Episode 78: Yellow Clamshells

This last weekend I went to a craft fair where I ate a nice taco-flavored rice dish. I also, not at the craft fair, made a yellow clamshell box for one of my novels (a re-covered Tristram's Printer - first mentioned back in Episode 50). The novel is actually in two parts. Part one is my novel and part two is the first book of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The first book is probably the most read part of Tristram Shandy as it is difficult to get through. Not your average Tom Clancy novel, let me tell you.

Tristram's Printer is about a young woman who learns about papermaking, printing, and bookbinding and falls in Love with a Printer who fantasizes about printing the typographically challenging Tristram Shandy. She is about 25, he is about 50. Characters in Tristram's Printer make an appearance in The Idiot Runs, a time-slipping 2010 Oregon coast to 1462 Venice, Italy bookbinding/printing novel I am currently editing.

This clamshell box (夫婦箱 - me otto bako, in Japanese. Literally: husband-wife box. 夫 is husband while 婦 is wife.) is my first. It is covered in yellow paper instead of book cloth and that was a mistake. It is already tearing at the hinge. My next clamshell box, coming up in a couple of weeks, will be covered in book cloth. The most challenging and worrisome bits are the measuring, cutting, gluing, and putting together the shell. Almost everything about it is worrisome to some extent.

Always in the back of my mind is the possibility that it won't fit together properly. In fact, the first attempt didn't because of a mis-measurement. This, while the first completed clamshell box, was renovated during construction as the first attempt had the two boxes colliding.

Clamshell boxes: they're not for the squeamish.