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Bookbinding 3

Over the weekend, I went up to the San Francisco Center for the Book again and took Bookbinding 3. It was really fun! We did a bigger, more traditionally-bound book — just one rather than two — and it came out pretty well!

There are a number of things we did differently with this book than the ones I made in Bookbinding 2.  For one thing, this one is a lot bigger — 18 signatures instead of 10. For another, we learned to handle the greatly increased swell (the increase in thickness at the spine of the book you get from the fold and from the thread used to sew the signatures together) with a much more curved spine. You can see in the photos below just how curved it turned out! The process requires using a piece of equipment called a job press — you basically put the book in once it’s a little rounded and crank it tight so that the swell is concentrated all at the end rather than making the whole book sort of wedge-shaped. It gives the book shoulders, where the curve is wider than the rest of the text sheets (almost like a mushroom shape, if you look down at it from the top). The cover boards sit in against the shoulders, so ideally the covers and pages are all flat, while the spine curves out on the edge.

We also learned to sew our own endbands, a process some of my classmates hated but which I really liked. It’s a bit tricky, but the product is so awesome that I don’t mind. I am planning on doing sewn endbands for all my books from now on!

We also used wheat paste for some steps instead of using the synthetic stuff we’ve used in the past. Every glue has advantages and disadvantages. Wheat paste takes longer to set, which can be a real advantage (you can move stuff around a bit after putting it together to get things perfectly lined up, for example) but is also a liability in a classroom setting, because it takes so much longer to dry. The biggest advantage to wheat paste in my eyes is that it’s totally reversible. You can melt it with some care and attention, enabling you to undo serious mistakes or redo a project once you know a better way. Once I get into conservation and restoration, I will probably be using wheat paste exclusively because a book precious enough to be restored will be worked on again in the future, for sure, and it’s good to make that future work a little easier when you can!

Wheat paste does have to be mixed fresh every time you want to use it (it molds very quickly when it’s wet, since it’s basically just flour and water) and you have to mix in calcium carbonate to make it pH-neutral, but it’s easy enough to do both those things that I don’t mind.

Finally, we added a lining to the inside of the cover so that there wouldn’t be a bump from the paper and bookcloth turn-in. This required some precision cutting, but wasn’t too hard, and I may add that to my own books in the future. The result is really nice.

So, here’s a look at the book!

I made a book!

I know, I know. I’ve made books before. But this one I made all by myself!

It’s smaller than the ones I did in class, and I used a different thread (one that’s bright orange, to match the cover!). For bonus win, I made it for my boyfriend, whose favorite color is orange — as you can probably tell from the photo — and he loved it.

I made the text block from printer paper, and used regular book board and book cloth for the cover. I made matching endbands, and used the curved-spine technique I learned in Bookbinding 2 (I don’t have a book hammer yet, but wound up being able to do it with just my fingers, probably because it’s such a small book).

My new nipping press is awesome and I actually cranked it down a little too hard – you can see some denting from the press being too tight if you know where to look in the photos. But it came out great for a first solo book! I’m very pleased.

Flog your blog!

In response to Junglemonkey‘s generous invitation to allow people to plug their blogs on her own, I’m doing the same – giving anyone who comments here the chance to sell their blog to the handful of bibliophiles (and Ealasaid-ophiles) who read this blog!

So, make a comment! Leave your name and let me know what kind of stuff you write. Do you portion out slices of life? Practice amateur comedy? Dissect current events? When you comment, there are a couple of rules:

1. You must be following this blog to make a comment.
2. You must do this on your blog too in order to give your followers a chance to gain new folks.

Come on – you have nothing to lose and perhaps a few friends to gain!

Tools!

I’m working on doing bookbinding at home now, and having to get sneaky about my equipment. A lot of bookbinding tools are kind of ridiculously expensive. Fortunately, I am pretty handy, and the internet is full of ideas.

Here are two items I made recently so I could get my work done:

On the left, we have a piercing jig (or trough, or cradle). I built this one out of bookboard using this design. To see how fancy (and expensive!) they can get, hit Google. Or look at this. Gorgeous!

This particular piece of equipment is used to hold a group of folded pages (a signature) open while you use an awl to make holes in them for stitching. The V-shape helps make sure the holes go straight down into the fold. It’s perfectly possible to do the punching without a cradle (or trough, or jig), but the trough (or jig, or cradle… can you tell I’m amused by all the names?) makes it a lot easier. This cost me about half an hour and maybe $3 of materials to make. It’s not as sturdy or pretty as a wood one, but it’ll do until I have the inclination (and money) to buy a nice one.

