for joining me today. We have got a fantastic interview for you. Today is the finale of the interview with Allie Alvis, known as Book Historia across social media. Today we're going to talk about all of her social media projects from her own personal website, her YouTube channel, her Etsy projects, and so much more. You do not want to miss this interview. Be sure to stick around at the end when we talk about our BookBanter Writing Prompt Challenge. We have a new prompt for you today, and we hope that you will write us a story and send it in to join in all the fun. So now let's get right to the interview. Please welcome back to the show Allie Alvis. You've had all of these great experiences with the companies that you've worked for. But you've also branched out and done a lot of stuff on your own. You've written articles. You do a vlog. What is your vlog like?

SPEAKER_01 1:27

So I make a series of videos called Bite-sized book history. And this really arose during the pandemic when I was stuck at home. I mentioned, you know, reading room tours that were always the highlight of my week or my day or whatever how often however often they would happen. I I loved telling new audiences about the wonder of rare books and the cool stuff that we had in our collections and bibliographic aspects that people had never experienced before. And I really missed doing that during lockdown. And I had a lot of pictures of books on my phone because I had been to a lot of places with books in them. So I thought I can make videos about this. I can show my pictures. And I have some old books at home that I could show off and use as examples. So let's give that a shot. So I taught myself video editing. I wrote scripts. I am the host, but bite-sized book history. Uh, it's a free resource for people to become more acquainted with interesting aspects of the material book. So I have videos on miniature books, um, on four-edge painting, on Volvelles, which are really interesting sort of movable book calculators.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

I was just watching your episode on the Vovells yesterday. That was so cool.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Yeah, it's it's really cool. Movable parts of books are something that people don't really consider outside of pop-up books and sort of books for kids these days, or specific sort of sculptural artists' books. But in the past, these Volvelles, they would have been the calculators of their day, or their iPhones. You know, you can look up different pieces of information using your Volvelle, trying to figure out the location of stars or planets, or how far things are away from each other, or what time it is in different time zones. And yeah, it's book as calculator or book as computer. It's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

It was making me think I had this thing when I was taking my German classes here, that you could spin these different wheels to find the articles to go with different nouns and verbs.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Yeah, that's a Volvelle. Yeah, Volvelles still exists today in things like that. That's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

One of the things that I was really surprised with that was I I don't know why, but I would have thought that they would have been made of sturdier stuff than just, you know, a few layers of paper.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Yeah, it's it's for a bunch of different reasons, uh including the fact that if they did that, it would have been fairly expensive. But books with Vulvelles in them were sold unassembled generally.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

So when somebody bought a book with uh a Vulvelle, they would have to put it together themselves. And the actual instruments would be printed on pieces of paper that were conjugate to other pages, and the owner would cut out the circles and assemble them themselves. You could pay extra to have your binder do it for you or something like that. But in general, because cheapness of printing that sort of thing, so you didn't have to go to a different press or load the press with a different quality of paper, then everything ended up being the same kind of paper. Volvelles in manuscripts can vary because obviously manuscripts are kind of one-offs and they are made according to the materials that the individual has or the scriptorium has. Uh, in one scene in the Volvelle video, I show an image of a Volvelle that's actually set into a wooden board. And it's a parchment that's mounted on a thicker piece of paper to give it a sort of stiffness. So it's more of a a hard instrument than a piece of paper.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

And I do have a link to your YouTube channel in the description for the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Because Yeah, so um, you can find me basically on every social media as Book Historia.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Um, and that is true of YouTube. It's book underscore historia.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

We've got all kinds of links to your stuff because it's so cool. I want to make sure that people can find where you are everywhere. I even have a link to your Etsy page because you have your own accessory business.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, so that is something, another thing that arose during the pandemic. I didn't have a lot to do outside because nobody had a lot to do outside. Uh, so I took up sewing again. And I was experimenting and if I made some masks, but for my videos, I realized that I need page weights and I needed wedges and book supports and things like that, things that are traditionally found in reading rooms, but cost a lot of money if you buy them from conservation equipment companies. So I thought I can make some of these for myself. And so I did. I posted them on my Twitter, and people just like deluged me with comments, like, do you sell these? Where can I buy these? Can I buy these? They're so pretty, can I buy these? And so I started making them and selling them myself. And now I have a tidy little business on Etsy where you can buy your own book support pillows, which are full of beanbag beans, basically. And uh they are sort of shaped like a V. So that way you can read your more fragile books in such a way that you're not laying them flat on the desk that it helps their structure stay a little bit tighter. Obviously, if you bend open and closed a book binding enough times, the boards will come off. And a lot of old books have that going for them since they've been used for 500, 600, 700 years.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

