Toolbox - Hardcover

Morabito, Fabio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582340617 ISBN 13: 9781582340616

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 1999

Synopsis

In this charming book, Morabito presents us with a collection of clever, funny, and ultimately profound prose pieces on tools and their very different characters. Paul Eluard's well-known remark "There are other worlds, but they're all in this one" borrows from a tradition that supposes the co-existence and simultaneity of different planes of creation. It is from this starting point that Fabio Morabito has written about tools common to every man: the hammer, the screw, the file, the sponge, etc. but with ingenious insight to each of their very specific and glorious characters. Toolbox is a work like no other, playfully examining the role each tool plays and the place each has in the world. These essays beg to be read aloud as they manipulate language as a tool in and of itself with hilarious results. Fantastical line drawings interpreting the various qualities of each tool make this a perfect gift for any tool-user or tool-lover.

About this title

About the Author:

Fabio Morabito is a poet and fiction writer. Born in Egypt to Italian parents, he was raised in Mexico and writes in Spanish, his second language.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The file is a blood relative of beheading instruments, cousin to the guillotine, kin to instruments that raze, amputate and cleave in half. But unlike the ice pick, the chisel or the machete, all of which concentrate their energies on a single point, the file spreads its impact over a network of points, an impact of apparent modesty and minimal caprices that a backward glance exposes as inexorable.

A file works by persuasion; it reduces the force of its assault instead of intensifying it. In place of one strong jab, it resorts to a host of weak prods, one after the other, which attack in an orderly fashion like an army of ants, with more monotony than passion, but with no chance of a mistake.

In its movements we can spy the action of waves as they crash deafeningly on the beach. Any projection that has to be eliminated from the surface of an object will suffer under the sea-like assault of the file. It will never have time to recover from a blow, because the blows that follow will already be coming down on it, submerging it. This is what a file does; it submerges whatever protrudes, anything that is over and above, it drowns it out thanks to the perseverance of its serried troops.

That impression of massive numbers is so acute that at first glance it seems that a file is boiling. And this isn't to be wondered at. It is a tool stuffed with fire.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1582340617
• ISBN 13: 9781582340616
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112
• Illustrator: Reclamier Bernard