Ep. 247: Colette Fu and a Typewriter

Bookbinder of the Week:

Colette Fu is a pop-up book artist. She makes incredible pop-up books that an adult can sit in, if you so desire. You can check out her pop-up books and her photos at ColetteFu.com. Watching some of her videos on YouTube inspired me to make my own – very simple – pop-up books. Hers are outta sight mechanically and visually. And big.

Tedorigawa News

Before rushing off to discuss myself, let me talk about myself. The Tedorigawa Bookmakers podcast is on Spotify, if you wish to use that service. I suspect this link links to my podcast. You can search for Tedorigawa or Tedorigawa Bookmakers. Both, hopefully, will get you to the podcast. Tedorigawa Bookmakers will get you there faster. 

Bookbinding

This week I sewed Heart of November and The Priests of Hiroshima. This is my first sew-up of Heart of November but not for The Priests of Hiroshima. Heart of November has a lot – I mean A Lot – of graphics, typographical twists & turns, tricks & tumbles. I was hoping they transferred to both the printed page (they did) and the ebook version (they also did, I think.)

I also glued a re-covering attempt on my 30+ year-old Japanese textbook which is less a textbook and more of a detailed explanation of the language. It’s part of the Hodder & Stoughton publishing house’s Teach Yourself Books series; 14th printing in 1978. I probably bought it in 1979 when I first descended on these island shores.

After I upload this episode I will get to work casing in all three books.

Fiction

In moving my workshop/office from Place A to Place F (for free) I accumulated a lot of boxes; boxes for books, supplies, materials, unfinished work, attempts, and templates. Buried deep in these boxes were boxes I hadn’t looked in in several years. We’re talking at least two decades. Maybe more, as we shall see in a moment.

This week I opened them to sort them out in two piles: throw away or store. I found… Fiction. Short stories, plays, a few screenplays (mostly finished), and the scribbled outline of a novel that I never started and probably never will. I read the outline, didn’t like it so much, thought about it, and tossed it. Some of the fiction was typed. As in, typed on a typewriter. Yes, a typewriter. I haven’t used a typewriter since 1989. 

I put one of them (There Is No Time in the Land of Nod) on InDesign and will probably upload it in a collection of short stories in the not to distant future — famous last words. I found a screenplay that I might turn into a novel called Sewers. As in people who sew. One character, the female of course, works in a factory making fancy jeans for rich people while the male character works for the department of water and power, ie in the sewers. 

I have been writing Growing Slurry and reading its inspiration: Moby Dick. I’m a bit surprised at Moby Dick. After several attempts at starting it, I am finally reading it and one observation is the number of people who say they can’t get through it because he talks so much about whales seem to have missed the point; I couldn’t get into it because of his language style; now I can. Melville talks about whales a lot, yes, but as they relate to either the main characters, landlubbers, or a philosophy of life.