手取川製本 ~ Tedorigawa Bookmakers

Ep. 323: Is three times the charm?

Bookbinding

I’ve made three books in the last week or so. All the same topic. All the same size - A6 or pocketbook. All with some mistakes. All three books have the same four short stories:

• Morris & Maurice is about a janitor and his Siamese cat, if you please, who witness both the development of a park and a murder.

• Paul’s Paris Disneyland’s Farewell Party about three friends who get together in Paris to celebrate Paul’s retirement. They walk in the footsteps of Marcel Proust primarily because I discovered Paris Disneyland is very close to a small village called Guermantes. 

• Satan Rains is about a heavy metal band that has trouble getting gigs until a tragedy occurs. 

• Snow Country. I told you about this short story last time, but I’ll refresh my memory. Three work-from-home weavers Zoom each other before their work day begins and tell each other ghost stories to give them something to think about as they weave. Two experience a ghostly event in their ’real’ lives.

I put all four short stories into one book called Snow Country. I printed it out. In the first edition, I thought the type was too small and the leading too close. The first attempt has 117 pages. That’s the green volume.

The second printing had an interesting problem: different fonts for the different stories. I don’t know how that happened. Probably when I imported the different stories into the book design app I was using.  Second, I usually want a new chapter to begin on the right page; the recto/odd-numbered page. One story in the second printing started on the left page; the verso or even-numbered page. Again, though, I thought the leading was too close. My biggest mistake on this printing was not gluing down the mull onto the book board. I did, however, glue it to the text block. I have no idea why I failed to do that. This attempt has 131 pages. This is the pale blue volume on the left.

So, I tried again. I made sure the leading was good, the fonts consistent, and the type the proper size. I checked, and all was good. I printed it out.

I began gathering the parts, bits, and material to case it in. I checked one more time to make sure. This attempt’s mistake is: it has two page 13s. Why? I have no idea. This attempt has 172 pages and is the pale blue number on the right.

With the third printing, I didn’t want to waste the paper, so I continued making it. The printer decided the book-cloth cover, pale blue, needed a splash of ink on the back, so this printing has that. Unfortunately, I misaligned the cover. The name of the book on the spine is not centered correctly. Ah, how we wish we could live and learn.

Fiction

I started a semi-fictional something. In Japanese, it’s called a zuihitsu. I believe in English it would be called a miscellany or journal. Zuihitsu means to write where the wind blows you. No, it doesn’t; it means: follow the brush (as in a calligraphy brush, not shrubbery.)

Ken Kesey wrote two zuihitsu, I believe. The first, Ken Kesey’s Garage Sale, contained essays, fiction, a play, and other musings. His second, Demon Box, had fiction and non-fiction essays. 

The most famous, in Japan, zuihitsu is from the woman who invented the genre. Sei Shonagon wrote The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) in the late 900s and early 1000s. Yes, about a thousand years ago. Her book had essays, anecdotes, poems, her opinions, and descriptive passages of life in the Heian era court, and seemingly endless lists of things.

I started it, in any case. There is a translator’s introduction that claims the writings were originally written by an Arab historian called Cide Hamete Benengeli. 

So far, it has fiction, non-fiction, and a recipe (for bread).

I started a novel, too. I have a name for it: The Tale of Kenshi. It’s about a woman who doesn’t fit her physical body; she doesn’t think she’s as beautiful as she’s been constantly told. She puts up an act when she’s around people, but buries her real personality out of sight. She meets and talks with an old crow, a bird, not an old woman. Or maybe the crow is a reincarnated old woman? Hard to tell right now.

Video

I have posted two videos for your viewing pleasure.

The first is one of my attempts to make Snow Country. It shows the making of the cover, but not the casing in.

The second is my third attempt at casing in Snow Country, which is available here: Casing in Snow Country: Is the Third Time the Charm?

