Ep. 263: Inoue Nao & Spine Grooves

Bookbinder of the Week: Nao Inoue

Inoue Nao is a bookbinder and teacher in Tokyo. She won a prize in an Italian bookbinding competition, has displayed her books in a variety of galleries, and has some innovative book covers.

She teaches all aspects of bookbinding from making your own book cloth to working with leather and making miniature books. She teaches in both English and Japanese and her website is in English, Chinese, and Japanese. I have taken her classes and learned quite a bit.

Ms Inoue’s website with classes and store: Marumizu.net

Bookbinding

This week I made six A6-sized (pocketbook) books using scraps, recycling bits and pieces of endpapers, text blocks, and covers. Why? To become more comfortable with the groove between the spine and the covers, something I have always struggled with. Success! I am now more comfortable with the groove.
And to see how long it takes me to make a book. Three and a half hours is my average speed for an A6-sized book with between five and nine signatures.

Yes, there are only five books in the picture. I finished the sixth one just before I made this blog post and its accompanying podcast.

I also made a small book 90 mm x 90 mm with, maybe 9 signatures, and a very ’Japanese-y’ cover. For those born and educated in the US, 90 mm is about 3 and a half inches (3.5, if you understand decimals) or about palm-width.

This one took about 3.5 hours as well, but it included that stripe on the front to indicate that that is the front. The other books have no such marker. Again, the text block is recycled from class handouts.

Fiction

I wrote a bit more on Molly Bright this time on Molly Bright. Chapter One is mainly about the second main character and the character who gets the story rolling: Sawako Kado, a genius computer wiz being sought after by a murderous religious cult. This chapter’s up to eleven pages and is mostly complete.

Chapter Three is about the third main character: Early Mathers, a easy-going, lazy, travel-addicted 30-something who gets caught up in Sawako’s dilemma. This one’s only got two pages and is far from complete.

But Chapter Two is about the main character: Molly. Molly is on a business trip in Fukuoka and Kagoshima in Japan when she runs into Sawako and Early. The people she meets and the trials and terrors she must go through change her from a career-minded, fast-track executive of the import business she works for into a more relaxed artisan with a talent for marketing.