MONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2010 NAMES & FACES


Bristol Palin buys a house After news that Bristol Palin


had paid $172,000 in cash for a five-bedroom, brown stucco house in a Phoenix suburb this month emerged from the Arizona Republic on Friday, no one seemed to know why. And a completemystery was born. “I’mnot sure why she wanted


to buy that home, but we are real happy for her,” Michael Smith, the seller, told the Republic. “She seems like a nice girl.We’re excited for her.”No one in the Palin family offered details over the weekend.


As usual, trusty TMZ.com,


citing unnamed “friends,” came through with at least a plausible theory. The site on Saturday reported that Palin, 20, plans to move to Arizona to attend college, possibly the Arizona StateUniversity school of broadcasting, just miles from the house. So that’s where things stand for now.No comment from the university, the site reported Sunday.


According to public records


andWeb sites, Palin is the sole buyer of the 3,900-square-foot house with a tile roof, 21/2


BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS baths, a three-car garage and access to a


HOMEBUYER: Bristol Palin paid cash for her purchase.


community pool in the Cobblestone Farms development inMaricopa, Ariz. Built in 2006 and originally sold for $329,560, the house went to foreclosure in January. Smith and his wife, Cynthia, fromNorth Dakota, bought the place as an investment inMay for $137,200.


Hefner to retie the knot Twice-married Playboy


founder Hugh Hefner thinks it’s not too late for a third go-round. In a Saturday Twitter post, Hefner, 84, announced that he and girlfriend Crystal Harris, 24, had gotten engaged on Friday.


“When I gave Crystal the ring,


she burst into tears. This is the happiest Christmas weekend in memory,”Hefner tweeted. Hefner’s first marriage, to MildredWilliams, ended in divorce in 1959.He filed for divorce from his second wife, Kimberley Conrad, in 2009. Harris was the Playboy Playmate of theMonth for December 2009.


Tyler Perry saves the day Christmas came early for an


88-year-old great-grandmother in Georgia this year when Tyler Perry came to town. Rosa Lee Ransby and her 4-year-old great-


Chief’s words get an old-style treatment papers from C1


blue, dyed with the pigment of eggplant skins in a tannery across the Atlantic Ocean. Tradi- tion has blocked a Buy America contract until the government can find an American tannery that dyes with vegetables instead of chemicals. Sometime next month, two


three-pound volumes containing the speeches, communications to Congress, addresses to foreign leaders, proclamations, executive orders and transcripts of other public remarks from Obama’s first year in office will be hand- delivered to him. The president with two BlackBerrys through which many drafts of these mis- sives passedwill add the volumes to hisWhite House library. Will he read them? These old-


style scrapbooks of officialdom represent a sliver of a presidency that’s being rapidly eclipsed by an electronic juggernaut of e- mailed memos, tweets, blog and Facebook posts, YouTube videos and other digital records of the most technology-driven adminis- tration yet. Some of those re- cords, including juicy policy deci- sionsmade overBlackBerrys,will no doubt be fought over years after the president leaves office.


Old craft in a new age But in the age of the tweeting


president, the hand-bound tradi- tion endures, costing taxpayers $45,000 to $50,000 a volume, with two volumes produced each year. How long this will continue is a decision government archi- vists are just beginning to pon- der.Have the presidential papers become souvenirs and backdrops for presidential addresses in the Roosevelt Room, or are they a still-vital piece of history? “We’ve all sort of accepted that


they are there,” says Anna Nel- son, a historian of diplomacy at American University who refers to the hard copies for her re- search. She believes they still mean something, even if the public papers going back to George H.W. Bush are available online. “Presidents may never take


them off the shelf, but they’ll have them,” Nelson says. “There are just some things you hold onto, even if they’re obsolete.” The first public papers were


printed during Herbert Hoover’s presidency as an attempt tomake the president more accessible (Franklin Roosevelt published his privately). They’re published twice a year by the Office of the Federal Register, with each vol- ume covering six months. The president’s remarks are checked against tape recordings; signed documents are checked against the originals. Then James and his printing-office staff bind three leather copies of each book. For them, it’s 10 days of on-and-off labor—gluing and clamping and waiting for the binding to dry. The president’s words are


available online long before they are printed and placed in James’s hand to create a touchable piece of history. The photo spread of the first family, for example, was uploaded to Flickr moments af- ter the White House photogra- pher shot it. There are no surpris- es here for a public that, before the Internet, had only old televi- sion and newspaper clips to re- mind it what the president had said.


Not exactly bestsellers The public isn’t clamoring to


own hard copies of the public papers — the printing office pro- duces just a few hundred cloth- bound copies for sale each year. Obama’s will cost somewhere between $113 and $130 a volume. Another 1,200 sets are distribut- ed to research libraries in the federal depository system, al- though it it hard to say howoften they are used as reference books. The record of John F. Kennedy’s first year sold 22,000 copies. But the bestseller of the electronics- age presidency, the papers chron- icling theMonica Lewinsky scan- dal during Bill Clinton’s second term, sold just 740.