Ep. 322: Ghosts & Mistakes

Bookbinding

In the last two weeks, I made two books. The first one was a quick, blank notebook using bits and pieces. The second one was a case-bound novel with one major mistake. First, the blank notebook. The base for the cover is a file cut to size. On the cover, I pasted a variety of bookboards left over from other projects. These boards were also partly plastic & paper files or folders, and partly real bookboards. Then I added a piece of string just offset the squarish files.

The whole book was coptic-bound with 96 pages. I used US letter-sized paper (it’s wider and shorter than A4; 8.5 x 11 inches or 216 x 279 mm vs 210 x 297 mm or 8.29 x 11.69 inches). Why? Because, really, honestly, about 20 years ago, I bought five reams of US letter paper for a project that consumed only two reams. Why five reams? Because that’s the smallest amount the store would special order for me, and I thought I’d probably use it. Eventually. I still have three reams minus 24 pages.

The second book was my novel, Molly Bright. About 250 pages, case-bound, B6-size paper, and one major mistake. Because it is B6, I needed to print A3 to fit the entire book. I don’t have a printer that can handle A3 (it barely handles A4). I printed everything on B5 paper: the front cover (with the title on the lower third); the back cover (with the Tedorigawa Bookmakers logo on lower than the lower third); and the spine (with my name at the top, Molly Bright in the middle (sideways), and TDGB on the bottom). 

The front and back are purple with the words in black. The spine is off-white, close to off-yellow, with the words in black. I glued the covers on the bookboard first, then glued the spine over the book and the covers. It came out looking nice. I also added quick and dirty end bands (the purple cloth folded over a piece of twine.

Naturally, with great caution, I test-printed everything. Especially the spine. Once everything was looking good, I printed everything on the bookcloth. I glued on the covers. So far, so good. I glued on the spine piece. So far, so good. I turned it over to smooth everything down. And there it was: the major mistake.

The first letter of Molly Bright was 75% covered by the spine; only a vertical line of the M showed. Heartbreak. But I immediately tried to think of a solution. I practiced writing the M with a small magic marker, an ink pen, and a pencil. I practiced on the same fabric as the spine piece. But in the end, I let the mistake stand. And sent it off to a friend.

Fiction

Also, in the last two weeks or so, I wrote two short stories (of about 20 ~ 30 pages). While I should have been finished Caraculiambro and Growing Slurry.

The first one is called Snow Country. Three work-at-home females who weave cloth on hand looms and knit sweaters and caps during the day start their day with a Zoom call. During the call, they tell each other ghost stories with ambiguous endings so that they have something to think about during the day as they weave or knit. 

The second one is called Oh, That’s Good, No, That’s Bad. A man has a bully. (that’s bad) He makes a decision (that’s good). He decides to kill the bully (that’s bad). He needs to buy an unregistered, unmarked gun. He goes to a sleazy bar. (bad) He makes a friend (good). He gets beaten up. (bad) He ends up in the hospital. He meets two nice doctors who are married to each other (good). He falls in love (bad). The woman agrees to date him (good). On a date, they run into his bully at a nice restaurant (good). The bully is nice to the woman, whom he knows from a charity he works with (good) and the man (also good).  The man says he no longer wants to kill the bully (good). The woman admits her husband is a bully, and she wants to kill him (bad). 

The title and the premise come from a 1967 song by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs titled Oh, That’s Good, No, That’s Bad. Sam, aka Domingo Samudio, is still with us at 88 years old. The songs vacillates between good and bad happenings in a man’s life (hit by a car, gets money, spends money on hospital, limps, gets a job in TV, horse falls on him, goes to hospital, meets a nurse, nurse’s husband is the guy’s doctor, operates on the wrong leg).

I sort of took that premise. Plus, the characters in my short story are named after the Pharaohs and the Shamettes (Sam’s back-up singers). The bully wears wool. Why? Because Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs’ biggest and first hit was Wooly Bully released in 1964, got to number 2 on the Billboard charts (kept off number 1 by the Dixie Cups and their Chapel of Love) and stayed on the chart for 18 weeks (longer than any song that didn’t get to number 1 until 2000). 1964 was the year the Beatles, remember them? had six number one hits.

