Ep. 253: Robert Wu and Moby Dick

Bookbinder of the Week:

Robert Wu

A Toronto-based bookbinder, marbler, and architecture graduate. His specialty is French-style design fine art leather bookbinding but he marbles, makes miniature books, boxes, and plays the cello. He has studied design for decades and bookbinding since the 1990s. His works are in a lot of different collections. His covers are intricate, delicate, colorful, and amazing to look at. He can be stalked at his website (studiorobertwu.com), Facebook, and Instagram. 

(Webiste)

https://www.facebook.com/StudioRobertWu/

https://www.instagram.com/studio_robert_wu/

 

Bookbinding

I finished casing in three books in the last three days.

Book 1: the purplish A6-size, 100-page blank notebook with 25 doodles of animals with their Japanese and English equivalents. 

Book 2: the bluish 2021 schedule for the Japan islands with two yearly calendars (2021 & 2022), thirteen monthly calendars, and a weekly calendar with photos of the Tokyo area.

Book 3: the brick-colored 2021 schedule for Belgium with the same details as the Japan schedule but with different pictures gleaned from free sites on the web.

I learned a bit about calculating the width of the book cover while taking into account the spine and space between the spine and the cover. What I learned was what I think is too big, isn’t.

Fiction

This has a little to do with my fiction. I finished reading for the first time Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It has a little to do with me because the two main characters in Growing Slurry meet when one notices that the other is reading Moby Dick. And a couple of chapters of my book mimic and/or copy Melville’s style or construction in his book.

A bit sad to say I read it on my iPad rather than purchase a Real Book as I hope others do with my books (buy a real book And an ebook). Now I am nearly finished reading Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Book 2, by the way, is much better than Book 1 when it comes to writing (or at least translating).

Also in fiction I am writing what I have planned to be about a 500-page novel. This will necessarily include a lot of observations about life and living plus have a strong plot and characters. If I pull it off.

I’m continuing to write Growing Slurry and am sneaking up on the end where the two main characters decide to have a relationship (based on their mutual love of Moby Dick).

I am also re-reading one of my unfinished novels that I really want to finish: Caraculiambro, a detective novel about land speculators and murder. The main character slash detective is a giant and yes, since you ask, his name did come from Don Quixote; he is the giant Don Quixote imagines he will defeat if he ever runs across him, which he doesn’t (spoiler alert).