3 Presidential historian Michael


Beschloss has the collection in his library. But he admits to consulting the electronic ver- sions online. “I’d be very sad if they stopped


publishing” the print editions, he says. “But given the [budget] deficit of this country, I can see a day, sadly, when they are no longer important.” For government archivists, the


question is whether the goal of creating an enduring public rec- ord of the presidency can be carried out in cyberspace. “The printed series is used extensively by numerous segments of our society,” saysRayMosley, director of the Federal Register, which is published by the National Ar- chives. “For many users, it is the starting point for researching and analyzing the complete re- cord of the president.” But can the record be just as


valuable if it can’t be touched? Mosley pauses. “It wouldn’t sur- priseme at all if in a fewyearswe did the offering only as an elec- tronic, online edition.” For now the tradition contin-


ues, a vestige of the days when federal documents were printed using linotype on the bindery floor of the printing office head- quarters at 732 North Capitol St. and the Congressional Record was clamped and trimmed on machines manufactured 100 years ago by SeyboldMachineCo. in Dayton, Ohio. (The Seybold is still used in hand-binding.)


Trained to tradition James, 65, has bound the pa-


pers of three presidents. He trav- eled to the White House to pres- ent George W. Bush’s first set in the Oval Office, the highlight of a career that began as an appren- tice in his native London at 15. Jamesmade sure the dimensions of each green volume matched those of the red ones of President H.W Bush to the millimeter. “I assumed father and son would want to keep them side-by-side,” he says. If he’s asked to deliver the new


volumes to the 44th president, “it would be just as thrilling as itwas the first time,” says James, a tanner’s son who wears a dia- mond earring and greets col- leagues with, “Hello, love!” His own reverence for tradi-


tion began at the London College of Printing and Graphic Arts, where he learned his craft in the 1960s. He went on to train in some of the city’s famous print


shops. He arrived inWashington 30 years ago, became a U.S. citizen, and in 2000waswell into a career at local binderieswhen a forwarding job opened at the Government Printing Office. In three years he was promoted to printing chief, supervising a staff of a dozen for $37.86 an hour. He commutes from Lorton, arriving to open the bindery at 7:30 a.m. The binding process may be


painstaking, but the end product is surprisingly spartan. The pag- es of Obama’s papers are neither marbled, embossed nor gilded with gold-stamped ornaments, aside from the title and the president’s name on the lower right-hand corner of the cover.


4


James will not turn to the rollers and fillets in the cupboard of adornments reserved for con- gressional and agency work. “It’s a very simple binding, really,” he says. Three books are bound in


leather so the archives staff can choose the best for the president. The otherswill be held in reserve in case something happens to Obama’s copy. Reviving a failing economy


was at the top ofObama’s agenda during the first half of 2009. He appeared on Jay Leno’s show 59 days in and joked about the new dog he gave his daughters, which Leno dubbed a Portuguese water head. The president flewto Flori-


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CRAFTSMANSHIP: Traditional skills are used in fine bookbinding jobs like the presidential papers. (1) Charlene Stevenson, a GPObinder, rounds pages of the newly printed Obama papers. (2) JoseMolina holds the negative of the gold stamp for the front. (3) Eric Bohn works on the cover. (4) PeterK. James, left, showsU.S Archivist David Ferriero, center, and Robert Tapella how goatskin for the cover is hand-cut.


da and held a Q and A with the crew of the space shuttle Discov- ery. His administration bailed out the auto industry.He laid out a timetable forwithdrawing from Iraq and feted retiring Supreme


Court Justice David Souter. He nominated Sonia Sotomayor to fill Souter’s spot. And Ted Kenne- dy was alive. “It’s thrilling to see you here, Teddy,” Obama told the senator, suffering from a brain tumor, at a White House forum on health care onMarch 5. It’s all there, chronologically, in Frank- lin typeface. Obama’s first sixmonths cover


1,017 pages. That’s 201 pages longer than George W. Bush’s first volume and 274 shorter than Bill Clinton’s.


No tweets allowed The public papers of this tech-


1 2


driven president have not adapt- ed to the biggest changes in communication of the modern presidency. The records of the tweeting, blogging, Facebook- posting, YouTube-videoing Obama White House are being archived onWhiteHouse servers. But they didn’t make the cut for the official public papers. Obama’s communications


through social media don’t meet the editorial standards of the National Archives. Obama may not write his speeches and proc- lamations, but he delivers and signs them, making them his official utterances. The tweeting, on the other hand, is done by a White House staffer. “We want to be sure they’re


coming from the president and not from some staff member,” Mosley says. “And that they’re focused on policy and substan- tive decisions the president is making, so they’re a complete record as a starting point for history.”


reinl@washpost.com D


VIDEO ON THEWEBWatch the Federal Eye’s interview with


GPO head forwarder Peter K. James at www.washingtonpost.com.


granddaughter escaped a fire Tuesday that destroyed their home of 40 years in Coweta County, southwest of Atlanta, and all of their belongings. When Coweta County firefighters started soliciting donations, word reached the Atlanta-based Perry, who visited Ransby’s neighborhood Thursday and offered to rent her a house for a year, pay for her utilities, buy her furniture and, yes, build her a newhouse on her property. Said Coweta Fire Chief Todd Moore: Perry’s generous offer “mademy Christmas.”


—Christian Hettinger, from Web and wire reports


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