Video

No video again this time, sorry. But you can look at my back catalogue, i.e. videos I’ve put up before. Kind of catch up, if you want.

Ep. 321: Ghosts, Spines, and Headbands

Bookbinding

Continuing with working multiple books like in my October Build month, I made, in the last two weeks, five books. The fifth book I will talk about in the Fiction section as well, but now I will talk about the first four books. 

The first two of the four books are called 24 for two (not 24) reasons. First, they were conceived on the 24th of October. Second, they have many facts about the number 24, not limited to math, but also the fact that in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams writes that the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. The opposite of 24. This and other facts about 24 are included in my blank notebooks, 24. Each is 118 pages. I did something different in the 24 notebooks made this month.

The differences all have to do with the cover: front, spine, and back. On the front, obviously, I printed the title, 24. On the spine, I printed the title vertically. On the back, I printed the Japanese equivalent of Tedorigawa Bookmakers: 手取川製本.

My main concern was that they all line up perfectly. They did not. The titles on the front were aligned properly because they could be anywhere, really. I wanted them in the lower third of the cover; no major concerns. The spines, too, aligned nicely. The Japanese on the back came out too low on one book and a little too low on the second. Plus, I accidentally printed markers where the titles and company were to be printed. A learning process, if you will.

The second two books are titled Black Moon Notebook and Cheshire Notebook. As with 24, I printed the title on the front cover, the spine, the company on the back, and the company initials (TDGB) above the title on the spine. These were 100-page blank notebooks.

But also and in addition, I made headbands and endbands. Seriously, this time. I made them before but just to see if I could do it. Then I reverted to glue-on headbands; much easier to use. With Black Moon and Cheshire, I concentrated on making the bands. I did..... not disastrously badly, but not as well as I wanted. A learning process, if you will. The endbands on both were better than the headbands on both because I made the headbands first. 

As for printing, they all — cover, spine, back cover — came out nicely. The initials, not so much because I didn't think about them until after I printed the cover. The B edged over into the spine gap.

All four were bound in green covers; they are A6 (pocketbook) size, with between 118 pages (24) and 100 pages (Black Moon and Cheshire); and have floral endpapers with birds (except one version of 24, which has brownish floral endpapers).

The fifth book is my novel, Molly Bright, which came out to about 260 pages (there are extra pages because I included a Japanese-English glossary, a brief origin story, and additional fiction) in a B5 printing. It has not been bound yet, but it has been sewn up (case binding), mull applied, bookboards and spine cut, endpaper chosen but neither cut nor applied, and cover paper tentatively chosen.

The reason I printed the titles of the previous four blank notebooks was, they were practice for printing the cover of Molly Bright. And practice sewing headbands. Molly Bright is a much wider book than the four blank notebooks, of course, sewing a headband will be more time-consuming and, if history is any indication, frustrating. Next time, I can show you the results; hopefully done to my satisfaction.

 

Fiction

I wrote a 30-page short story titled Snow Country (not taken from Kawabata Yasunari’s novel of the same name). Three women who are weavers meet on a Zoom-like app to talk about life, their children, and tell each other ghost stories. They do this because their life as a weaver means they work from home and only interact with their children (all three have two children, all in middle school) and a delivery person who comes only when delivering orders, supplies, or picking up finished products; they never appear in the short story.

The ghost stories give them something to think about as they weave on their looms and, later in the afternoon, knit. Their weaving and knitting are their livelihoods; it pays their bills. They have husbands, I suspect, but they are never mentioned. 

