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?

[goljerp]

That's a good one. I actually wouldn't mind seeing that in print. (Not that I'd want to use it every week, but to put on my shelf along with my other siddurim...)

There is actually a "loose-leaf" siddur that a minyan has developed -- the "loose-leaf" format lets the prayer leader mix 'n match without all that annoying "OK, skip ahead 23 pages" bit.

Of course, if you're using that with more than a few people, I imagine the logistics of changing the pages get crazy, and people don't actually swap the pages out that often. I wouldn't know; I've never been part of a minyan that uses such a prayer book.

[cellio]

Our morning minyan uses a home-grown siddur in binders, with plastic sleeves to keep the pages from getting torn up. We don't do it with the intention of swapping stuff week to week, though we've been able to easily modify it when we wanted to replace a page (typos) or insert something we hadn't been doing previously. It's about 50 pages total, so it fits in a one-inch binder with room to spare and is not too heavy.

[cellio]

It's not something I would specifically look for, but it's also not something that would bother me. :-) (It wouldn't work with Mishkan T'filah because of the intentional two-page-spread layout they're using. Personally, I'd buy a "right sides only" edition if one existed, except that they'd have to tweak it in the few places where they violated the format (like the torah service). As you might infer, the left side of each spead is for "creative" English readings.)