Having a Little Fun

During the recent New Year's vacation I dabbled in a miniture book. Well, maybe not so miniture. It measures 6.5 cm by 10 cm and its theme is Halloween. Why Halloween which is either 10 months in the future or two months in the past? Because I used a box as a cover and the box originally housed a plastic jack-o-lantern and, as such, had a carved pumpkin on one face and a bat on the other.

The interior of the book - perfect binding, by the way, meaning not 'perfect' but like a 'real' book - continued the Halloween theme with a short essay on why certain folks don't like Halloween, a variety of Halloween-themed drawings (bats, pumpkins, a ghost or two), and Trick or Treat. The main difference between this book and others is that each 'signature' is actually a folded single piece of paper using what seems to be called the 'Hot Dog' folding method. This is actually a quite common fold here - lots of elementary school kids do it when they should be listening to the teacher - but handy.

Most of the 'art' in this book was done before the paper was folded so it's a surprise to see what pops up on what page. The essay, for example, starts on one page but doesn't conclude until several pages later and the middle is hidden. Fun. A pleasant way to spend a little snowy afternoon.

Cereal Series Part II

The Premium Corn Flake with beet sugar Book. (It says so on the front cover.) This is a book from my Cereal Series. It has coptic binding, cereal box covers, seven signatures of six folios each for about 168 unlined pages. It's a blank notebook suitable for gift giving.

It's not so big (B6) and fits nicely into a jacket pocket. The one problem is the back cover is on upside down. Or not. Maybe it's art. 

To your right, the Kellogg's Genmai Book (Brown Rice Flake Book) - on the left; and the orange Premium Corn Flake with Beet Sugar Book - on the right. The Premium Corn Flake is B6 size while the Genmai Book is B5, if that makes any sense.

Five Yellow Notebooks

Five yellow notebooks all with coptic stitching (one almost done well), book board covered in yellow, red inserts for a touch of flair and endpapers made of photos I took from around the neighborhood. A very big neighborhood. Pictures of cherry blossoms on the inside front cover. And a temple in sepia on the inside back cover. Unless you turn the notebook over, in which case they are the opposite.

What did we learn from all of this? I learned how to do coptic binding better and tighter. The whole purpose behind making five (five green notebooks below and five yellow ones now) is Practice. Practice. And more practice. Each one seems to be getting a little better each time (except the one where I ripped the hole too wide near the edge and screwed it entirely. Oh, well, we learn and live.)

Ready for one more picture?

Here is in the inside of the back cover. This is a temple in Kanazawa at dusk, although this is a sepia and slightly Photoshopped for color adjustment. A famous writer lived here as a child and it's half a temple and half a museum of his life.

Good fun in making all five notebooks. The last one is the one with the funky cover which you can barely see in the top photo. All the others have nothing on the cover except yellow.

Japanese Stab Binding and Cereal boxes

I saw the opportunity to try my handbinding at another Japanese binding. Normally, I don't like the Japanese stab binding because the book itself is hard to open. I know there are tricks around it and all but I like the traditional approach to it. And, therefore, like coptic binding better because it's easier to open.

On your left is the front of the Genmai (Brown Rice) Flake Japanese Stab Binding notebook I made the other night. Complete with recycled and discarded A4-size paper folded over once. And uncut.

Speaking of uncut, check out. Tedorigawa Bookmakers audio blog to read more and listen to the short dramatic session that accompanies it. Or you can click on The Second Times the Lucky Charm on the player at right. Thank you very much.