Snow Country comes in three parts: Snow Country, Seaside, and Mountain because the main character of each part lives in a snowy village in Japan, a seaside village not in Japan, and in a mountain village in Japan. At the beginning of each part, one of the main characters opens their Zoom and waits for the other two. They tell each other ghost stories and then get to work weaving (except Seaside, who is just finished weaving and knitting; she’s waiting for her children to come home from school).

The ghost stories are based on my reading of several Japanese ghost stories. 

After writing Snow Country, I went back to editing Growing Slurry and looking at but not writing on Caraculiambro. Then I picked up a 955-page book to read, The Books of Jakob by Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel, 2018). Oh dear. I just finished reading her Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Video

No videos today, sorry.

Ep. 320: Building Days

Bookbinding

 

This was a daily building challenge where you were allowed to build anything you wanted for one month (one of the longest months: October, with 31 days). 

 

I, naturally, made mostly books. In fact, I believe I made 22 books.

I first ran across Building Days watching Evan Monsma’s YouTube channel at Evan Monsma where he said that October, for him, was a challenge he gave himself to build something every day. I took up the challenge and, except for three days when I had a debilitating cold, I made stuff. Twenty books and seven other products, including cleaning up a table, writing & mailing about 10 postcards, and uploading a couple of podcasts.

 

Almost every book I made used recyclable leftovers in my To Be Used Pile Hoard.

 

For example, the A6-sized book above on the left is called 24. It has 24 facts about 24 (James Dean died at age 24, as did Lee Harvey Oswald). It was made on October 24. The cover and endpapers are from the Hoard. It is about 100 pages of relatively new paper. 

 

The book in the middle was made of a used Amazon shipping envelope. It’s called The Amazon Notebook and contains facts about a river in South America, not about a major corporation that makes a billionaire richer. It is about 100 pages of relatively new paper. 

 

The book on the right, The Epson Screw-Up Notebook, has a brand-new cover, but the interior pages are recycled from printing errors made by a certain printer, which will remain nameless. It is about 100 pages of relatively new paper. 

 

I also made an A6-size blank notebook called The Starbuck Notebook with facts and figures about a certain whaling family based out of Nantucket, MA called Starbuck. They were the basis for the Starbuck character in Moby-Dick. Of all the facts and information about the Starbuck family in this notebook, not one of them deals with a certain coffee company. It was shipped off to a customer who enjoys coffee and notebooks. Except one: Why does Moby-Dick have a hyphen but Starbucks doesn’t have an apostrophe?

 

Most of the expense of making these books was tabulated in Time and glue. What did I learn making books almost everyday in October? First, that I can make a book in one day if I put my mind to it. Second, thinking about the book before delving in to make it is time well-spent. Third, it’s not impossible to do what you think is impossible if you concentrate not on social media, but life. 

 

Fiction

By the way, despite spending many an hour making books, I also wrote a little bit. I managed to improve and expand Growing Slurry (one of the books I made, and simultaneously made a big rookie mistake making it). I also edited and improved Caraculiambro. The rookie mistake I made was putting the text block in upside down (or the cover wrong side up). The kind of mistake I thought I was finished making, but evidently not. What I have not worked on much in the last month (October), was editing Molly Bright or The Nuns of Nanao, both of which are finished but need a good edit.  

Video 

A video of the books I made in October’s Building Days can be seen Here! Enjoy.

Ep. 319: Exploring Amazon & Carving out Reincarnation

Bookbinding

I purchased three books from Amazon. Two arrived in a timely manner: Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, which deals with memories and remembering; and Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto, which deals with both sibling rivalry, obnoxious and entitled people, and forgetting and possibly forgiveness, but I was intrigued by the envelope my Amazon horde arrived in: corrugated cardboard, which was plain on one side and festooned with a variety of QR codes on the other; probably my name, address, the deliveryman’s name, and et cetera for all things concerning delivery. (A Proustian sentence if I ever saw one; and I have.)

