tedorigawabookmakers

This book is called The Dance of the Fool for no particular reason except it popped into my head (the title, not the book) as I was struggling with the cutting, gluing, and aligning the hills and valleys on the cover.

The Dance of the Fool has rough front and back covers as I added hills and valleys to the bookboard. I cut into the board to make nice half-holes and added board to make the hills. My original intent was to cover them tightly with book cover cloth so that they really stood out. I failed in this attempt.

Then I added small squares of color onto the hills. Originally, the book cloth was going to very opaque so that we could see the colors behind the cloth. But the cloth wasn’t that opaque. You can still see just a hint, so I think it was, er, semi-successful.

I covered the whole thing with rough cover paper. The end papers are also rough but over the endpapers I added more rough paper with poems by Adelaide Crapsey (Moon Shadow and Amaze).

This is actually only the second book I made with what is called perfect binding. I stitched up the signatures, glued on some semi-rough paper to the sewed up signatures. The first book was the The Puccini La Boheme Book, which you can see below in Episode 29. The Puccini La Boheme Book is being used as a notebook by a junior high school student, by the way.

The interior has 80 pages of regular (?) paper - four signatures of five pages each. Regular means the stuff I can ‘liberate’ from the office copy machine.

What did we learn from The Dance of the Fool? First, measuring and accurately measuring is important. Second, planning is important - after I glued on the hills I thought it would have been nice to have covered them first. Also, next time, maybe, I will put the cover cloth under the colored squares so that it will look more pronounced.

What else would we do? Get really nice paper for the interior rather than use regular paper. Why? Because if every page were rough, it would be much better. Useless, perhaps, except for the occasional artist, but better. Now at least I can use it for a memo pad or a book wherein I can copy as many Adelaide Crapsey poems as I wish.

And now that I am finished with The Dance of the Fool book, I must do two things: Begin my Ice Cream book and, more importantly, go … dance! of course.

Music is October by the Scottish Guitar Quartet from Podsafeaudio.com

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:03:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (25)

Read Full Post »