physical aspects of siddurim

[cellio]

It looks like Mishkan T'filah, the new siddur from the Reform movement, might actually come out before the moshiach comes. Someone asked on the worship mailing list how people feel about physical aspects of prayer books, such as hard-cover versus soft-cover. This made me think explicitly about things I implicitly react to.

My reply:

My criteria for a siddur are, roughly in order:

• content (but that's a separate discussion)
• legibility (crispness matters at least as much as font size)
• holdable in one hand
• paper not too thin (the "old Plaut chumash" problem)

Gates of Prayer (both blue and gray editions), Sim Shalom, and our home-grown Shabbat morning service in a three-ring binder all fulfill "holdabiltiy". The paperback Mishkan T'filah does; I'm a little concerned about a hardcover edition with the larger page size and all that extra content (almost 700 pages), but we'll see. I'll use the book anyway, as its content is miles ahead of GOP in my opinion, so this is just a question about how much hassle it will be.

Why is being able to hold it in one hand important? Because I want to have a hand free to turn pages and to hold stuff (like tzitzit during Kri'at Sh'ma, a lulav and etrog in their season, or a magnifying glass when a siddur violates the legibility goal), and I don't see well enough to just rest the siddur on the top of the pew in front of me when I need a free hand.

I don't care about outside factors like cover color/art beyond "would this embarrass me in a non-denominational minyan?". I don't particularly care about hardcover versus softcover, but the latter tend to get beat up as people fold pages back and that's not so good. But I don't feel that I'm having a lesser prayer experience if my siddur is softbound, spiral-bound, or in a binder. First and foremost for me are content and usability.

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

spiral-bound

Rise Up Davening?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I agree with your criteria, but I'll call out that "holdable in one hand" has implications not only for size and binding but also weight. One of the motivators for creating my own siddur was the desire to have a siddur that wouldn't make my wrist feel exhausted by theend of Musaf.

[wrenb.livejournal.com]

Before I quit the Religious Practices committee (so this is back when Mishkan T'filah was going to be available in January 2007) I remember hearing that it would be available in 2 volumes. This should solve the holdability issue and also allow congregations on a budget to buy just the Shabbat liturgy. Whether or not this will happen now I don't know.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Another vote for holdable in one hand but for a different reason: that will generally correlate with smaller (top to bottom) pages. This is important to me because my current glasses have small (top-to-bottom) lenses*, which means that when standing I cannot hold larger pages in a position where both top and bottom are in focus through the glasses at the same time, and sometimes getting either the top or bottom of a larger page in focus requires holding the book in an uncomfortable position.

*This seems to be the current decade(s)-long fashion, so it's likely to be an issue for a lot of people for a while.