I made a book cover out of Amazon’s envelope and added some facts about the Amazon River on the recto side. Facts such as the first European to explore the Amazon starting from Peru and floating all the way to the Atlantic (Francisco de Orellana, Spanish); why the Amazon is called the Amazon (de Orellana’s crew was attacked by warriors, including many females, which reminded de Orellana of the Amazons in Greek myths), and the direction the Amazon flowed 15,000,000 years ago (west).

The Amazon Book is 100 pages, A6, with red endpapers, a cover made of an Amazon (the company) envelope, and blank except for small tidbits of information about the river that was, about 60,000,000 years ago, connected to the Congo, the second largest river by volume after the Amazon.

October is, according to one Youtube creating maniac (Evan Monsma), Building Days in which you build something –anything– everyday for one 31-day month to build, among other things, confidence in your own abilities. (It is also the month of my high school girlfriend's birth.) I am building books, of course, but also made a drawing,  and a podcast. Several books in October are made up of leftovers, scraps, and unevenly cut pieces from my To Be (Possibly) Used in the Future pile of leftovers, scraps, and other pieces. I shall display some of them in our next podcast.

Fiction

I’m editing one novel (The Nuns of Nanao) while writing the final chapters of another novel (Growing Slurry). Doing both is complicated as the stories, characters, situations, places, and outcomes are all different. I think I’m going to concentrate on The Nuns of Nanao as this novel is finished except for clearing up misspellings, wrong words used, plot holes, and clichés; i.e. the regular stuff writers have to do to make their work better. 

But on the other pen (keyboard? hand?), I just had an epiphany about the ending of Growing Slurry (my Moby-Dick inspired novel about a forensic certified public accountant meeting a homeless murderer in a character-driven plot that concentrates on memories, the unknown, and, of course, a kind of love) that clicked so well I’m outlining it before I forget it and before I get back to editing The Nuns of Nanao.

And Facebook reminded me that I started a novel Ten Years Ago! that I have as yet to finish (a Don Quixote-inspired detective novel called Caraculiambro, the first 100 pages I like, but have yet to finish; and the plot might be too complicated for my feeble brain.)

Video

I have yet to drop a new video, but there are three in the works. Stay tuned. Subscribe. And I promise to upload more in the future. Tedorigawa Bookmakers on Youtube.

Ep. 318: I Wove a Book and Russian Reincarnation

Bookbinding

You might be happy to know that you have two books to check out this week. Two books of varying quality and ingenuity (or semi-inventiveness), but both useful (hopefully to you).

First, the complete Woven Kanazawa with Useful (?) Japanese Phrases. About 100 pages with the phrases you can use throughout the Japanese-speaking world. Last week I showed you the incomplete cover. This week: The complete book! An exposed spine, link stitching, muted endpapers, but a cover made of cut-up Manila files and woven back together. With useful phrases such as “Where’s a pharmacy?” (薬局はどこですか) and “See you next year!” (また来年!) with transliterations so those of us who can’t read Japanese can pronounce them. (Yak-kyoku wa doko des ka and mata rai-nen, respectively, if you’re wondering.)

Second, the complete third segment of Marcel Proust’s Guermantes Way. The second segment has about 120 pages. The third segment has over 200! The first segment, hastily slapped together with no regard to history or continuity, has 80. If I planned this out properly (or with a healthy dose of OCD), each segment would have had 160 pages - keep in mind the first segment starts 80 pages into the novel, which I read on my iPhone (not recommended). 

The third and final segment is A5 in size, using the French link stitch, which came out too loose, in my opinion. But the real innovation here is the cover. It’s made of a clear plastic file, so, naturally, the cover is clear, too. The first thing you see is the first page, which has two photos. The top photo is a manuscript page marked up (with a doodle) by Proust. The lower photo is Proust himself looking sardonic and wise. There are no endpapers as the cover is sewn into the textblock via the French link stitch system. The next clear-file cover I use will probably be a Coptic binding, which tends to be tighter and opens the book wider.

