Friday 21 October 2011

The Power of Craft

Tomorrow I will be at the Vancouver Wayzgoose, so of course I need cards. I was told that the cards I hastily printed at home were the ne plus ultra of dorkiness (not because of the design but because of the perforations around the edge), and I must do better.

I thought of printing the cards onto heavy art paper and cutting them out myself (no perfs), but my laser printer needs to wind the paper around the drum and of course the paper was too heavy and it jammed. Never mind, I am obstinate and I am a bookbinder and I have cold mix paste ready to my hand. So I have just printed my cards onto 24-lb laid paper and pasted the paper onto the heavy art paper for a duplex card.

I have no idea if this process is going to work, and if it does the cards may still offend the world at large, but I think they'll be cool. If they work. If not, anyone who can track me down at the Wayzgoose is welcome to a home-printed card with perforations around the edge. I'll have lots.

And I have been thinking about the power of craft. If I want business cards, I am not defeated by not having any money or not being near a store that carries exactly the kind of cards I want. I have printed these on my laser printer, but I could have printed them with my own type, or stamped them with foil, or I could have hand-written them or stencilled them or stamped them with a potato. I have options, and that gives me power.

Similarly, if I can get hold of a raw fleece I can turn it into a sweater. I can take linen thread and turn it into lace. I can take flour and sugar and milk and turn it into cake. Being able to change your surroundings, to turn what you have into something else, is a source of great power.

We craftspeople are wizards.

Friday 14 October 2011

Back to the Future

Why are books - the physical object - important to anyone in this day and age? Back in my childhood, books were the repository of all knowledge. They were comparatively expensive and most people didn't have a lot of them. If you wanted had to write a school report on Cornwall, you went to the school library and looked up Cornwall in the encyclopedia, wrote down in your own words what the encyclopedia said, and that pretty much was all you were expected to do. Or, really, all you could do - unless you trekked downtown to the big main city library that had other books about Cornwall, and that took up a whole Saturday and yeah, right, I'm really going to do that. Once you had what the Encyclopedia said, why would you bother? I was one of those goody-two-shoes A students so I would sometimes look up Cornwall in two different encyclopedias in the school library (we had three sets)  to see if one had more information than the other, but in my world that was stepping pretty far into academia and my social standing was in jeopardy.

Today, of course, if you want information on Cornwall you type it into Google and in .15 seconds you get 73,300,000 hits. We are inundated with information, and it is always there - the Internet is our own giant library - so why do we need to own any book at all?

Well, there's serendipity. On the Internet you get what you ask for, and only what you ask for. There is little chance that, browsing through the library stacks on the subject of Cornwall, you should run across a book on Cheshire, become fascinated with a photo of half-timbered houses on the cover, and soon find yourself leaving the library (or bookstore) with "The History of English Architecture" or "Life in An Elizabethan Town", and subsequently learn about all kinds of things you never thought you were interested in. You could do that on the Internet, but it turns out we don't. To get those 73 million hits down to something manageable we search by such fearsomely narrow descriptions ("Cornwall tin mines death 1732") that we dip into the information pool just long enough to fetch out the bit we need, and move on. So we can wind up with a lot more information than we used to have about some very narrow topics.

I took a workshop a couple of weeks ago, on social media and how the Internet is changing our brains. The older people in the workshop tended to reminisce about the good old days, before the Internet, when we were all literate and pure, and the younger people were rather preening themselves with the knowledge that according to the experts, as a result of their Internet exposure their brains would be changed forever. We were told that because people only spend a few seconds deciding whether or not to click on a particular link that is brought up by their Google search, that means people have some sort of Internet-induced ADHD. We were invited to remember how much time we usually spend dipping into a book before deciding whether to buy it, and to compare it to those few seconds those modern, brain-altered people spend making their decision.