So you want to use something that will support the binding while you're looking at the pages.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Well, see, and I think those book supports are great because I am one of those nerds that I can read a book 15 times and it still looks like it has never been cracked open. I I hate having a book that the spine has been cracked and broken. I always I take very good care of my books because they're my babies. I love books.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Yeah, I always take uh dust jackets off if I'm reading books because it's like, oh, I don't want to hurt it.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Yeah. But now you also are a fairly prolific writer. You have done a lot of articles, you've done a blog.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so as I mentioned, uh my research interests are bottomless. And I like writing about the stuff that I find interesting. When I was doing my first master's degree, I started posting book pictures and stuff on my social media just sort of as an experiment. Not even as an experiment, but just as, you know, here's what I'm doing today. And the feedback and the questions that I got by sharing those images and that information was really eye-opening. And it sort of made me think like, how can I share all of this information with people who might not necessarily be aware of this aspect of history? And I find writing about it in addition to doing social media and videos about it to be very rewarding. So I write for academic journals, things like that, academic books, but I also write a lot of blog posts in a voice that is much more accessible. And yeah, I just want to make sure that no matter where you're coming from, that you have something to learn about through my media presence, whether that's the anatomy of a book, like we were talking about the covers and the four-edges, or things as complicated as, for example, poison books.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yes. My husband would not forgive me if we didn't talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah, so that's a really good example of a topic that can be come upon from an extremely academic angle or a very popular angle. I have contributed to an article about it that was it's very dense scientific uh analysis of arsenic green pigments that were on book bindings made in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries, a very sort of specific style of bookbinding. But I've also written about them from a more popular angle, about why these bookbindings are like this. And the short of it is because people like the color green. It's not anything nefarious, nobody was trying to poison anybody. Arsenic orpament, which is a very yellow yellow, could be mixed with indigo, which is blue, to make a nice, fairly cheap green. On these German book bindings, which were the middle of the road bindings, they they weren't particularly expensive, but they weren't super cheap. The binders wanted to cut corners where they could. So they used manuscript waste to cover the book binding. But with manuscript waste, obviously, there is manuscript on it. And it didn't look great aesthetically, so they painted over the manuscript with green paint, which happened to be made of orpament and indigo. So you have this sort of muddy-looking color green that does enough of a job disguising the manuscript waste. And even back when they were doing it, there was this understanding that you should not eat the orpament, but as long as you were painting with it or grinding it up or whatever, like you were fine, this is fine, nobody's gonna die. Of course, when we were interested in reading the manuscript waste below the green paint, that was when we discovered the arsenic content through X-ray fluoroscopy, which is a process of pinging electrons and seeing how they fluoresce and telling us what chemicals the pigment is made out of. It's very complex and it's really cool. But we discovered these books are actually coated in arsenic.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

Is there actually any danger to handling them?

SPEAKER_01 12:18

So funny you ask that, this is one of the rare occasions where you actually should wear gloves when handling a book. Um, not cotton gloves, though, because as I mentioned, they can lift stuff uh and transfer stuff. So in these arsenic books, you should wear uh nitrile gloves or surgical gloves, something like that, and dispose of them after handling the book. But even then, really they should only be worn to handle the outside of the book. If you're turning the book binding around or opening it or carrying it, that's when you wear the gloves. But if you're turning pages, you're fine. The Smithsonian did experiments on their arsenical book binding to see how much it was disintegrating, if it was uh getting into the air at all, all sorts of uh environmental studies, if these things are safe to look at. And they really found that the highest danger was the binding. So once you get into the book, as long as you have it set up and you're not touching the binding anymore, you don't really need to wear gloves. But again, this is not something that will kill you the moment it touches you. It's it's not that poisonous. It really builds up in your system if you're working with it very closely for a long period of time. But unless you're eating these books, it will not kill you.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Well, that's good to know.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Now, there was another article that I saw of yours that I found really fascinating. It was Publishing Pretents and Pigeons.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Oh boy, it's been a minute since that one. Yeah, this is an interesting uh publication story going back to my Smithsonian days. It's a book about pigeons. And you think, oh well, it's a book about pigeons. Why why is that important in any sort of way? Like I see pigeons every day out on the street. They're they're street rat birds. And first of all, no, they're not. I love pigeons very much. But second of all, around the world there are these beautiful species of pigeons.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

And ornithologists have studied them quite a lot. And there is this French book about uh sort of pigeons of the world with stunning illustrations by Madame Nipp, who was a French woman artist and really stupendous ornithological artist. She worked closely with an ornithologist who was describing these birds scientifically, naming them, you know, saying this is where this one lives, this is their productive habits, that sort of thing. But when it came time to go to press with this book, the ornithologist was working in a different country from Madame Nip. And Madame Nip was in charge of actually having the book published. So when she took her art and the text to her publisher, she put her name before the ornithologist's name who did this research. So you gotta give her credit lauded as this incredible scientist, and uh in actuality it was someone else.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

So you gotta give her credit, though. She really went after what she wanted there.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

I know, right? Yeah, it's it's really hard to say, like, oh, what a what a crook. It's like, oh man, good for her. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

That was what I thought when I was reading your article.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

So now that you have had this experience with working at the Smithsonian, and now you're working for a private book dealer, and you have your own little side business with your Etsy, and you write your articles and you do your vlog. What else do you want to do? I mean, is there anything left for you to do?

