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.)