Rough Book

Having strolled through too many stores that sell great paper, I found myself with a large variety of paper - soft, rough, colored, white - and finally decided that instead of buying more and not doing anything with it, I would use the paper I've got before I buy more. Ha! That's a good one. Anyway, I made The Rough Book. (You can see the rough cover here.)

The pages are rough, the endpapers are rougher, but the cover is the roughest: it isn't really paper so much as woven threads. I backed this cover paper with rough yellow paper (like endpapers.)

Here is an open page 

and you can see the stems and leaves embedded in the paper. This is also a very light book. Because the cover is so porous, and the pages aren't exactly the tightest weave in the world, the entire book is very, very light. 

And finally, here is a shot wherein you can see how roughly cut the pages are. More like torn than cut but they are very beautiful to look at. 

Chinese Stab Binding

I looked at some Japanese stab bindings over at cailun.info and they inspired me not to make a great Japanese stab binding but to return to the genre. With two caveats. 

First, I was told by some Chinese humans that what most of the world calls 'Japanese' stab binding is actually 'Chinese' stab binding. I did a little research (I googled Chinese stab binding) and found that the main difference between Japanese and Chinese stab bindings is that the distance between the sewn threads in a Japanese-style binding is even. From one thread to the next is the same distance on traditional Japanese binding. In Chinese binding, that distance can vary. 

Second, I went to a Buddhist store that sells Buddhist scripture. The books Buddhist priests read from when they chant. These are all bound using Japanese stab bindings. I checked them out. Now, one reason I didn't like the stab binding genre (Chinese or Japanese) is that the book doesn't open very widely. Well, I examined in minute detail the scripture book. It has very thin paper, very few pages (maybe 50 at most), and the binding is close to the edge. With the thin paper and few pages plus the binding close to the edge, the book opens wider.

So, I cut up some paper to B6 size and made two Chinese stab binding pamphlets - blank journals of about 60 pages (30 sheets). I liked the fact that I could make one while watching a DVD (The Queen staring Helen Mirren) and only stab myself once or twice.

They open nicely but still you can't use the inner most edge as it is closed off by the binding but they make nice notebooks and doodle pads if one were stuck in a meeting for a couple of hours.

Frustration and Appeasement

Get a nice piece of wood. Decide to make a book cover out of it. Saw it. Find a flaw. Saw it again. Check it out with paper. Wrong size. Saw it again. Decide to carve a groove in it and put in wood a different color for contrast and 'art's sake.' Cool idea. Carve it wrong. Not once but twice. The groove is too big for the wood I was going to insert. Try to find another piece to insert. Can't. Shrug shoulders ... and not for the last time on this particular project. Drill holes for the binding (to be coptic). Crack the wood. Glue it back together. Varnish it. It looks crappy. Sand it. It looks worse. Varnish it a different 

color. Bang head against a brick wall. It looks extremely bad. Sand it to smithereens. Cool. Very thin wood now, by golly.

Lather on the varnish, it doesn't look That bad. cough cough. Decide to make the back cover the front cover as the front cover doesn't look That good, either. cough. Add a few baubles and whatnot to the front and leave the back alone with its ugly groove and uglier insert.

Fold the paper for it, align the holes in the paper and cover. Decide to call it a night before termites appear and resurface the whole shebang. Still, termite trails might be an improvement....

Suffice it to say this has been one bad karmic cover which has needed salvation time and time again. But if you work on it long enough and remember two things: wood is flexible, cut-able, and adjustable, after a fashion, and sand paper is a gift from the gods, then perhaps you can salvage and even end up with a book that looks good. Or better than its karma would have made you think. 

This is a 168-page blank journal of an odd size paper (not as wide as A4 but just as tall) because the wood was not equal to any known paper size. And, as I am further from its birth pains, I have grown to like it more. Even the sewing, which went not so well, has its fine points. We live, we learn. (Does that mean, if we keep learning we'll live forever?)