Well-Read Life™

Thai Pad Country

We make a point to visit all manufacturers of Levenger products, but for several years, our silk Thai Pad, those traditional Thai silk pillows handmade in Thailand, had been an exception. We always met with our supplier at their offices in Bangkok.

“Oh, they are made so very far away, in the country,” we were told when we asked about visiting the factory. “And there’s really nothing to see. Plus there are no hotels up there.”

But we’re insistent on this matter, for several reasons. First, we want to assure ourselves that the people making products for us and for you are working in safe conditions. Second, we almost always come away with ideas for how to improve our designs, as we understand what their strengths and limitations are. Finally, we want to get a feeling for the human beings, for how they live, for what their neighborhoods are like, their schools and their libraries.

So when my older son, Cal, was embarking on a job interviewing swing through Asia, I asked him to take the time to fly from Bangkok up to the remote area where our Thai pillows are made and let us know what he saw. Below is his report.

—Steve

The tiny village of Yasothon, Thailand, sits unobtrusively near the Cambodian border. Last May I journeyed there to learn more about the community that provides Levenger with these vibrantly colored silk pillows so many customers have come to love—the Thai Pad.

From the air, Yasothon is barely visible amid endless greenery. The town and its environs seem to be nothing more than a quilt of rice patties and verdant forest. Soon after touching down, I met Aoh, a pretty woman in her forties who runs the small trading company that helps Levenger source Thai pillows. After greeting each other with a bow and some pleasantries, we climbed into her truck and began the hour-long drive to the village where Thai Pads are born. The community I found there, and the circumstances of production, were like nothing I could have imagined.

On past trips to Levenger’s vendors, it had been customary to tour the factory with management before sitting down to talk. From the start I could see that this visit would be different. There was no factory to tour. There were no big machines to admire. Instead of a factory, there were only handsome two-story homes with wide verandas facing a well-worn dirt road. In place of machinery, there were small groups of women sitting together stitching silk panels together.

In the shade of one porch, six women sat on a low table, sewing and chatting. A couple of dogs dozed beneath them, and the sounds of a children’s television show could be heard inside the house. Although these women were making the silken pillows I recognized from the Levenger catalog, it was hard to imagine that their products would ever leave rural Yasothon, let alone cross the Pacific and reach American hands.

I had expected to see something industrial that day. I had expected to see sewing machines, at least. Instead, what I found in Yasothon was traditional and familial. These women work with their hands while their children play nearby. There is no need to choose between family and career. Both are located on the steps of their homes.

Women’s lovely work

After viewing production with Aoh and two of her young assistants, it was time for lunch. A selection of local dishes was placed before us on a low table, just like the one I had seen the women sitting on while they worked. There were no stools or chairs. Local tradition, I learned, is to sit on the table. After taking off my shoes, I joined Aoh and her assistants on the table. Over lunch I learned more about their village.

Tourists seldom visit Yasothon, Aoh told me. Local incomes and the local diet both depend upon the cultivation of rice. During the spring and autumn, women work in the rice fields alongside the men, but during the rainy summer months, when there is little agricultural work to do, they earn extra income by stitching and stuffing traditional Thai pillows.

For centuries the women of Yasothon have crafted vibrantly colored pillows and mattresses, and it is easy to see why they still make them today. The silken furniture makes even hardwood floors cozy and inviting. Local ties to this traditional product remain so strong that the town’s bus stop is sheltered by an oversized, brightly painted plaster “pillow.”

Serendipity, scaled down

It is a happy accident that Thailand’s traditional pillows make an ideal home for a hardcover book or tablet computer. At Levenger we discovered that a scaled-down version of Yasothon’s ancient pillows could support both your handheld device and your hands with comfort and grace.

Ours is a traditional product, made in the traditional way. There is no factory. There are no heavy machines. It is simply Thai silk, stitched into pillows by Thai hands.

From their hands to yours, this is the Thai Pad—ancient, elegant support for your modern device.

—Cal Leveen

 

 

From holding books to upholding literacy

While our Thai Pad has become a helpful tool for many of our customers, it’s also helped us launch a special arm of our Partnering for Good initiative called Upholding Literacy. Through our foundation, Levenger is contributing to an international literacy group, the International Reading Association, which reaches remote communities in Thailand such as Yasothon.

We’re making a similar contribution to a literacy group that supports outpost communities in India, where our first Fair Trade Federation product, the India Cloud Book Pillow, was handcrafted.

It’s one more way that Levenger (and by extension, our customers) can do good in the world, helping to support literacy-based program.