Or, which makes more sense, re-sew it using the French link stitch until I get it right; practice, I have been told, makes perfect. In my case, however, practice takes time. And might lead to improvement. I hope so.

 

Fiction

Having finished editing Molly Bright, I have jumped into too many other fictional writing activities. First on the Too Many list is finishing Growing Slurry. Second, and pushing Growing Slurry onto the back burner, is editing The Nuns of Nanao, your typical transmigration of the souls of WWII-era Soviet tank crews from their deaths in Stalingrad in 1943 to Brighton Beach in New York and the subsequent second migration of the commander into a younger man novel. The younger man (ironically nicknamed The Russian because he isn’t) seeks out the commander’s possibly dead Stalingrad-era girlfriend. In Yokohama, of course. In the present day.

I guess the sub-title should be A Transmigration Love Story. But it’s the love story that reincarnates, if the possibly dead girlfriend is found, not the people. 

Third on the Too Many list is printing Molly Bright. Everything has to be checked: chapter title placement, page alignment, captions, and, as I’m checking, I’m also reading the text, so changes are made; this is a sort of final edit which takes time, as you can imagine. I could send my beta reader a PDF, but I know he’d prefer a Real Book™ as he’s a real book kind of guy.

Video

Part One of Woven Kanazawa is here. Part Two is here. A total of six minutes for your viewing pleasure if you’re a YouTube user. And want to watch me weave a book cover.

Ep. 317: Weaving Molly Bright

Bookbinding

I created three covers for two as-yet unplanned books. All three are woven. The idea of the woven book cover came when I was cleaning out my stockpile of To Be Used in the Future material aka junk pile. About 15 years ago a friend abandoned Japan and gave me a ton of manila files. He kept teaching material in them.

Everything from a very general Environment to a more specific Canadian holiday activities. I have used a few, maybe two, of these files as book boards. They are lightweight, flexible, and available. But I have a ton more. For some reason I sliced three up into strips. Then wove the strips back into a solid form. Thus creating a woven book cover.

I’m not one to case in a blank text block. I understand bookbinders who don’t care about what the text block is, they want to create well-made, handcrafted blank notebooks. I like words. So, for one of the woven book covers, I created a semi-blank book. Semi-blank because the recto side of the pages has, in two languages (English and Japanese), useful (?) phrases.

Now, as you probably know, Japanese uses three (or four) writing systems: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. 本 is kanji. ほん is hiragana. ホン is katakana. All three are pronounced hon. The kanji usually means book. But it can also mean, depending on the rest of the sentence: origin, source, base, basis, foundation, root, or cause.

The fourth Japanese writing system is called romaji. Romaji is Japanese words written using Latin letters. For example, hon is romaji for 本, ほん, and ホン. For people studying Japanese, first they have to learn how to pronounce the kanji, hiragana, and katakana. There are 46 hiragana, 46 katakana characters, and about 46,000 kanji, of which about 3,000 are usually used.

Whew. In my semi-blank notebook with useful Japanese phrases, the romaji is first, so people know how to pronounce the next sentence, which is in the normal Japanese syllabary. After that is the English equivalent. For example: 

Tei-nen-go mo Kanazawa ni sume-ru to omoimas ka?

定年後も金沢に住めると思いますか？

Do you think I can live in Kanazawa after I retire?

Fiction

I finished editing Molly Bright, although are writers ever finished editing a book? (Also finished reading the unfinished The Pale King by David Foster Wallace and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen because it’s her 250th birthday.)

Made it much better, in my opinion, as what happens early in the novel reverberates toward the end of the novel; a circle of ideas, as it were. For example, Molly meets a vagabond who makes chairs (Arisa). Molly mentions, early in the book, she’d like to make chairs, too. Molly gets fired from her job. By the end of the book, she ends up learning from Arisa about life, living on the edge, and, coincidentally, how to make chairs. A small detail not related to the main plot, but it makes Molly more human and gives the book more of a closure (unlike The Pale King which just ends with no loose threads explained).