On the right is a basic finishing press (sometimes called a lying press), made following these instructions (roughly. I did some tweaking here and there to suit my own preferences). This is a very important piece of equipment, and one that you can’t really do without (unlike the piercing… thing). The finishing press holds a book while you work on its spine, pressing the pages together so the glue doesn’t seep down between them.

There are absolutely gorgeous wood presses out there, but they are pretty pricey and also difficult to find. They require precision wordworking (traditionally, the screws between the two sides of the press are made of wood as well as the press itself) and not many people are able or interested. There’s a local carpenter who makes the presses for the San Francisco Center for the Book where I’m taking classes, and I’m on a list of people he’s going to call when he has another batch done (this gives me time to save up!).  Here’s a photo showing one of his presses. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on one for my workbench!

In the meantime, though, I have my ersatz tools and am chugging along. I’ve added handbound journals to my list of services, as you can see, and am enjoying working on creating them at my little workbench:

I’ve ordered a nipping press, since those are essentially impossible to build ersatz versions of, and I’ll have lots of photos once it arrives! I can’t wait.

Bookstores

As you’ve probably heard, Borders is closing a number of its stores as it files for bankruptcy.

Part of me is doing a small, vindictive, schadenfreude-laden dance of EAT IT SUCKER! I remember when there were a fair number of independent bookstores in my area, charming little bookstores which started struggling and many of whom eventually closed as Borders and Barnes & Noble moved in. Admittedly, this is when I was a kid and didn’t have enough disposable income to do much book shopping, but my parents took me with them to bookstores, so I did notice the shift.

After college, I spent a lot of time in my local Borders where a guy had organized a regular Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game night. Every week, a handful of us would gather around a table the store kindly set up for us back in the music section, buy drinks from the store’s cafe, and stay until the store closed, gaming our little hearts out. I had a lot of fun — as a second-generation Tolkien nerd, I love LotR. The game was well crafted for the first few years, and a major championship game even made it to ESPN2 (one of my gaming group guys was on the commentary team for that broadcast, and had me coach him in correct pronunciation of the card names).

The group disbanded when the Return of the King release of the game was so bad that it made the game almost unplayable, but I always look back fondly on that time. Seeing the Borders when I drive past makes me smile. Even a corporate bookstore can be a positive location.

You’ll note, however, that I don’t smile because of hours spent buying books there.

I like to buy from indie bookshops when I can, and hopefully now that Borders is shrinking its reach the indies will start to thrive a little more. There’s even a handy list of indie bookstores near closing Borders stores you can consult for new places to go to get your hunt-or-gather on.

There’s something particularly charming about small indie bookshops. They don’t tend to have coffee bars or enough space for local gaming groups to hang out in them, but they tend to have knowledgeable employees and a rather more eclectic selection of books. Plus, the atmosphere just strikes me as me as more bookish! Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather browse in a bookshop that looked like this:

Fields Books in San Francisco, photo by Ellen Francik

than like this:

Borders Books in Seattle. Photo by Ruthanne Reid

I’ve done a lot of browsing in Borders over the years, but I can while away a lot more hours in a much more enjoyable way in indie bookshops. Long live indie bookstores!

Bookbinding 2!

I took Bookbinding 2 at the San Francisco Center for the Book over the weekend, and had a great time! I made two new books and learned some new techniques. Check it out:

There were three main differences between these books and the ones from Bookbinding 1 — the rounding of the spines, making cloth corners for one of the books (cloth is more durable than paper, so the corners won’t wear through as quickly), and assembling the cover in a more traditional, stronger fashion. You’ll note the paper joining the spine to the cover boards, that’s been torn along the edges. We sanded that down so it would be smoother under the endpapers and the edge of the paper wouldn’t make a bump. The tearing makes that process easier.

I’ve been doing a little work on a book of my own at home, but stalled out because I need a finishing press… plus space to work and a nipping press and and and. I’m in the process of getting all that, and once my workbench is all set up, I’ll give y’all a tour!

Mine, All Mine

It would probably surprise anyone who saw my bookshelves, but I don’t consider myself a serious collector — mostly because I don’t shell out tens of thousands of dollars for rare editions of centuries-old texts the way the hardcore ones do. I certainly have the urges, though, and when they hit, they hit hard. A case in point:

At a recent convention, I was perusing the shelves of a vendor carrying books and I found this little treasure. I paid $75 cash to the lovely lady and hustled out of there before anyone could notice and point out the utter insanity of me even finding this book, let alone getting it for such a good price.

