The iPad, the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony Reader. Will real paper books disappear into cloud libraries? Are this centuries bookbinders dealing not with leather, wax, pulp, and inks but oughts and ones? Perhaps. Is this bad? Not for me. I enjoy binding and I enjoy giving my bound books to people. But who reads old books anyway? Old people?

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne has been a burden on my back for sometime. It’s not an easy read but it’s an enjoyable read. I have even written a novel about a printer whose main goal in life is to print Tristram Shandy. (It is also a love story between a young woman and an older man. Very unique in the literary world.) My book, Tristram’s Printer, will soon be available only through Tedorigawa Bookbinders. Maybe. Maybe this year.

Goals, then, for this year are to print, bind, and edit (not necessarily in that order, I hope) three novels and offer them up for sale: Calvado, The Priests of Hiroshima, and Tristram’s Printer. The first two have been bound but no covers; and they haven’t been edited. The third one is in the printing/sewing stage. Maybe it will be edited before sewing and binding?

By the way, the title of this episode is Latin for

“Luke, I am your father.“

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:01:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (10)

I have two novels floating around my workshop that I’m planning on releasing to the world. The first one:

Calvado:

A Deadly Love Story

is about Mack who causes the deaths of all who love him or he loves. Then he meets the love of his life: Calvado, a former fashion model now a medical school student. Calvado must deal with her love and studies while Mack struggles to protect her. On top of all that, someone is trying to kill Mack.

The second one:

The Priests of Hiroshima

is a sequel to Calvado. This time Calvado, suspended from medical school, is traveling the world and ends up in a mysterious bookshop in Istanbul. A Japanese student arrives and with the help of an English-speaking cat, they find time holes throughout the bookstore. They end up in Mainz, Germany in the workshop of Johannes Gutenberg and Agents of the Inquisition.

I am binding them now and if all goes well, this Double Novel, this Original, Unedited, Hand-Bound Piece of Art will be available for sale.

(In the accompanying audio portion of our program, the narrator misreads ‘Mack’ as ‘Micheal.’ I fear our narrator has seen This Is It! one too many times.)

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:02:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (17)

Holidays are a good time to catch up on things you wanted to do but claimed were too busy to accomplish because of ‘work’ or ‘meetings’ or ‘lazying around in front of the tv.” At least for me. This week I managed to finish the Wine Diary 2010 (see Episode 40: All Wined Out.) and today I finished a blank notebook with a red and yellow cover.

(I suspect a long dry spell for creating books is approaching in the near future.)

This bookbinding hobby is fascinating. My most recent: Red & Yellow 59 is a case-bound blank notebook with 10 signatures of five sheets each for 200 pages of total wonderfulness. The size is B6 which is 189 mm by 134mm for those of us on the metric scale. (About 7 and half inches high by 5 and a quarter inches wide.) The reason it’s fascinating is the things you learn, eh? You know what I’m talking about?

I learned, for example, putting a elastic strap around this book. Didn’t work out but I learned not to just paste it under the endpapers (green, in Red & Yellow 59) Next time I’ll carve a little grove in the bookboard and crucify that sucker with a couple of 8 penny nails.

Audio up soon. Hang in there.

Pictured here with two green covered books made approximately 18 months ago. I actually made five but gave three away and kept the two worst ones. I mean, the ones I didn’t want others to see. They have both been mightily and wonderfully used. Pocket-sized and handy is a descriptive phrase. The Red & Yellow 59 book is the same size. And, one hopes, will be equally as useful.

Drank a bit of wine over the holidays/no work days if by ‘a bit’ you mean several bottles. And completed this Wine Diary 2010. Many pages (8 signatures some with 7 sheets, some with 5. I was trying to make everything fit.), about 160 pages, and case bound. The decorative paper on the covers is from a local paper shop and turned out to be too thin. The front cover has, underneath the decorative paper, white paper. The back doesn’t have the white paper beneath the decorative paper so it might appear darker. This is A5 in size.

The Wine Diary 2010 has space for a list of wine shops, their phone numbers, email addresses, and urls. Another list for the wines purchased and finally, the largest section: wines consumed. The wines consumed section has all the particulars: cost, place purchased, vintner, plus a place for the label and a full page for comments.

