手取川製本 ~ Tedorigawa Bookmakers

Episode 138: Doko?Kanazawa or どこ金沢

Good afternoon everyone. I have created a tourist book or two for tourists to this fine town and it is titled Doko?Kanazawa which is a shirt-pocket sized lined notebook with 100 pages and... And it has pictures of places most tourists might not see although they are next to the famous places tourists go to see. A bakery, for example, next to a famous shrine. The bakery is good, it is tasty, the food is plentiful but it is small. And to get to it you have to veer left rather than go straight to the famous shrine.
If tourists have my little book, they can find these places, photograph them themselves, and enjoy a little bit more than the usual touristy spots. Maybe someday I'll put a picture or two up. 

Episode 137: More Japanese Stab Bindings. Or Chinese.

Recently I've made a few Japanese stab bindings especially Yotsume Toji (four-hole binding). I made a book about the art of Kanazawa called, appropriately, Kanazawa Arts which includes short short extremely short essays on 

• Kutani-yaki (a colorful style of pottery), 
• Wajima-nuri (a black & white style of lacquerware), 
• Kaga-Yuzen (fabric dyeing), 
• Washi (paper), 
• Wagashi (Japanese-style sweets), 
• Kinpaku (gold-leaf painting), and 
• Matsudaira Sadanobu a politician who may have named Kanazawa's famous garden, Kenrokuen, Kenrokuen. 

The book cried out for Yotsume-toji and got it.

The main difference between Japanese stab bindings and Chinese stab bindings, which are the origins of Japanese stab bindings is the distance between the threads. In Japanese bindings they must be equidistant. In Chinese bindings, not so much. And the language inside the book, of course. 

While at the same time I've been working on coptic bindings for a small line notebook. Coptic binding only needs glue for the cover, if you glue the cover together. Stab bindings only require glue on the corner pieces (if you want them) and the title on the cover. This new job seems to bring out the work in me. I like it.