tedorigawabookmakers

Life gobbled me up and spit me out and I didn’t finish the fourteen books in fourteen days but I finished one. And three more are in a variety of stages of unfinished which, given a few more hours, they will be in a different variety of stages of unfinished. However, I am enjoying trying to do them and will post a photo or three with in a few days or so as I gradually and purposefully march toward completion! I hope.

Special sound effects by suonho at freesound.org. Thanks for reading and listening.

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Tactile. Touchy-touchy. Very light.

These are a few words that describe this book. As you can see, the cover threads are bare; you can see through them to the rough yellow paper I used as endpapers.

I bought the red cover paper a long time ago and have been trying to figure out what to do with it ever since. Then I bought the paper recently that has become the pages.

And here you can see the stems and leaves stuck in the pages themselves. The phrase “stems and leaves” might remind some of our older readers of the sixties when the exact phrase was “stems and seeds” but the idea is similar.

To continue, this paper is rough, has the stems and leaves in it and is one folio. One page folded over once. There are seven of these pages so the whole book is 28 pages.

Here is a closer look at how the pages are more torn than cut nicely. The look and feel of this book just screams out for someone to touch it.

Now I need a poet and a calligrapher to add some content. Or maybe an artist with a calligrapher’s pen that will draw some worthy portraits or pictures. Or some phone numbers and turn it into an address book.

Noooooo!

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This is the Triangle Book. It has wooden covers, coptic binding and about 168 pages of an off-size: as tall as A4 but not as wide (because the wood wasn’t as wide and I didn’t feel like gluing more wood to it.)

It also has five strings the same color as the binding hanging down from the edge of the triangle to near the bottom. This is ‘artsy’ with a capital F, verdad?

But it only took lots of sanding, two or three varnishings and more sanding to get it to look right. For some reason I couldn’t get a handle on it. The inlay on the back, for example, took a week to get right and it’s still not completely what I wanted.

Practice, I suppose, is next on my agenda. In fact, next week we will have three books from my Chinese - or is it Japanese - Stab Binding Series.

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