It is going to be released into the public. i.e. I’m giving it to a friend who enjoys, as they say, the grape. I hope he doesn’t notice the few errors: the front endpaper is too big but it looks nice. The back cover endpaper is also a bit suspect. I really have to practice gluing in the endpapers. Or glue them in before I guzzle a fine wine.

I completed two yellow books this past week. One, the larger, is a novel I captured in the wilds of National Novel Writing Month (some years ago) titled: Calvado, A Deadly Love Store. A time-warping ala Tarantino story about a man who is death to whomever he loves, literally, and the med student/former model he falls in love with.

The thicker one - 160 pages, 10 signatures of four sheets each - is a blank notebook with an accessory on the front: an ‘A’. It is destined to be released to someone whose first or last name begins wih, oh, I don’t know, an ‘A’ perchance?

These are both two of many attempts at making a hardbound (cased in?) book. A book that looks like, as my friends would say, ‘a real book.’ Not coptic bound or a pamphlet stitching thing but a ‘real’ book. Well, Calvado is a real book, with words and everything.

I currently have three works-in-progress that I hope to finish over the winter holidays. First, another NaNoWriMo novel, The Priests of Hiroshima which stars Calvado in Istanbul in yet another time-warp novel but not a look-I’m-copying-Resevoir-Dogs time-warp but a real one: the characters jump back and forth between Mainz, Germany in the 1430s (Gutenberg is, yes, a character), Istanbul today and just before the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The main characters are: The former model/med student Calvado, a bookstore owner and his cat, a Japanese tourist, Gutenberg, and a priest who attempts to shut the heathen Gutenberg down only to fall in love with a serving wench. That’s the first project in progress.

Second project is another copy of Calvado with better binding and endpapers. The third is a Wine Diary which is complete except for the cover. It’s been sewed up and lathered in glue and awaits the appropriate cover. I’m hoping for wood but I think it’s going to get book boards and book cloth. Maybe a creative cover with accessories; I’m still thinking about it. Below you can see the inside of Calvado.

In the last few days I have worked my way through three different books of three different sizes. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses but all are pretty good. I must be getting better at this bookmaking business. From the pictures you can see they are small, medium, and large (or grande). One is from my Cereal Series, one from my second or third attempt at Perfect Binding, and the last was featured on Episode 38: The Big One.

Then I went to an exhibition of paper and books here in town and got incredibly wonderfully voraciously inspired and sat down to design a 1000 more books. Time was a constraint, of course, so I only completed the design of about three books. One of which has a new binding/old binding that I want to try out. It’s sort of a woven affair. I’ll be using that one on a book about looms.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [ 0:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (33)

What we have here is the largest book ever made by myself here at Tedorigawa Bookmakers. It is hardbound with book boards about 1.5 mm thick and has about 200 pages, I think. 180? In that neighborhood.

It is A4 size (11 3/4″ by 8 1/4″ • 21cm by 29.8cm). The cover is made of an old piece of cloth I got at a flea market at a Buddhist temple. Buddhism had nothing to do with either the flea market or the cloth; I don’t think. In any case, it was cheap but small - an odd size small - which finally fit perfectly this large book.

I found a tutorial at PapierDesign, also available on the YouTubes, and mostly followed it. I especially liked his sewing of the signatures. His Yootoob videos are easy to follow. On his website he has similar video tutorials in German and English.

It’s big and it was fun to make and it’s blank - You can do anything you want with it: turn it in to an accounting ledger, draw fabulous pictures of aging hippies, or collect autographs.

But what did I learn from this little adventure?

First, it takes time. From folding the A3 sheets to sewing to gluing to attaching the mull to measuring and cutting the book covers to backing the cloth to be used as book cloth to thinking about it all takes time. Time well spent because I think this is a fairly good production (despite a few flaws which I will get to later).

Second, don’t panic. (Hmm, I read that somewhere before….). Glue might set quickly but not That quickly.

Third, cut the corners Before you glue them. Big mistake that, but not untreatable. This is related to whether to panic or not. When one looks at one’s cover and notices that the corners have not been cut and the glue is thick and drying, one tends to panic. Quick cutting is required - not panic.