Video

Video up about Sewing for a Blank Notebook is up for your viewing  pleasure.

Ep. 316: Casing in Kenrokuen Souvenir

Bookbinding

I cased in two books in the last week. One, The Kenrokuen Souvenir Notebook, is an A6 (pocketbook-size) mostly blank notebook. The recto pages (right side) contain really short Japanese lessons; translations of useful (?) words you might need while being a non-Japanese tourist in Kanazawa. The verso pages (left side) are lined for your writing pleasure.

A video of the pages being printed and folded is available here. A video of Kenrokuen Souvenir Notebook being cased in will appear semi-shortly. I mean well within this year. I hope.

The cover has two outdents: a circle and a bar on the front to distinguish it from the back, which has no such design element.

The second book was, in my estimation, sloppily done. The textblock is crooked on the cover, the endpapers sits cattywampus on the textblock, and the cover was hastily thrown together. The cover itself was meant to convey Marcel Proust in Paris. But it doesn’t; it portrays a man straight out of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Paris.

The content, however, is the important part of this book. It is 200 pages liberated from Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way. I cannot read Proust on my laptop or iPhone. I need to read a Real Book™. So I print out my Project Gutenberg download. I print them in editions of about 100-200 pages instead of all at once. Why? Easier to carry. I mark up the printed version with notes, dates of completion, circles, lines circling back to related passages, and hundreds of thousands of question marks. 

Fiction

I continue to edit Molly Bright, write on Growing Slurry, and procrastinate on a hundred other writing projects. These procrastinate-linked projects include; three mystery/detective novels set in Kanazawa, one literary detective novel set in Seattle, one futuristic dystopian novel, and six English textbooks (three for specialized mechanical engineers, and salemen, one for medical students, and two for general university students).

Video

A less-than four-minute flick (viewable here) about printing and folding an A6-size semi-blank notebook. It’s semi-blank because the left (verso) page has lines on it for writing notes of your trip. And the right (recto) page has words or phrases in Japanese and English, possibly useful. For example, at the bottom of page 3 is: 

お金 — o-kane – money

Now, 金 alone can mean gold, money, iron, or metal depending on the context. 金 can be pronounced kin, kon, kane or kana, also depending on the context. For example, the 金 in 金沢 (Kanazawa) is pronounced kana and means gold. But with the お in front of it, it is pronounced okane and means money.

As an aside, 金髪 is pronounced kinpatsu and means blonde hair. 髪 is pronounced kami and hatsu and means hair.

But you’re not going to get this level of Japanese language education in either the four-minute video or the actual Real Book™ because this blog doesn’t teach Japanese, except as it applies to either bookbinding or fiction. Or, obviously, a video.

Ep. 315: Unfinished/Complete

Bookbinding

About two months ago, probably longer, I folded two sets of A5 sheets of paper in order to make two A6 notebooks (blank). Those signatures sat on my workbench for those months,  unfinished. I took a short trip to another part of Japan, visited friends, recharged my passion for living, and came back to Kanazawa (in a heavy rainstorm. I actually left Kanazawa in a heavy rainstorm, too.) 

After a couple of days relaxing from my not-necessarily relaxing vacation, I started to work on those two books and finished them today. 

The first one is a gift for a co-worker. It’s A6 with seven signatures of four folios each. It has my co-worker’s name on the front and her family name on the spine. It has page numbers and a ninja in various situations (left and right bottom and top corners.) Plus, a couple of shots of a local famous garden (Kenrokuen, if you’re interested). Plus, a very small, black and white, artsy photo of me that you can barely tell who it is.

The second blank notebook is similar: seven signatures of four folios each, but no page numbers or other decorations save for a photo of a local river (the Saigawa, if you’re interested). This one is called The Saigawa Committee Notebook for no apparent reason. Another future notebook will be called The Spanish Exploration Committee of the Saigawa Notebook.

