手取川製本 ~ Tedorigawa Bookmakers

Episode 129: Kikkado Notebook

An A6 size notebook that fits nicely in one's pocket is pictured here. It was made of upcycled material. Specifically it was made from a box that a delicious New Year's Stollen came in. Unfortunately, I ate the cake so I can't send you any. The notebook is six signatures of four sheets resulting in about 84 pages. A handy size all around, I think.

I sewed, glues, mulled, and put on those glue-on headbands much, much earlier last year and, when I saw the box the stollen came in I thought, wow, here's the cheap (i.e. free) book board I've been looking for. I spent a wonderful afternoon measuring, cutting, gluing, and finding endpapers.


The endpapers are also upcycled.... I really don't like that word. It sounds too cutesy. The endpapers are also made from recycled material. I believe they are from a wrapping that another purchase was wrapped up in.

All in all, a fairly successful adventure, considering these are among the first books I've cased in in a long time. I cased in the yearly planner shortly after New Year's but these are in the top three, for sure.

Episode 128: Planning! Or Failing to do so...

This is a  planner that was supposed to be presented as a Saturnalia present back on December 25th but I got a bit  backed up. Well, with running around shopping at least.

It is A5, 12 signatures of four folios each for about 192 pages. I used a link stitch and cased it in with 2 mm book boards. Plus it was only about two weeks late. Hey, it's the thought that counts? Next year... Earlier? (That's what I said this year....)

As you can see, it has purple endpapers that are intended to match a pair of chairs that will be delivered at the end of January, another Saturnalia present arriving fashionably late.

It comes with a weekly calendar, a monthly calendar, and two yearly calendars. It also has lots of space for note-taking; for example, the weekly calendar is on the left side while the right side is blank. A request from the recipient.

This is the fourth book I've made so far this year and it's only the fifth of January. I will definitely not say I will be making a book-a-day for 2015 but I'm off to a good start. The other three books were kind of a fluky thing.
 
I had this badly printed novel on my desk for a while (like a year or more ~  the novel is Tristram's Printer). It was printed on only one side of the paper and I contemplated occasionally, what to do with it. One option, which came up frequently, was to trash it. Another was to Perfect bind it. The last option was to use a Japanese stab binding which is the one I went with. However, a 200 page novel is hard to stab. So I divided it up into five mini-novels which are pretty much divided along chapter lines. On the second day of the first month of the year, I stabbed section one.

This stabbing was followed on the third and fourth. When I finish all five sections I hope to make a small clamshell box for them and title it Tristram's Printer's Skeleton as the pages have been edited in red and black pen. Lots of corrections.

On the last two pictures you can see a monthly calendar followed by a weekly calendar. On the weekly calendar you can also see how much space is available for writing: the entire right-hand page. The previous planner had a weekly calendar on both pages but the recipient requested more writing acreage which I happily provided.

Speaking of casing in books, I believe I have about 14 uncased books lining my desk. Does that mean I will case in 14 books in the next two weeks? One can only hope. Especially considering that two of them were intended as year-end presents.

Episode 127: Cigarette Machines

Art-o-Mat sells art through used cigarette machines. Artists may submit their work to Art-o-Mat but it must meet certain requirements, like size. This is a great idea for not only recycling used cigarette machines but for also distributing art to people walking down the street. Go to: Art-O-Mat.

In that spirit, I am working on cigarette package-sized books. The book must fit inside a box the size of a cigarette pack and that has given me a whole new set of skills: measuring extremely accurately, folding, printing, and sewing small stuff. Eight pages are printed on one sheet of paper and then folded. The first book is nine signatures. The signatures are then sewn together. The second book is seven signatures. How many books will it eventually contain? I have no idea. Thrilling, isn't it? Picture two has a couple of cover ideas.

The book is called Giapan: A Quixotic Love Story. It is about a gypsy nun (La Gitana) and a wanderer (Giapan) who find themselves working for King Phillip of Spain shortly before the Spanish Armada sets out on its fateful voyage. The nun and the wanderer cross paths with a famous Spanish novelist who works briefly as a tax collector for King Phillip; until he is arrested for embezzlement.

Episode 126: More Japanese Binding

The first picture is a picture of my be-jeaned knees. Pretty, no? Between the knees you can see the kado-kami (edge papers) that support the text block and go under the cover and around the corners at the head and foot of the book. You can also see the thread wrapping around the edges.

This second picture is of the covers of the two recycled volumes of The Priests of Hiroshima: An Historical Love Story. What is the story about? A medical student and a Japanese student discover an antique bookstore in Istanbul with a talking cat that has perfected time travel. They go back to Mainz, Germany to watch Gutenberg build his printing press, avoid arrest, watch a nun and priest fall in love, and discover their joy of life. Nothing whatsoever to do with Hiroshima or those semi-famous priests.

One of the better things about the Japanese binding? It can be done fairly quickly with no waiting around for glue to dry. (Except for the kado-kami.)

Episode 125: Ear Cleaning Japanese Binding

The shaded areas in the picture on the left are the Kado Kami (角紙) that supports the corners of the spine. On the right are the Koyori Kami (コヨリ紙) that supports the text block itself. In this picture the twisted paper is put through two holes; some instructions are for only one hole.

Plus, an easy to watch speed version of sewing six signatures of a blank notebook: Binding Six Signatures.

Episode 124: Barber of Whitman

Serendipity brought me around a bit into American culture. First I listened to an interview with the soprano Renee Fleming who talked about Samuel Barber (Of course, she said) so I had to look him up on YouTube. Below one Barber video was another about Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass, so I listened to and read about Uncle Walt and his poetry. This inspired me to print out my incomplete novel: Caraculiambro.

