James Barron > Quotes

“Philately is exacting. It demands an eye and a memory for details, for the intricacies of designs, for tiny differences between one batch of stamps and another.”
― James Barron, The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World

“Steinway made its soundboards with eastern white spruce until the 1920s. Today the remaining spruce trees in the East cannot provide boards long enough, or wide enough, for pianos. “That’s all logged out,” Albrecht says flatly. And, while Steinway can glue boards together vertically (with the grain), as it does for the rims, it cannot do so horizontally (against the grain). So, long before Albrecht came on the job, Steinway had gone west and found the Tebbs. Steinway adopted the northwestern spruce from twenty-five hundred miles away, where gnarly roots serve as an anchor in soil so wet that logging is often an amphibious proposition.”
― James Barron, Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand

“The poet John Donne wrote that no man is an island — “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’’ But when the continent is a mile away, it is not easy being the man who owns the island.

“I thought I would have great thoughts out here,” he said, standing on his doorstep on Columbia Island, the smaller of the two.

Many of the thoughts he has had in 14 years as an island owner were about money. He said he had spent $8 million on renovations, including solar panels for electricity and a desalination unit for drinking water.”
― James Barron