I disagree. I think they're comparing apples and pomegranates.  The SERP is not the same thing as a book. The SERP is like when you go into a bookstore and you ask "Where can I find books about Cornwall?" and they direct you to a section of the shelves, filled with fifty or sixty or a hundred books under the broad heading of "travel" or "Europe" depending on how many books your bookstore has in stock and how broadly they've grouped them. The Internet's SERP has 73.3 million books in it - if that were your experience in a bookstore, how long would you spend on each book? Exactly.

Now, say you're in your bookstore faced with only 30 books in the "Travel - Europe" section. What do you do? You pull out this one and that one depending on the title, and maybe the colour of the cover - what you can see from the spine. That's the equivalent of the few seconds deciding whether to click on a link. Then you glance at the cover.  If it doesn't turn you off (and you can be turned off by the colour of the illustration or even the typeface) you may look at the back cover or dip into the text. That's the equivalent of the few seconds you give each link on your Internet search, once you've clicked on it,  before you hit the "Back" arrow and take a look at the next link.

When you decide that a website you've reached from the link has the information you want, you spend just as much time on it as you would in the bookstore deciding whether to buy your book. And if you really like that website, you bookmark it or even follow it so new updates come directly to you.

That kind of time investment is maybe even more than you give the hard-copy book you bought in the store. So my conclusion is: are our brains being changed forever as the futurists (and future-fearers) claim? No. It's the same comfy old brain. We're using it in familiar ways. Not to worry.

By the way, today there's an interesting blog post on our decision-making via book cover. If you're designing a book cover, remember it's not all about what you think are pretty colours. It's marketing. It's about what your audience will choose to pluck from the shelves, or click on.

Saturday 1 October 2011

Books - What's the Point?

My brain has a lot of time to think this morning, because I am folding and pricking and pressing a batch of 25 new books. Once you've got that set up your mind has a lot of time to wander. And of course I am thinking about books. It's what I do.

Lately I've been attending classes on How To Start A Small Business, and of course they want to know what I think is worthwhile about bookbinding. I can see they don't think anything is, and it's my job to convince them otherwise. So I've been thinking about my relationship with books a lot, and so my next couple of posts are going to be about value.

Bookbinding does a couple of things - it preserves and repairs books, and keeps them free from harm for a longer time. Fine binding also turns the book into a luxury object - something most people will make an effort to preserve.

For me, books are not only the words on the page. Old books are little pieces of history. They are stories that are not told elsewhere - the book itself is the story.

I just reached out a plucked a piece of the early 18th century off my bookshelf.

It is a small volume - about 4" x 6" - bound in sprinkled calf, and rebacked but I'm not sure when. Whoever did the reback tried to mimic the original style but couldn't resist adding double gold lines that probably wouldn't have decorated the original boards. Those lines are sort of worn off but that could easily be faked and I can see the rebacking binder made an effort to make the lines and the new spine look early, but the details aren't quite right.

Inside, I see the pastedowns are original. If the reback had been an early one they would have cut the flyleaf back to a stub and folded it over onto the inside board, which is a kind of mutilation that is frowned upon nowadays. Whoever did the reback added a separate strip of paper, toned to go with the original. So they're not hiding the reback but they're trying to make it look natural, which means the reback was, again, later rather than earlier. See? I've just looked at the thing and already it has a story.

Now, the book itself. The title on the spine is "Mottoes Etc." because back in those days the label wasn't the Official Real Title of the book, but just enough words for the owner to differentiate it from the other books he owned. The actual title: "The Mottoes of the Spectators, Tatlers, and Guardians, Translated into English" is given on the title page, along with one of my favourite parts of any old book - the printer's note:

For "Mottoes Etc." was printed in London for Richard Wellington, at the Dolphin and Crown without Temple-Bar. And lastly, it was printed in M.DCC.XXXVII. That is 1737, and I am interested to note that they divided up the date into millennium, hundred-years, and less-than-a-hundred-years using periods. I file that information away in my trivia collection, and go back to contemplating Richard Wellington and whether he had a good time at the Dolphin and Crown without Temple-Bar (early typography is fun, too) and wondering whether the D&C was a pub. It sure sounds like a pub, and I often do business out of the local coffee-shop, why shouldn't Richard Wellington have worked out of a pub? Or maybe it's just that the Dolphin and the Crown were the signs he used on his own storefront. Or maybe the D&C was also a rooming house and that's where he lived.

