I like to think I’m quite good at picking birthday presents. A loaded Oyster card for an aspiring Londoner, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy for a soon-to-be medic, and those trinkets, of little monetary value and which without context would be meaningless but, given to the right person, invoke a fond memory—mementoes of events shared.
For some years I’ve been interested in the writings of David Pearce, a philosopher who describes in lucid detail his vision for eliminating suffering from sentient life. His chef d’œuvre, The Hedonistic Imperative, is a philosophical manifesto proselytising and elaborating upon the moral urgency of this goal and how it might technically be achieved and is as much a philosophical text as a scientific and literary one. He combines mellifluous prose with a solid understanding of the bioscience needed for ‘paradise-engineering’: genetics, molecular biology, nanotechnology and what he lyrically calls “the biochemistry of bliss.” It’s an undoubtedly provocative read.
What better gift, then, for a blossoming polymath?
HI is not yet mainstream, and it’s not available in book form at all. Unafraid of intellectually challenging birthday presents, I set about binding my own copy of the treatise.
The method is not exact, but after looking at as many DIY bookbinding tutorials as I could bear I settled on what I thought was the best and most efficient way of making a hardy, hand-bound book. Typeset in nicely-kerned Helvetica and Univers 45, the book was printed on A4 paper, two-to-a-side, four-to-a-page in eight-sheet signatures (the industry term for a single ‘fold’ of sheets. Have a look at the spine of a commercial book; you’ll see them). Each signature had four holes put through its centre, and with the folded signatures stacked on top of each other they were sewn one to the second, the second to the third and so on; a kettle-stitch.
The book-block assembled, a simple card cover was cut and glued to the spine. A day of drying later and a contrasting navy slip case assembled to protect the book, it was ready for the finishing touch: a decal symbolic of Pearce’s message.
It’s highly stylised, but it’s there: the molecular structure of MDMA, the so-called ‘penicillin of the soul’ the empathogenic-entactogenic effects of which provide perhaps a glimpse of a possible world which Pearce believes, someday, we may inhabit.
Pharmacotherapy
I like to think I’m quite good at picking birthday presents. A loaded Oyster card for an aspiring Londoner, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy for a soon-to-be medic, and those trinkets, of little monetary value and which without context would be meaningless but, given to the right person, invoke a fond memory—mementoes of events shared.
For some years I’ve been interested in the writings of David Pearce, a philosopher who describes in lucid detail his vision for eliminating suffering from sentient life. His chef d’œuvre, The Hedonistic Imperative, is a philosophical manifesto proselytising and elaborating upon the moral urgency of this goal and how it might technically be achieved and is as much a philosophical text as a scientific and literary one. He combines mellifluous prose with a solid understanding of the bioscience needed for ‘paradise-engineering’: genetics, molecular biology, nanotechnology and what he lyrically calls “the biochemistry of bliss.” It’s an undoubtedly provocative read.
What better gift, then, for a blossoming polymath?
HI is not yet mainstream, and it’s not available in book form at all. Unafraid of intellectually challenging birthday presents, I set about binding my own copy of the treatise.
The method is not exact, but after looking at as many DIY bookbinding tutorials as I could bear I settled on what I thought was the best and most efficient way of making a hardy, hand-bound book. Typeset in nicely-kerned Helvetica and Univers 45, the book was printed on A4 paper, two-to-a-side, four-to-a-page in eight-sheet signatures (the industry term for a single ‘fold’ of sheets. Have a look at the spine of a commercial book; you’ll see them). Each signature had four holes put through its centre, and with the folded signatures stacked on top of each other they were sewn one to the second, the second to the third and so on; a kettle-stitch.
The book-block assembled, a simple card cover was cut and glued to the spine. A day of drying later and a contrasting navy slip case assembled to protect the book, it was ready for the finishing touch: a decal symbolic of Pearce’s message.
It’s highly stylised, but it’s there: the molecular structure of MDMA, the so-called ‘penicillin of the soul’ the empathogenic-entactogenic effects of which provide perhaps a glimpse of a possible world which Pearce believes, someday, we may inhabit.
For my favourite pharmacologist.