Finally, align the endpapers nicely. The one (minor?) flaw is that the endpapers are not straight, especially on the back cover. However, that is just the appeal of a handbound book, is it not? Those slight Human imperfections. To the right is a detail on the back endpaper.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:01:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (27)

Behold, a blank notebook from my Cereal Series. This one, made of recycled paper, is 10cm by 15cm and is sort of almost kind of perfect bound. It started as perfect binding - the paperback style of binding with the gobs of glue. But the pages kept falling out. So I sewed the pages together using a very, very, very modified Chinese/Japanese stab binding: I didn’t sew from hole to hole, just one loop. This will keep the pages in but it will also limit the opening range, sort of like a stab binding limits the opening range. Something I don’t like so much.

The second thing is the thing the book is sitting on. It’s an old printer, obviously a Heidelberg, that sits in a modern printing office: the office has state-of-the-art equipment (computers, soy ink, high speed three-color printers the size of several Prius cars) and this old Heidelberg over in the corner. They still use it from time to time, too.

The cover of the book, remember that? is from a cereal box of brown rice flakes (vs corn flakes) and the Japanese on the front cover says that: 玄米 genmai = brown rice. The back cover states how many vitamins and calcium a nutritious brown rice flake breakfast can be (if you add milk, fruit, and don’t add sugar.)

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:01:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (20)

I just completed two green blank notebooks that will be used for episode guides for two other podcasts I make (Hokudai/Cast - Japanese, English, and Chinese with music; DinoSoar Pix - audio drama). Both books are essentially the same: 150 mm x 110 mm (a handy pocket size), 120 pages (six signatures of five sheets each), and hardbound with green book cloth.

Hokudai/Cast Episode Guide & DinoSoar Pix Episode Guide

The DinoSoar Pix Episode Guide is thinner and less, er, perfect. Neither are perfect but the DPEG one is the lesser of the two. The H/CEG has endpapers whilst the DPEG does not. I think the endpapers, plus the better gluing and sewing job on the H/CEG the nicer looking of the two. Also, the H/CEG was made second so the DPEG labored as sort of a practice book.

What did we learn from this little episode guide creating event? Alignment is important. Beside alignment, thinking would be nice. Thinking is always nice. By making DPEG first, I could think about how I should improve my next attempt, the H/CEG. Maybe I should always make three or four books at a time. By the time I get to book 4, it might just turn out okay.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:02:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (25)

The title seems to mean “The The Walkure Class.” A bit odd, that.

Did a two-day bookbinding class. Day one was making book cloth from an old T-shirt (purchased during Wagner’s Ring opera.) and a bit of old cloth. Main impression: use a lot of glue. Day Two was making the cover with the book cloth, getting the text block into the cover - all without making too many mistakes. Okay, one: the text block had to be re-sewn because both knots came unraveled.

However, this was the first class I’ve taken for bookbinding and I learned quite a bit: folding, measuring, and cutting techniques. Also, I learned a new way to thread a needle and make an almost inconspicuous knot. A book press would be nice to have if I get into making books on a regular and competent basis. The important word being competent. As would a sink for cleaning brushes and hands.

The book - as can be seen at right - was eight sheets of paper of less than B6 for a total of 28 pages and two endpapers. Perfect binding was utilized and it was a successful operation, probably because of the excellent teacher(s). (One on the first day and two on the second day.) Both showed us students how to do things with great clarity.

One teacher (at left, the main teacher) sells binding supplies, paper, presses, and books, actually. She also accepts commissions and spends a lot of her time doing wedding albums, baby books, and whatnot. She works everyday on something.

What you see here is the workshop area, obviously. With a big  book press just visible sitting on the floor on the right side.

I’m hoping I don’t forget what I learned and hope to attend other classes in the future. The first teacher has an incredible link/long stitch book that took her many weeks to make. She’d be perfect to teach how to make it.

This second shot is of the back of the other teacher (at left) and a student (the guy) with a book press in better view.

The Interview - (Not a word-for-word translation, but the gist is right. I think.)

When and where did you learn bookbinding?

I first started about eight years ago with a private teacher in Jimbocho, Tokyo. (A section of Tokyo famous for used bookstores) I spent two years with him. After that I would sometimes show him my work.

When did you start your store?

Four years ago in another smaller location. I’ve been at this location for two years.

Is there a university or college in Japan that teaches bookbinding?

Not that I know of. There is one teacher at a school who teaches a course in Italian bookbinding, but that’s only one teacher and one class.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [ 1:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (29)