Episode 43: Luke sum ipse patrem te
Jan 28th, 2010 by tedorigawabookmakers
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.“
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Drank a bit of wine over the holidays/no work days if by ‘a bit’ you mean several bottles. And completed this 
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.
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.
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
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.
What we have here is the largest book ever made by myself here at 

Behold, a blank notebook from my
The second thing is the thing the book is sitting on. It’s an old printer, obviously a
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
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.
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.
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.












