In two weeks I will be taking a two-day bookbinding course from someone who makes money doing three things: teaching bookbinding, selling bookbinding supplies, and selling books she has bound. It is this last skill that intrigues me the most and I will be grilling her about how she does the business of binding books.
The class will start on day one, as classes are traditionally begun. I believe we will be up to our elbows in marbling endpapers. Something I have little interest in and no aptitude for. Should be fun. Then we will fold and sew. The second day, I believe, is spent designing and making covers and putting the book together. It is the designing and making covers bit that most intrigues me. I want to improve all aspects of the bookbinding process and it is this section that is the most challenging for me.
I will, hopefully, have much more information to pass along. Or a long rambling complaint.
Also, tonight I will add another notebook to my Cereal Series only this time it will be using an ice cream cover: Ice Cream Notes.
On the audio portion of our show tonight we feature: “Fire in the Heart” by Internal Flights from PodsafeAudio.com. Please enjoy.
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Posted in ramblings on Aug 10th, 2009 No Comments »
Here are some extremely well-designed books bound on the theme of water and employing a large variety of material. From the Guardian in the UK.
Over at Kimbooktu is the world’s most expensive book: Norman Mailer’s Moonfire about the US landing on the moon; the book is complete with moon rocks and Buzz Aldrin’s autograph (Buzz was the second man on the moon - he also searched for Noah’s Ark.)
And after organizing my workspace to such an efficient degree that I can’t find anything, I got a commission to make five books with wooden covers in the next 20 days. No problem, that’s over four days a book if I didn’t have a day-job and wanted to sleep.
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I will be working on my Crapsey Quintain Coptic Book of poetry tonight as I have delayed working on it for quite some time, and don’t you just love the name?
Adelaide Crapsey created a type of poem she called the quintain - a 5-line poem of 22 syllables total. Eacy line should get progressively longer but that doesn’t always hold water, not even for Ms Adelaide. I don’t know why I got interested in her, her quintains, or her biography. Could it have been because of her surname? Am I that shallow?
Here’s an example of one of her quintains called Night Winds
Night Winds
The old
Old winds that blew
When Chaos was, what do
They tell the clattered trees that I
Should weep?
On a business note, I am planning to sell my books and will be setting up an online shop for a variety of finished books shortly. As an added bonus to early visitors, I will be throwing in - free - other stationery items such as pens, notebooks, simple notepads, and a 1959 250 GT Berlinetta Ferrari. Oh, wait. I made a mistake. Sorry, no notepads. Or the Ferrari, gosh darn it!
Not open yet, watch this space for future developments and the opening day.
_______________________
music from Sonnyboo.com and composed by Peter John Ross. Check out his movies! Especially Relationship Card - it’s hilarious.
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Posted in ramblings on May 21st, 2009 1 Comment »
I am going to continue work on an original, handwritten, handbound novel that I have put off for several months now because of either a) writer’s block or b) laziness. I think writer’s block sounds better because it gives the impression I’m pacing back and forth in my studio trying to wrestle with the creative beast instead of laying on the couch running through blogs and Tweets and things.
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Hopefully by this time next week I will have a few snaps of a fun book I’m in the process of making: A non-blank notebook - a doodle book, if you will - that is going to encompass all sorts of new techniques that I haven’t even come close to mastering or even non-mastering. An experimental book to go along with the experimental nature of Tedorigawa Bookmakers. All part of the master conspiracy in my mind. Oooh, that sounds ominous, if I do say so myself.
The new book will have a linkstitch exposed binding, a cool cover, eight signatures of four sheets each for a total of 128 pages, and about B6 in size. And a cool cover, I hope. The cover will incorporate found objects, at least two different kinds of paper, and an odd doodle or two.
Content will include stories, drawings, receipts and other stuff I haven’t decided yet. Blank notebooks are good and I get a lot of practice from them but most people don’t pick up a blank notebook and think, cool binding. They pick up a blank notebook and think, uhn, nice?
Anyway, hopefully next week. What should this book be called? I’m partial to “The Invisible Rhinos of Tokyo.”
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Posted in ramblings on Jan 12th, 2009 No Comments »
I whipped up my first miniture book one bright and shiny non-snowy December night. (And cut off all my hair and my beard.) The miniture is holiday-themed. For Halloween. Because I recycled a box and it had housed a jack-o-lantern of the plastic and small variety.
First, I folded the signatures in what has been called a Hot Dog fold. If you click the link and then look to the right, you can click on a YouTube video that explains it all. But let me back up. First, I drew a bunch of Halloween-related pictures and wrote a short essay about Halloween on some very thin Chinese-style paper. THEN I folded them in the hot dog fold. This meant that some of the pictures and some of the essay were not visible - they were buried in the folds. This made it a surprise book, even for me.
I used what is called the perfect binding, not because it was perfect but because it looks like a ‘real’ book, with back, spine, and front. All of those were taken from the jack-o-lantern box
Then everything was hastily and sloppily glued together so that I could get back to my holiday wine. It dried overnight and then I showed it around and people (okay,one person) was suitably impressed but it really was sloppily glued together. It’s…. cute, though.
What did we learn from this little excursion into miniture-ness? Folding is fun. Writing and then folding is more fun. Making small things is fun. Sometimes, but I prefer to make more useful things such as calendar or diaries (I’m actually working on one for 2010 as you read this. If you’re not reading this in the dead of the night.) ![]()
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Posted in ramblings on Dec 18th, 2008 No Comments »
It’s never too late to promise yourself something that in a few month’s time you will renege on and stop doing. Such as improving yourself. However, since it’s never too late then it must not be ever too early either, if that made sense, but if it didn’t, I must apologize. However. Here are my New Year’s Resolutions for the great economic pile that will be known as the first full year of That Year: 2009, the year this generation’s Great Depression leapt to the fro.
Resolution 1: Update and post more often. (Hahahahahahahahahaha. Even I couldn’t keep a straight face on that. How many millions of Google hits do you get when you google ‘update more often’? - Only about 88,000 so far.)
Resolution 2: More bookmaking more often. I really, really want to end up at the end of 2009 with a whole stack of books that reflect any improvement I may make in this glorious of arts. I’ve even definitely decided on carving myself out a nick of time to bookbind (early evening).
Resolution 3: Sales. Yes, a perfect time to start a SOHO business now that the global economy has imploded and could well continue imploding through the coming few years. But look on the bright side, if I sell anything at the pit of the empty well that is personal discretionary funds, imagine what I could sell once people had too much money burning holes in their pockets? Cool, eh?
Resolution 4: Spreading the joy. In the past I have given - released to the wild - books I have made; sometimes to strangers by putting a little sign on it saying: Feel free to take one. This I haven’t done much of in the past 6 to 9 months and I would like to do it more. It’s fun and feels great (but it also depends on production - see resolution 2)
Resolution 5: Explain how it happened that we went from Episode 15 to Episode 18 without the anguish and turmoil of slogging through the marshlands that would have been episodes 16 through 17.
Enjoy your year end activities whatever they may be and I’ll see you on the flip side of December 31.
My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-0a2742ed32f8d76cdb72d1b59deacddc}
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