Definitely think I'm over a certain funk about bookbinding which is a good thing because I have a lot of naked books that need covers and ideas for more books. Plus writing a couple.

Episode 123: Cheap & Cheep & Over the Funk

I see great book covers by people like Susan Mills or Hedi Kyle or Don Etherington and I think to myself, how can I accomplish that? And I get into an artistic funk depression and am consumed by what's the use? That is another word for being too lazy to work through problems but it is still a real problem. It takes time to pull yourself out.

The end result, of course, is I haven't bound a book recently and have about eleven waiting for covers. I have, however, managed to conquer the funk and am starting afresh with a positive attitude. This positive attitude can be seen in the fact that I made my first podcast in two months.

Episode 122: A Mountain Day

Usually I manage to panic and start making next year's schedule book in late October or mid-November. Obviously this is not the best of times. So this year I took the matter into my own hands and made a schedule book in May, a full seven months before it is actually needed.

The day after I printed out a prototype and sewed it together, the Japanese government added a new holiday. Back I ran to InDesign to make that a red-letter day. Not the government's decision but the actual day itself which, if you'd like to know is August 11. It's called Mountain Day, the fourth in a series of national holidays that celebrate nature. The other three are Sea Day (in July), the Spring equinox (in March) and the Fall equinox (in September). Mountain Day makes the 16th national holiday thus far in Japan.

My 2015 schedule book has two yearly calendars (2015 & 2016), a monthly calendar that runs from January 2015 to March 2016 (everything ~ schools and work ~ starts in April in Japan), and a weekly calendar that runs from Jan. 2015 to the end of April 2016. And why does the monthly calendar end in March and the weekly calendar end in April? Good question. I think I have more work to do.

It also has 12 pictures but the pictures have nothing to do with the seasons or the months. They are photos I took of relatively well-known scenes around town. In the book itself the pictures are muted so that the dates and days can be easily seen. Not your usual touristy shots but shots of parts of places so that people who live here can try to figure out where it is.  At the end of the book are all twelve pictures with captions so people can check if they're right or not.

Episode 121: Magnetic Islamic Venetian Slime Woman

In Episode 120 I discussed a possible novel in an Islamic binding. Today, I will talk about a definite novel in an Islamic binding with an additional feature: Magnets. We all love magnets, eh?

In the flap that extends over the front cover, I glued in a small, flat magnet. In the cover, I glued in another magnet with the opposite polarity. After some experimentation, I got them to stick together. Being small and flat, the two magnets didn't have enough umph to attract each other through two layers of book cloth. I cut the cloth away from the magnet in the extending flap. The idea is good and I have seen magnetized covers on books that literally snap shut with a resounding click. They are also a bit difficult to open. I want something in the middle between what I make and the crowbar-required other books.

The book is a novel. It is The Venetian Slime Woman: A Biological Love Story by me. It is 201 pages long, in A5 format with a hard cover. It's available as an e-book at Smashwords.com.  Or as a hardback at tedorigawa.bookmakers@gmail.com.

It is about a new life form found only in the canals of Poveglia Island in Venice. One glob of slime manifests itself as a beautiful psychic woman who is literally dumped in the lap of an EPA water specialist. The specialist quickly finds himself on the wrong side of Homeland Security. They want to find out what makes this slime woman tick and, if possible, kill her. The EPA man and the woman have to get back to Venice. From Seattle. Undetected. But how?

What did I learn making the magnetized version of the Islamic binding? I need a stronger set of magnets, for one. Second, again, is measuring correctly and aligning things is important. Plus, the larger the magnet, the easier it is to work with and, perhaps, the stronger it is. I have more of this thin magnet strip that I can cut up and use so expect more magnetized book closures in coming episodes.

By the way, the previous Islamic binding in Episode 120 is not a novel but a lined journal with Japanese ~ English translations and puns in the upper margin.

Episode 120: Paper Trails

What have I been doing in the last month or so? Reading about how paper got from Cai Lun's workshop in Leiyang, Hunan province in southern China in 105 CE to Europe a mere 1200 years later. Leave it to those rascally Moslem conquerors in the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates in the six and seven hundreds.

First, remember that the Han dynasty is from 200 BCE to 200 CE and that Cai Lun was alive from 50 to 120 CE.  The Han dynasty worked out how to get silk from China to Europe via the Middle East. They did it with caravans from Xian, China to Samarkand, a city in Uzbekistan that has been conquered by everyone from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan.

Merchants along the trade routes sell everything except the technical knowledge of how to make silk and paper. Meanwhile, the Umayyad Caliphate conquers everything from Damascus to Cordoba, Spain. Then the Abbasid Caliphate squeezes the Umayyad out of everything but Spain. The Abbasid also wants to move East toward China. The Tang Dynasty under Emperor Xuanyang objects. The two regional superpowers duke it out at the river Talas, north of Samarkand.

One result of this battle is that Chinese papermakers are captured, marched to Samarkand and forced to teach the caliphate how to make paper or die. Shortly after, papermaking migrates from Samarkand, across the Middle East (including Egypt, where papyrus was first used) to the remains of the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain. Spain gets papermaking knowledge in about 10th century. Italy gets it about 100 years later and by 1400 Germany acquires the skill. Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany goes crazy. (And, eventually, bankrupt.)

Now, while the Moslems of Samarkand were busy making paper, others in the Islamic community were busy making books with that paper. The developed an artistic style for the covers but they also developed a flap that can be used in two ways: to cover the fore-edge of the book and thus protect the contents from sand, wind, rain, and busy fingers; as a bookmark. 

In this episode of Tedorigawa Bookmakers you can see that I have made a book using just such a technique. I believe the book is a novel about time-traveling between Mainz, Germany in the 1450s and Istanbul, Turkey today written by myself and called The Priests of Hiroshima.