SPEAKER_01 16:09

It would be nice to get paid for making videos like that would be really cool. Um, but I don't know. I'm I'm happy just as long as I'm working with cool books and obviously getting paid. Yeah. Because you have to eat if you want to work with cool books. That's the the alley story. Yeah. I just hope that I can continue to work with cool books and cool people, and as the the pandemic sort of changes shape, that I'm able to go back to reading rooms again. I really miss going to universities and sitting in reading rooms and doing research there.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Um, but obviously with everything that's gone on, it's been something that I haven't been able to do since 2020.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

So I hope to do that someday. More talking to people about books, more working with books, and I'll be happy.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

I definitely understand the desire to get back into reading rooms because I can admit that whenever I was in college, I was a total research nerd. Whenever my teachers would say, We're going to assign you a 30-page research paper that you need to have sources out the wazoo for this thing. I was like, Yes, I am so happy, you know, while the rest of the class groaned. Because I was thinking, I'm gonna get to go spend my entire weekend in the library researching, and for some reason that just really feeds my soul.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Yeah, yeah, same. I mean, like, I love the sort of mystery solving that is inherent in research. And um, especially looking at books as physical objects, like, why is it this way? I can read a bunch of books about it and I can find out.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Or I can talk to the right people, or I can look at enough examples of this thing and learn why it is. Um, so I just like finding questions and then finding their answers. It's it's very satisfying.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Yeah, it's definitely like you're trying to solve mysteries that have to do with books. Yeah. Not the story in the books, but the actual creation of the books, where it came from, who developed this, who found this information. It's fascinating. Yeah. So I would love to see some more. Do you have any videos that actually talk about the rebinding?

SPEAKER_01 18:31

No, not yet. That's something that I would like to shoot in a reading room somewhere. Unfortunately, I cannot afford any rebound illuminated manuscripts. Yeah. Maybe one day if I get to go back to uh Edinburgh or Glasgow and shoot some footage in their reading room, I would love to do a video about Douglas Cockrell and son and about the sort of art and nature involved in book conservation and rebinding.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

That would be cool. I would watch that video. If you get that video made, I will definitely watch it. You already have a viewer. This has been so fascinating. I've been dying to have a chance to sit down and talk to you about books ever since you graduated college and started the Smithsonian. I was thinking, okay, this is somebody I can actually talk about nerd book stuff with. And we've just never had a chance to sit down and talk. So I have loved every minute of this.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Yeah, I'm so glad. Thank you for talking with me. Obviously, I'm always excited to talk to anybody about books. If you would like to talk to me about books, uh, you can find me on any social media platform, including TikTok, even though I'm not very active there. And I'm happy to talk through education questions or general book questions. Yeah, I think it is my mission on this earth to sort of share any knowledge that I accrue uh with other people. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Very cool. I will be sure to have a complete list of links so that people can find you all over the internet. Thank you for this. This is so fabulous.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

I'm so glad. Yeah, this was so fun.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

So there you have it, folks. We have completed the entire interview with Allie, Book Historia Alvis. I hope you will check out all of her social media platforms because she is really, truly fascinating and has a wealth of knowledge that she is willing and ready to share with all of you. Now, before we end today's podcast, we do have today's Writing Prompt Challenge prompt. So here we go. Our prompt for August 3rd. As you walk outside, the wind starts to pick up and storm clouds begin to roll into your area. When you look up, you notice something odd about the clouds. As you watch the clouds roll and swirl, lights begin to flash in the clouds. What could it be? Now be sure to go and check out our Writing Prompt Challenge page on bookheartbooks.com, and you will find all of the information for how to submit your story. Your story can be one, two, or three pages long, but we do ask that you don't go over three pages. And we will pick one story at random occasionally to read on air in the BookBancher podcast. And about once every three months, we're going to pick one story to win a prize. We'll either pick it ourselves at random or we will put them up for listeners to vote on and let them choose. So let's hear your best stories. And don't forget, you don't have to just write on today's writing prompt. You can pick any of them that are in the list. So let's hear your best work. Now it's that time again, folks, to go forth and be happy.