On both of these, I practiced printing the title on the spine as my two other unfinished projects require it. Yes, after these two books sat on my workbench for a couple of months, I have two more unfinished projects. 

Read on.

 

Fiction

Speaking of not finished, incomplete, and shockingly surprised, I thought I had two novels that would be of interest to two people. The first friend is reading Moby Dick, and I wrote a novel called Growing Slurry, which has a heavy Moby Dick influence. Both main characters are re-reading the Melville novel; several chapters of Growing Slurry copy the style of different Moby Dick chapters, and one character is searching for a mysterious person (not a whale). I thought I would print, bind Growing Slurry, and give my friend the book.

To my surprise, I hadn’t finished writing Growing Slurry! I thought I had. In my brain, I’m sure I had. So now I’m writing it in order to give it to the friend who is reading Moby Dick.

My other friend lives where my novel Molly Bright begins (Miyazaki, if you’re interested), and I wanted him to read it and critique it so I can improve it. I opened it on my computer, read through it – scanned and skimmed it, really – and discovered — to my horror! — that I hadn’t finished it either! My oh my.

Now I have to finish two novels that I thought I already finished. Besides the two I know I have finished, but want to (Caraculiambro and Merengue, if you’re interested).

Video

And, yes, I have film footage of a couple of books that I have bound that I have not yet made into a YouTube video for your viewing pleasure. Incomplete, again! Goodness, am I that lazy? Or that busy?  

Ep. 314: The Complete Saigawa Exploration Committee Notebook +

Bookbinding

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week in bookbinding, I made an A6-size blank notebook with a relatively unique cover. First, the book is six signatures with four folios each. It’s called The Complete Saigawa Exploration Committee Notebook. In both Japanese (犀川探検委員会全集) and, of course, English for you non-Japanese speakers/readers. The Saigawa is one of two big rivers that flow through Kanazawa (the other being the Asano river, meaning shallow river.)

But the point of this book is the cover. First, it has a flap that goes over the front edge, but it’s not tied down. It covers about 2/3rds of the back cover, keeping the pages protected. Second, it is mostly green, as is the thread. On the front cover are two decorative bits. First, a wide vertical band of colorful red-blue-black-white Japanese-style chiyogami. But on top of the chiyogami is a wider, thin, green, lacy paper that is only glued down on the inside; the part that covers the front flaps freely. The endpapers on the back are greenish-red-yellow chiyogami with birds. The endpapers on the front are the same colorful chiyogami as on the front cover and the same bird chiyogami. 

Fiction

I have just started writing again after the trauma of two+ months ago. However, I am looking at two unfinished novels. One is The Merengue Dancer and the other is Caraculiambro. 

I started The Merengue Dancer maybe three or four years ago. Merengue is a character from my novel Molly Bright. In that novel, he plays a free-spirited Japanese man who was a former company employee. He helps Molly and other vagabonds find a kidnapped physicist when the Japanese police aren’t interested. In Merengue, we learn how he came to be a free-spirited person.

I started Caraculiambro maybe ten years ago. Maybe more. The name comes from Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He is a giant Don Quixote is going to fight, defeat, and give to his lady friend, Dulcinea del Toboso. Like Dulcinea, Caraculiambro is a figment of Don Quixote’s imagination; he never appears in the novel. He’s only talked about. In Caraculiambro, he is a giant, driven out of his hometown (Olympia), and he becomes a private detective in the town of S—, which he does not wish to identify (straight from Don Quixote, the novel.). The first character he comes across in the opening scene is a character very much like Don Quixote. He investigates a murder, a case of fraud, a conspiracy involving real estate, and the death of a character very much like Don Quixote.

Video

The Complete Saigawa Exploration Committee Notebook can be seen being folded and sewn (mostly) here. It is the longest video I have sprung on you, my listeners, at almost 14 minutes. I do a lot of talking and bookbinding on it, but it’s not packed with information. Please enjoy.