Tiny books are cute and anthropomorphic

I am making several tiny books to sell as pendants at an upcoming renaissance faire... I quickly discovered that they have an irresistible personality!

Here's Shep, a book dog.

He belongs to these bookly citizens.

Is that...a bird?  Or a plane?

A well-dressed stranger visits the town.
The bookly citizens gather to admire her gilded wardrobe.

Shep finds something interesting.

The book boards for everyone's hard covers have arrived!  Everyone gathers to see, and the town elder claims the podium to regale them with his tale of The Day I Earned My Covers.

Suddenly, in the middle of his tale -- a GOD descends -- !
The citizens stumble backward in awe!

While the others stand frozen, the town elder steps forward, fearless.
"Are you sure that's wise?" protests the gilded newcomer.
"Perhaps not, but the spirit of ADVENTURE compels me!"

The bookly god is benevolent and takes them to see the Promised Land of Bookshelf. Someday, when all the bookly citizens have earned their covers, they will come here to live among the great ones.

To be continued...

Tiny books

How to practice the techniques of bookbinding in a non-resource-intensive manner?

Tiny books!  Each is about 2.5" tall and 1.5" wide.  The pages were cut from sheets of tracing paper (which is suitably thin for this scale).

The first is a traditional book on raised cords with a scrap of leather on the spine, and scraps of marbled paper on the covers.  Observe: my first successful French groove!

For the second, I decided to try a coptic binding.  The first such binding I saw was a revelation; a book that shows off the stitching of its own spine?  Wait—you can do that?

Yes.  Yes, you can.  My first try was a little sloppy around the headbands, but I intend to get better.  Here's what it looks like from the inside:

I may add a ribbon to hold it closed; I think my stitches were a little too tight, because this one loves to fly open.  Like a puppy with an open door, I sweartogod.

The next project, currently in the works, is a rose-themed notebook with tear-out pages.  The paper is handmade and contains real rose petals.  Which...might be kind of hard to write on, but I'm counting on it being cool enough that nobody will mind.  (There aren't that many of them.)

The Tome, part IV: Preparing the cover

Remember how I said this book was going to have to be leatherbound? Well, it is, and now I have the leather. For this, I went to Ann Arbor last Saturday to pay homage to Hollander's Store of All Things Bookish and Beautiful. Seriously, they have everything. Try not to drool on the very expensive papers. (There, now you have my birthday wish list.)

They did have some of the best bookbinding leather, which is morocco goatskin, but it was prohibitively expensive and I don't think I'm exactly worthy of it yet. Instead, I brought home a small hide of calf leather in black, along with a sheet of French marbled paper for the endpapers.

To practice working the leather, I overlaid a scrap onto a carved block of wood, producing the J. R. R. Tolkien monogram in the photo. At this point, I started feeling a little overwhelmed by the magnitude of my first leather project. I very nearly chickened out and revised my plan to a quarter-bound book, using leather only on the spine and that marbled paper as the cover material. However, while that would still be good-looking and no doubt wiser, I don't think it would satisfy what I hoped to achieve with this journal. Remember, it has to be

• of an epic scale and
• ornate,

and furthermore, as per Brian's hints and nudges, it should ideally incorporate

• some Celtic knotwork,
• his 40k coat of arms, and
• a volume number (he'll have more birthdays).

If tooling, stamping, and/or gold leafing can be worked into that arrangement, all the better.

So, I reconsidered and came up with a feasible design. The main feature will be a raised insignia; I expect that such dimensionality will add an extra sense of weight to the tome, and besides, it's easier than tooling. The design is intentionally massive and not terribly detailed—or, as I like to think of it, uncluttered—which will be easier on my novice hands. However, I still find it aesthetically pleasing.

The olive branches and volume number will be tooled. Whether this will involve more or less work than cutting out the cardboard for the raised areas, I couldn't say, because that was an absolute pain.

Have a look at the spine, which will feature raised bands, and at the ribbon marker poking out from under the headband:

Right, so, the next step is to cover it all with leather. Wish me luck!

