A big, big book

For many years, the size of my artist books generally ran to about 3" square. Manageable, I thought. The last few books have been closer to 5" x 8".

The project finished yesterday is 15" x 19". It felt something like trying to play the xylophone with my fingers, as though it were a piano. Over the winter break, I began helping the scrapbook committee of the high school Latin club to build a handmade scrapbook. We laminated two thickness of binder board together for both covers, and covered them with book cloth that we made with cotton, kozo paper and wheat paste. The front cover has 4 cutout windows, one with several waves cut into the bottom border. That was a covering adventure. My beloved Japanese screw punch was pressed (yuk yuk) into service for the post-and-screw binding. The punched spine pieces were turned in and a spine cover strip bound with the pages.

I wish I had thought to take a picture, but as soon as we finally got it finished I had to rush off to class.

Cloth-Covered Card Case

I always enjoy reading Denis Yuen's blog, Cai Lun. En route to filing something else, I came across a saved bookmark to his tutorial on making a card case, or, as he calls it, a namecard holder. To a book artist who is guilty of carrying her cards in a rubberband, this seemed like a good project for today! Although his example places the side flaps on the bottom section of the structure, I placed mine on the center section.

I was pleased with the overall result, although I imagine that the only way to avoid stupid mistakes in construction is to make the structures often enough and enough times that I don't have to stop and think about where to make the cuts.

Dennis's instructions say to make the lining flaps a little larger than the cover flaps -- and this is sound advice since it allows the trimming of the flaps after the lining and cover flaps are pasted together. But I found this problematic if too much leeway is allowed for, because there is that awkward intersection of center section and adjacent hinge and flap.

I used a green moire book cloth that is fairly unforgiving of paste-y fingers. The book cloth was left over from my final project last semester in photography class. And now I realize I never posted anything about that. Maybe I'll post photos of that soon.

Slot and Tab Book

Over at the Book Arts list on Yahoo, there's currently a discussion about the slot-and-tab book structure. Carol blogged about the structure here when people asked her about the book in her blog header, and Celia posted her sample with instructions here.

I followed the instructions in Alisa Golden's book, Creating Handmade Books. I've made many of the book structures in the book, but I had never tried this one before. I used scrapbook stock decorated with woodless colored pencils and water-soluble crayons -- 8 sheets in 4 colors, with half decorated and half plain. Even with all these colors and patterns to help me keep it straight, I may not have attached the 2-sheet signatures to one another in a consistent manner. I'll look at it again later when I have more time. I only had an hour for this today.

Some of the heavier tab papers were harder to curl through the slot papers without damaging. I imagine a strong, long-fiber paper like kozu paper would work well with this structure. It's a great non-adhesive binding structure.

Happy New Year

Happy 2008! I'm looking forward to the new year. This month (I've given up on yearly resolutions) I plan to do something creative every day. I may not get to post every day, but I'll do something creative every day and post it when I can.

Today I made this one-page book with pop-ups.
The text is from the Herman Hesse poem, "Stages". My favorite part of the poem is not in this little book, but they are appropriate words for the new year:

In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.

Although the structure is very simple and quick, it took me awhile because I decided to make the switch from Microsoft Publisher (2000) to CS2 InDesign. Since I got CS2 I haven't wanted to upgrade my very old version of Publisher but have always been in too much of a hurry to figure out InDesign. It was fairly easy to pick up, although I'm that today sure I saw about 2% of what it can actually do.

Butterfly Tunnel Book

Here's a the front cover of the tunnel book I did in my 3D Design class this semester. (Odd that I would have a tunnel book assignment in 2D Design last semester, and another one in 3D Design this semester.) I'll post the first tunnel book when I get it back. Julia DeHoff and I are exhibiting some of our artist books at the public library during the month of October, and that first tunnel book is on display there.

The idea for the book came from an essay on butterfly collecting by Ann Fadiman in her book At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays. She describes her childhood obsession with butterfly collecting, recounting in gruesome detail the catching and killing and mounting and collecting of the butterflies. This quote stayed with me: "When did we realize that this was horrible? My brother, Kim, and I had started collecting butterflies when he was eight and I was six. Shame set in about two years later. I remember a period of painful overlap, when the light of decency was dawning but the lure of sin was still irresistible." This seems to me an excellent description of our current relationship with our planet.

The left side of this image shows quotes from the essay written on the side accordion folds of the tunnel book. (You probably can't even see it unless you click on the image to get the full-size image.) The right side of the image is a view of the tunnel book from above. Since the view window of the tunnel is a magnifying glass, it was even more difficult than usual to photograph the view inside. The butterflies, cut from my stash of pasted-painted and decorative paper scraps, hang from the tunnel frames by strips of transparency film.

