Episodes
Tuesday May 18, 2010
Episode 50: Tristram Shandy's Printer
Tuesday May 18, 2010
Tuesday May 18, 2010
Awhile back for one of the NaNoWriMo November's, I wrote a love story between an older male printer and a young female papermaker called Tristram's Printer. The printer lives on an island in the Mississippi River near Guttenberg, Iowa (of course, where else would a printer live?) and says his favorite book to print, if he ever gets around to it, is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, because of its complex typography. After a disaster of a marriage, the woman is hired by an artist and artist's agent to learn about bookbinding, papermaking, and typography. She travels from Chicago to London to Guttenberg when the artist asks her to check out the printer. She does. Love ensues.
Now, for the first time ever!
In the history of bookmaking & printing!
Tristram's Printer and Tristram Shandy Vol. 1
are together again for the first time!
The first section is Tristram's Printer which is 164 pages long and set in a variety of types (as befitting a typographer/printer). Ten signatures of four sheets each. The second section is Volume One of Tristram Shandy and is seven signatures of four sheets and about 113 pages. 277 pages in all (plus a few blank ones.) The book is A5 in size (about 6 1/4" by 81/2") with a hand-backed cloth cover and green endpapers.
Seventeen signatures - that's a lot of sewing.
The Audio is Up and Well, thank you very much.
Please listen and enjoy.
Tuesday May 11, 2010
Episode 49: The Seth Harwood Express
Tuesday May 11, 2010
Tuesday May 11, 2010
Seth Harwood writes books. Hard-boiled action novels (Jack Wakes Up, This is Life, Young Junius). Then he makes them into audio books which you can listen to at your leisure. You can also buy his books at the usual places plus his website.
Except for This is Life (Book Two of the Jack Palms series - Jack Wakes Up is Book One. An excellent choice if you want to listen to Seth read - with passion - rather than read it yourself.) There is as of yet no hard copy of This Is Life, although Seth has said it could well be coming out this year or next. This presented me with a dilemma. I needed three copies of This Is Life because myself and two others are listening to the audio book (available at Seth's website) and needed to read it, too. Seth was kind enough to send me a PDF file and gave me permission to make copies.
This I have done. But rather than merely staple the pages together and pass them along to the other two people, I case bound the suckers. Quickly. In fact, as fast as I have ever made two books: from printing, imposing, folding, and sewing to screwing up the final endpaper was, maybe, five hours. Two books in five hours.
Nine signatures of five sheets each for about 165 pages; A5 in size; hand-backed book cloth (the yellow is from an old t-shirt and the other one is from bits of cloth in a Japanese motif.); including a red bound bookmark - this is for reading and studying, mind you - we need to find where we left off. The Yellow Seth Express book has green endpapers. The Japanese-Motif book has nice off-beige, textured endpapers. Both are quarter-bound with black, hand-backed book cloth.
Now I need to make one more: for myself. At a more leisurely pace, however, with more thought given to quality rather than speed. Will I ever finish it? I hope so. Thanks to Mr. Harwood for making it all possible.
Monday Mar 01, 2010
Episode 46: Dipping My Toe
Monday Mar 01, 2010
Monday Mar 01, 2010
I'm dipping my toe (small one on the left foot) into the briny waters of online marketing. I have finally arrived at a couple of bound items that I wouldn't mind parting with.
The first up for sale is:
Two Novels In One Handsome Volume.
The first novel is Calvado: A Model Love Story. It's about a female model/medical student who befriends and is sucked into the life of a male singer/scammer. The Tarantino-esqued time sequence makes it fun to read but there's even more excitement: This is the first draft! Which means you get to see the warts and all! It also means that in the future (this year) I will be editing it, re-writing parts, correcting any errors, and adding more depth to the plot and characters. But you will get it at its most embryonic state!
The second novel is a sequel that can be read without reading Calvado. The Priests of Hiroshima: An Historical Novel is a time-travel story gliding from present-day Istanbul to the time of Gutenberg. Calvado, the model/med student in the first novel, gets involved in history, a Japanese student, a talking cat who knows where the time portals are, and a crusty old bookseller who may or may not be 900 years old. This is also available in its first, raw, naked version.
This is a fun read (talk about warping time), with good solid characters, a global setting, and a quirky ending.
The book is casebound, A5 in size, black bookcloth, 234 pages (Calvado is 120 pages and The Priests of Hiroshima is 114); and if you purchase this one, you'll be given the first chance to buy the revised, expanded edition. Autographed if you want it.
You can read samples of both novels at
Calvado
and
The Priests of Hiroshima.
Priced at only $234.56 (first editions and first drafts are rare, you know.)
Coming soon: The Tsunami: a blank notebook made during the Chilean tsunami
Tuesday Feb 16, 2010
Episode 44: Sterne
Tuesday Feb 16, 2010
Tuesday Feb 16, 2010
Using Cheap Imposter I have imposed five novels and printed them out. I have sewed the sections together and am working on the covers. They'll be perfect bound but not perfectly bound. Is this not also called casebound? Like a hard back novel.