We’re searching for more such opportunities. If you know of artisan groups—in other countries or our own—whom we might be able to work with, I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

—Steve

How Lincoln got the Gettysburg Address to go viral

I learned something reading our new Levenger Press book on Lincoln and his five versions of the Gettysburg Address.

There was a reason Lincoln kept the speech so short (about 272 words), and it had nothing to do with a lack of something to say. He calculated—correctly—that his brevity would help carry his message the length and breadth of the Union.

As Doug Wilson, the co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center, describes it in the narrative he wrote for our book:

“In an age where newspapers were virtually the only access Americans had to news of important events, the great majority of Northern adults would have seen, usually on the front page, not just a notice of the President’s speech at the Gettysburg ceremony, but, because of its brevity, the speech itself in its entirety.”

Today we would call that smart viral marketing on Lincoln’s part. Just imagine what he might have done with Twitter.

It wasn’t just the length of the speech that mattered to Lincoln, of course. It was the words and their cadence. Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison asked Doug, himself a man of words (read his Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words), to talk more about how Lincoln crafted this most revered of American speeches.

Levenger Press: Even the first draft of the Gettysburg Address that Lincoln wrote—the Nicolay copy—is very neatly penned. There are few strike-throughs or cross-outs or incomplete sentences. How was Lincoln able to deliver such clean drafts of this speech?

Doug Wilson: My own view is that the first page of the Nicolay copy represents the earliest stage of the Gettysburg Address of which we have a documentary record, and as such is probably the distillation of an unknown amount of previous drafting. The evidence for the way Lincoln composed a consequential letter or address is only partly from the existence of earlier drafts, but largely consists of testimony about the way he took notes on his topic, preserving ideas, phrases, arguments, etc. on pieces of paper that served as the basis of his first drafts.

LP: Where are these original draft notes?

DW: Most of these scraps of paper, along with most earlier drafts of important speeches, have disappeared. The few examples that have survived, as well as his early drafts of letters that he retained as file copies, show that he typically made changes that added to, deleted from, or corrected what he had first set down.

LP: How do you think Lincoln wrote the Nicolay draft?

DW: A reasonable guess is that the first page of the Nicolay copy represents the state of the first half of the speech at the time he left Washington for Gettysburg. The second page was not written at the same time, does not actually fit the material on the first page,  was written on different paper with a different writing instrument, and, to my way of thinking, is actually the second page of a different draft. In other words, he created "clean drafts" like the first page of the Nicolay to see what, if any, changes were still needed.

LP: Did Lincoln ever read his speech drafts to his wife for her critiquing?

DW: I'm sure he must have read drafts of speeches to his wife, if only because he liked to try his speeches out in the presence of a listener. We have many examples of his doing this, but I don't recall a well-documented example involving Mary Todd Lincoln.

LP: How do you think Lincoln inflected his “of the people, by the people, for the people” when he delivered the Gettysburg Address? Do you think he stressed “if,” “by” and “for”? Or did he repeatedly stress “people”?

DW: I know that there is some evidence that he emphasized the word "people," which persuaded Carl Sandburg and others to do likewise. I have always had reservations about this, if only because of the awkwardness of the resulting cadence, and prefer to see the emphasis placed on “of,” “by,” and “for.”

LP: Why do you think that myths about Lincoln’s writing of the Gettysburg Address persist? For instance, the myth that he wrote it hastily, on the back of an envelope, on his way from Washington to Gettysburg.

DW: I am tempted to speculate that any text that becomes so famous and familiar as to become the focus of a widespread common interest is probably ripe for myth-making. In the case of the Gettysburg Address, the myth of the envelope gained enormous popularity in the famous fictional story by Mary Andrews at the beginning of the 20th century. The strong impression made on readers by her treatment of this detail overrode the circumstance that it was not a verifiable fact.

LP: Perhaps because of its cadence, the Gettysburg Address comes close to sounding like a sacred text. How much was Lincoln influenced by his readings of the Bible?

DW: We have an abundance of evidence that Lincoln knew the Bible very well, that he could cite chapter and verse to an impressive extent, and that he read the Bible habitually while President, so I don't have any doubt that the Biblical sound of the Gettysburg Address, language and cadence, was influenced by his intimate familiarity with the original. I think there are other writings that carry the imprint of his reading of the Bible, the Second Inaugural being the most conspicuous case, but he was wise enough not to overdo it.

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Now to you, dear reader: What has your own experience been in reading the Gettysburg Address? Did you ever memorize it? Has it moved you in some way? I’d love to hear your comments. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).