The back of the tunnel book was made to look like a Riker mounted dead butterfly, or perhaps ghost of a butterfly. I made a covered box and a lid which glass from a battered 5"x7" frame. I thought I'd have to secure it closed with some pins, but the fit was quite snug enough to stay closed on its own. If I'd had more time, I would have found some jeweler's cotton; as it was, the morning the tunnel book was due I was feverishly pulling apart cotton balls and trying to approximate that layer of cotton.

Such is often the nature of class projects. I have to keep remembering that they're not actually going in a juried show, for instance.

Tunnel Books -- Links

I'm not a fan of tunnel books, but a current class assignment has led me to look at them more closely.

It's often frustrating to look at images of tunnel books. You're shown the cover, you see the sides, you see the sculptural aspects of the book, but only rarely do you get to see even an approximation of what one sees when one looks through the tunnel book.

Here are some of my favorite tunnel books that you can see online:

• Roberta Lavadour's Harvest Moon, a luminous view of the moon with layers of twig branches covering the main image.
• A collaborative tunnel book made in Julie Chen's class at Pyramid Atlantic. I like it that the square confines of the outer shape are breached.
• Tara Bryan's World Without End, with the story on the accordion panels and the images in the tunnel. At roughly 3" x 3", it seems a little small for comfortable tunnel viewing, but since the story is on the outside, maybe that's not as important as it might be otherwise.
• Ed Hutchin's Grandma's Closet -- a great use of the tunnel structure.
• Peter and Donna Thomas's awesome Ukelele Tunnel Book, part of a series of uekele books. The back of a ukelele was sawed off to allow for the tunnel structure. The entire series is here. Although I found this book first, I list it last, so that the rest of the list wouldn't be disappointment.
  

I don't like tunnel books as much as I like other book structures, I think because it functions more as a sculpture than a book. You get the whole picture at once, and time doesn't play the part that it does in books whose pages have to be turned and whose images and words appear serially. In a tunnel book, there are more things to see as you look around more, but that's true of paintings and sculptures.

Concertina Cabaret revisited

Even though it's been a month since I photographed all the pieces of the model I was making for Michael Jacobs' structure, Concertina Cabaret, in Books Unbound ... I did actually make the book that same day. I'm only just now getting around to photographing the model.

I used mostly Canson Mi-Tientes, sheets from the Fabriano Artistico artist's journal (a nice book -- the larger one -- to have around for small pieces of good colored paper) and a few scrapbook paper scraps.

Concertina Cabaret

This morning I'm making a model of the "Concertina Cabaret" structure in Michael Jacobs' latest book, Books Unbound. Except for my painted endpapers and the tomato red cover papers (and perhaps the olive green pieces), these are not familiar colors. Actually, I don't know what "my" colors are anymore; the colors in the painted endpapers are pretty new to me still. But I digress.

The reason I took this picture is to preserve that feeling of satisfaction at this point in the process: all the pieces are prepared and I'm ready to begin constructing the book -- each piece grain identified, papers measured, re-measured, cut, labeled. At this point -- and this is true even if I'm constructing a book whose structure I've worked out on my own -- it almost feels like I've constructed a kit, and it only remains to fit slot A into sleeve B, etc. It feels this way even though I know from bitter experience that at some point in the process it will become clear that slot A will never fit into sleeve B because piece C was cut 1/8" too short, or because I forgot to allow for the width of the fold X, or ... The possibilities for miscalculation are endless.

Foreknowledge notwithstanding, the feeling of satisfaction at this point in the process remains. To paraphrase Rona in "The Twenty-fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee", "It's my favorite moment in the book."Fortunately, as with Rona at the spelling bee, I have more than one "favorite moment" in the making of a book.

The finished book

Here are two views of the finished book. The different colors on the front are the result of sanding through all the layers of paint on the distressed surface.

It was gratifying to make, although I'm not sure I'll make another anytime soon. It's rather small not particularly sturdy -- not suitable for use as a carrying-around artist journal, for instance. It's more of a library book. If I remember correctly, these Egyptian books were stored face-up with the fore-edge pointing out, and they had metal feet on the back cover to protect the cover from being scraped as they were being removed from or replaced on the shelf. So formal content would be more in keeping with the structure of the book, and the idea of supplying (let's see: 12 signatures of 16 pages each equals) 192 pages of formal content is daunting!

But it is a very satisfying thing to hold in one's hand.

International Dunhuang Project

Click on the title of this post to visit an excellent source of information about the bookbinding structures found in the collection Dunhuang and other Silk Road manuscripts housed in the British Library. The information at this website is both extensive and well illustrated with both photographs and diagrams.

Pop-up Galleries

Robert Sabuda, a creative pop-up book artist, has put together an inspirational website all about pop-ups.

The gallery of international pop-ups by country and artist is still growing. Click on the link below each country flag; sometimes clicking on the flags themselves gets you a 404 error message.