Go to: Part III | Part V

The Tome, part III: Structure

Chairete! (That's Attic Greek for "Hello, everyone!) How about a view of the top of my head while I'm working?

I've been making progress on the journal. I've gotten the spine stitched, glued, rounded, and backed. I've stitched in headbands -- making them myself was easier than trying to find a place nearby that sells them pre-made. Here's a picture of the book with all these things accomplished, except the rounding and backing:

Sewing thread isn't quite thick enough for a headband, which needs more of a heavy floss to look good, but that was all I had. Rather than go out and buy something thicker, I decided to make a project of twisting the thread I had, four-ply, into a thicker strand. This would have been absolutely pointless if it weren't an excuse to use Grandpa Parker's hand-drill, but it was, so as a matter of fact it was a complete win.

With the spine all set, I cut cover boards and laced them onto the cords. May I now present to you... structure!

From the inside, the book looks pretty nearly finished -- it just needs a cover on the spine.

The next step is to find leather and start covering the...covers. Cover boards. Decorating them. There.

That means the prettiest pictures are yet to come, so stay tuned for part IV!

Go to: Part II | Part IV

A new craft for an uncertain graduate

I have no idea what I want to do with my life, but until I figure that out at least I have a book titled Creative Bookbinding, by Pauline Johnson. I stumbled across this in a Barnes and Noble two summers ago, and the little wheels in my brain went "snick snick snick...whirrr?". Yes, mechanical analogies of my cranial matter can absolutely express a dizzying but wonderful uncertainty.

This is a leatherbound edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and someday, I want to do THAT.

Between my involvement in the GV Writers' Club publication and my bent for crafts, bookbinding just seemed like the perfect idea, so I started my first project. I don't exactly recall what prompted my choice of poetry compiled from The Lord of the Rings, except that I was re-reading the trilogy at the time, so, duh.

There is a lot of poetry in The Lord of the Rings; I wound up with about 70 pages of text, which I formatted using the inestimable Adobe InDesign. Finally, after a trip to the school copy center, I had a lovely set of pages printed and trimmed to size. I folded them into five signatures, where each signature is a set of four sheets folded down the center and nested together.

I won't get into the mechanical details of binding the signatures and adding the covers, at least not just now. Assume it was magic. Poof! Two years later, my little book is complete! Why the hangup? The spine needs a special glue, and I couldn't find it online and/or was leery of buying hide glue. For two years. Yeah. The actual book took me maybe a week of work. But here it is! (Click for higher resolution.)

Placing it on top of Houghton Mifflin's 50th anniversary edition makes my little book look better by association.

This book was a prototype, a see-if-I-can project expecting more to follow if it works out. It did work out. So, what next? Here are my thoughts:

• A journal for Brian. We saw a giant, black, leatherbound tome of a journal at a shop in Rome (yep, Rome). He wanted it; I said I could make him one. I will, and in time for his birthday on May 28.
• Re-bindings of old trade paperbacks. Who wants a custom binding for their favorite childhood sci-fi/fantasy story? This girl, for one. I've been cautioned that the pages on such a book are typically fragile; however, I think I know how to do this in such a way as not to disturb them too badly.
• A special run of past Running Out of Ink editions. Last winter, the Writers' Club hand-bound a portion of the copies of our publication using a fairly elementary paperback technique. I still have some of the unused page stacks, and I have a lot of the old pdf files. This would be a good practice project.
• Journals in general. I know, it's kinda lame, but why not. I could sell them. This gives me room to have fun with quirky ideas like a duct-tape cover.
• Personalized editions of classics. Yes, of course I want my own unique copy of the Iliad. Duh. Inspiration drawn from the Folio Society, who do this on a mind-bogglingly gorgeous professional level; I have copies of their editions of Jason and the Argonauts, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Theirs is the standard to which I aspire.

Incidentally, I got a gold-leafing kit for the monogram detail on the cover, so now I may go off on a crazed gold-leafing tangent.

Until next time, be crafty!