I already own the Wolf Annotated Dracula in paperback (with its impressively hideous cover, bleck), but have always longed for the long-out-of-print hardcover edition. This one? This is a first edition. The vendor said she only finds one every few years, if that. I’ve found ones in good shape for sale for well over $100. This one has a Demco dust jacket cover protecting the lovely dust jacket (which is in surprisingly good shape) and aside from a general yellowing of the pages, it’s in excellent condition.

Much to my disappointment, almost none of my friends at the con got why I was so excited to have gotten my paws on this lovely tome. But then, it wasn’t a book convention, and there aren’t many people who understand why I own half a dozen copies of Dracula to begin with, let alone two editions of the same annotated edition (the notes are fantastic, and the text of the novel is a reproduction of the second printing ever).

That’s all right, though. I didn’t buy it to show off, I bought it because it makes me grin and do a little dance to hold it.

Looks like I’m a collector after all.

Profitable Idealism

I spent a big chunk of time today at the Twitter Party for Profitable Idealism — Very interesting stuff! I even got super lucky and won the grand prize, free admission to the Profitable Idealism course! WOW.

If you missed it, check out the hashtag on Twitter and poke around the site. It looks like a great course! Go forth and sign up before the price goes up next week! There are pre-registration bonuses, too! DO EET. Preferably through my affiliate link there. 🙂

One of the questions that was both easy to answer and got me thinking was: who are your role models for changing the world?

Obviously, my answer was Eddie Riggs — I’ve written about him before — but after I sent in my reply I had a thought: is it weird that one of my inspirations is a video game character? And not just a video game character, but one from a heavy metal hack-and-slash-with-real-time-strategy game? Not to mention he’s played by Jack Black, who isn’t really known for being all about idealism and changing the world.

But, as I put it in my reply: Eddie saves the world and gets the girl, and all while serving others. His whole existence is about making life easier for artists so they can do their thing, and one idea that kept coming up in the conference call part of the party was that changing the world can happen through helping the people around you. Companies like Zappos.com are idealistic and world-changing because they’re so focused on employee and customer happiness.

From that point of view, Eddie is definitely an idealism/world-changing role model. He organizes, directs, builds, and takes major risks in the service of helping out the people he believes in — Lars, Lita, and Ophelia.  He works hard for little or no recognition in the our world before he’s taken to the Age of Metal because he loves music and is dedicated to being the best roadie he can be.

So yeah, it might seem weird, but my inspiration for being a world-changing idealist is Eddie Riggs, roadie, metalhead, and general badass.

Eddie Riggs
A good roadie knows his whole job is to make someone else look good, keep someone else safe, help someone else do what they were put here to do. A good roadie stays out of the spotlight. If he's doing his job right, you don't even know he's there. Once in a while he might step on stage just to fix a problem, to set something right. But then before you even realize he was there or what he did, he's gone. --Eddie Riggs

Bookbinding 1!

Oh, man, I had the best time up at the SF Center for the Book over the weekend! I took Bookbinding 1, which consisted of building two flat-back hardbound books under the guidance of Rhiannon Alpers, who has both her BA and her MA in book arts. How cool is that?

I took a bunch of photos of the process, so here they are for your viewing pleasure!

I had a lot of fun, and am going to take Bookbinding 2 at the end of the month. Rawk!

It’s a lot of fun learning how to do this — not only does this enable me to build my own books, soon I’ll know enough to start repairing books as well!

Busy Week for the Roadie!

There are two exciting things coming up this weekend for book-lovers. The first is third biennial CODEX International Book Fair and Symposium taking place February 6-9 at UC Berkeley. There will be lectures (alas, they’re pretty pricey) and a book fair with vendors from all over the world. I am planning on hitting the book fair for sure.

The Codex Foundation is dedicated to preserving the art and craft of the book, and they’re offering a series of workshops on Saturday February 5 at the Kala Art Institute. The Kala Art Institute offers printing and typesitting classes, and is well worth checking out.

I’m particularly excited about a different event happening this weekend: The San Francisco Center for the Book‘s Bookbinding I class! It’s a two-day workshop covering the fundamentals of hardcover bookbinding, and I’m psyched. This is one of the classes that will enable me to repair old, damaged books, and is the first of several I’m planning to take at the SFCB. They offer a ton of workshops related to books, from printing to art to binding.

Looks like February is going to be a good month for book-lovers in the Bay Area!