Ep. 254 Hanmer and Don Quixote

Bookbinder of the Week:

Karen Hanmer

A most famous bookbinder and educator who even the most beginning binders probably know about, have taken classes from, or at least heard about as she was prominent in the periodical Bonefolder. Her website is KarenHanmer.com. She has amazingly artistic covers and a wide variety of classes.

Bookbinding

I made three books this week. The first one is a repeat of the notebook from last week: a A6-size, 100-page blank notebook with 25 doodles of animals with their Japanese and English equivalents. But with a different cover, of course, and, I think at least, better.

Second two are different in two different ways. First, they’re blank. Nothing fancy on the inside. Plus, they are small. They’re A6 (4 x 6 inches for our American brethren) and four signatures of four folios each (64 pages).

Second, they were inspired by Sage Reynolds’ video A Book In Less than An Hour. For me, a new way to adhere endpapers and the cover. The video also taught me a better way to glue on the spine paper without pain: glue the paper on the spine, fold it over, glue it again, and fold it over again. 

Fiction

Continuing to work on a whole bunch of lies i.e. fiction.

First, Growing Slurry. The main character is a forensic accountant who makes a life-changing discovery and abandons the consumer lifestyle for one of acceptance and positivity. He cute-meets a woman who has lived a hard life; on her own in the big city by age 10, killed two men who tried to rape her, surrounded by alcoholics and drug addicts, abandoned by her mother. Both are lovers of Moby Dick.

Second, Molly Bright. The three main characters get trapped in a kidnapping. The  kidnappers are after one of the three because she can McGyver bombs out nearly anything. The kidnappers are also working for a religious doomsday cult that is planning to wreak havoc on Tokyo. As planned, this is going to be a long novel. Most of mine are about 250 ~280 pages but this looks like it could be closer to 400. 

Third, The Posthumous Biography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. (which I think I will re-title: The Agonizing Biography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver). Agnes is a widowed mother of three in 18th century New England struggling to raise her family by working as a weaver in a textile mill; a job usually done by young, single women in need of a husband.

One of her children has autism and epilepsy (obvious signs of being a witch), one has what the neighbors call “the evil eye,” and one is sensitive to the needs of others.

Agnes sees the when, how, and where people die one year before they shuffle off.

And fourth, but not really, is Caraculiambro. Started a long time ago, it is a detective investigating the murders of two seemingly innocent people caught in a land developers squabble. The detective is a giant and named after a giant in Don Quixote.

Hopes? To finish Growing Slurry soon.