The novels are, in order of printing: Calvado: A Deadly Love Story and The Priests of Hiroshima: An Historical Love Story written by me. These two are combined into one book: a double novel! The main character of Calvado appears in The Priests of Hiroshima as well. More on her and them later.
The third and fourth books are Tristram's Printer written by me and Tristram Shandy (Vol. One) written by Laurence Sterne. Tristram's Printer and Tristram Shandy are in one volume together because Shandy is discussed in Printer so it only makes sense to have them together, don't you think?
What Is Tristram's Printer About?
Tristram's Printer is about two people, a printer in Guttenberg, Iowa and woman who abandons a psychologically abusive husband to work for a painter. The painter insists that she learn about papermaking, bookbinding, and printing. She falls in love with papermaking. The painter then insists that she convince the printer to work for the painter. At one point, she asks the printer what book he would like to print most and he replies Tristram Shandy and why.
Thursday Jan 28, 2010
Episode 43: Luke sum ipse patrem te
Thursday Jan 28, 2010
Thursday Jan 28, 2010
The iPad, the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony Reader. Will real paper books disappear into cloud libraries? Are this centuries bookbinders dealing not with leather, wax, pulp, and inks but oughts and ones? Perhaps. Is this bad? Not for me. I enjoy binding and I enjoy giving my bound books to people. But who reads old books anyway? Old people?
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne has been a burden on my back for sometime. It's not an easy read but it's an enjoyable read. I have even written a novel about a printer whose main goal in life is to print Tristram Shandy. (It is also a love story between a young woman and an older man. Very unique in the literary world.) My book, Tristram's Printer, will soon be available only through Tedorigawa Bookbinders. Maybe. Maybe this year.
Goals, then, for this year are to print, bind, and edit (not necessarily in that order, I hope) three novels and offer them up for sale: Calvado, The Priests of Hiroshima, and Tristram's Printer. The first two have been bound but no covers; and they haven't been edited. The third one is in the printing/sewing stage. Maybe it will be edited before sewing and binding?
By the way, the title of this episode is Latin for
"Luke, I am your father."
Wednesday Jan 06, 2010
Episode 42: Novel Sales Coming Soon?
Wednesday Jan 06, 2010
Wednesday Jan 06, 2010
I have two novels floating around my workshop that I'm planning on releasing to the world. The first one:
Calvado:
A Deadly Love Story
is about Mack who causes the deaths of all who love him or he loves. Then he meets the love of his life: Calvado, a former fashion model now a medical school student. Calvado must deal with her love and studies while Mack struggles to protect her. On top of all that, someone is trying to kill Mack.
The second one:
The Priests of Hiroshima
is a sequel to Calvado. This time Calvado, suspended from medical school, is traveling the world and ends up in a mysterious bookshop in Istanbul. A Japanese student arrives and with the help of an English-speaking cat, they find time holes throughout the bookstore. They end up in Mainz, Germany in the workshop of Johannes Gutenberg and Agents of the Inquisition.
I am binding them now and if all goes well, this Double Novel, this Original, Unedited, Hand-Bound Piece of Art will be available for sale.
(In the accompanying audio portion of our program, the narrator misreads 'Mack' as 'Micheal.' I fear our narrator has seen This Is It! one too many times.)
Sunday Dec 27, 2009
Episode 39: Binding the Elusive NaNoWriMo
Sunday Dec 27, 2009
Sunday Dec 27, 2009
I completed two yellow books this past week. One, the larger, is a novel I captured in the wilds of National Novel Writing Month (some years ago) titled: Calvado, A Deadly Love Store. A time-warping ala Tarantino story about a man who is death to whomever he loves, literally, and the med student/former model he falls in love with. The thicker one - 160 pages, 10 signatures of four sheets each - is a blank notebook with an accessory on the front: an 'A'. It is destined to be released to someone whose first or last name begins wih, oh, I don't know, an 'A' perchance? These are both two of many attempts at making a hardbound (cased in?) book. A book that looks like, as my friends would say, 'a real book.' Not coptic bound or a pamphlet stitching thing but a 'real' book. Well, Calvado is a real book, with words and everything.
I currently have three works-in-progress that I hope to finish over the winter holidays. First, another NaNoWriMo novel, The Priests of Hiroshima which stars Calvado in Istanbul in yet another time-warp novel but not a look-I'm-copying-Resevoir-Dogs time-warp but a real one: the characters jump back and forth between Mainz, Germany in the 1430s (Gutenberg is, yes, a character), Istanbul today and just before the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The main characters are: The former model/med student Calvado, a bookstore owner and his cat, a Japanese tourist, Gutenberg, and a priest who attempts to shut the heathen Gutenberg down only to fall in love with a serving wench. That's the first project in progress.
Second project is another copy of Calvado with better binding and endpapers. The third is a Wine Diary which is complete except for the cover. It's been sewed up and lathered in glue and awaits the appropriate cover. I'm hoping for wood but I think it's going to get book boards and book cloth. Maybe a creative cover with accessories; I'm still thinking about it. Below you can see the inside of Calvado.