Then I turn to the preface, which kindly tells me why the book was written, and I find another story. "Many of my Fair [ie, female] Readers, as well as very gay and well-received Persons of the other Sex, are extremely perplex'd at the Latin Sentences at the Head of my Speculations; I do not know whether I ought not to indulge them with Translations of each of them."

So here's another little footnote to history. I knew the newspapers in the title - The Guardian, the Tatler, and the Spectator - were re-published in several editions and no doubt you can find them on the Internet - but how many have heard this story? That there were so many people asking what the Latin phrases in those newspapers meant that they wound up being published in their own book? We don't often see Latin in books any more, but when we do we assume that way back when books were printed in Latin people were so well-educated they could read those books. Not women, of course, but apparently a lot of "well-received" men, too, couldn't figure them out - or at least not well enough to be sure of the meaning. Interesting social history side note.

Whenever I pick up my little book I can find out something. Turning randomly, I can read Latin (because who can ever get enough Latin, right?) like "Quid de quoque viro, & cui dicas, saepe caveto" which I am told means "Take heed of whom you speak, and what it is, Take heed to whom" Very true and useful, I'm sure, but more just fun for me to read.

Plus, in 18th-century style, this book is stiff with ornaments. Those are decorative stamps used in printing to fill in odd pages ends or mark the beginning or ends of chapters or divisions. A story and Latin and a lot of pictures! All in one little volume.

Of course I love it. Of course I want to take care of it. I am glad somebody thought enough of this book to save it from the ravages of time. I think a lot of it myself. And that is why bookbinding will continue.

Monday 26 September 2011

Books, Binding, and Vancouver

Yesterday was Word on the Street here in Vancouver, and of course I went as I do every year. I go with a writer friend, who comes with me to see the book arts table, and then I go with her to the Romance Writers' table, and then we both hit the mystery writers' display. Then a general tour, lunch, a couple of talks, and revisiting our favourites. I always plan to join the Calligraphy Society and never quite actually do. What can I say? It's tradition.

This year I bought a book, "The Silk Train Murder: A Mystery of the Klondike" (all of us long-time Vancouverites know about the silk trains, or should), and was sorely tempted by this lavishly illustrated tarot-based cookery-based thing. Downstairs in the library ("Word Under The Street") is always the lair of the cartoonists, anime and e-zines. This year I was amazed by the quality of artistic talent, as otherwise normal-looking people lounged behind their display tables casually doodling out pictures I could never hope to even begin to draw. The calligraphers evoke the same amazement, only I always think I could conceivably learn calligraphy, while I never think I could learn anime. (There's supposed to be an accent on the last e of anime but I don't know how to type it. Kindly imagine it for me, will you?)

My big delight of the day was finding out that a group of enterprising book arts folks have applied to start a Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild. They've already set up their own blog, and I'll be watching for the first meeting.

In the meantime, I've embarked on an entrepreneurial venture - more in the next post.

Wednesday 13 July 2011

Better and Better, Bit by Bit

The other day I was doing a bit of bog-standard backing when I had an epiphany. I suddenly realized something about the way I was working and what I was doing that drastically changed how I looked at the process. I figured out a new way to do it, one that works better for me.

No, I'm not going to tell you what it was, because that would only interest someone who works with exactly the same equipment setup I have and that's not the point anyway. The point is that I had done that job thousands of times, and then I realized something that made one small part of the job easier and better.

That's how learning a craft goes. You chunk along at a certain point, and then suddenly one day you take a step up, and then you chunk along at that level for a while. Or one day you recall that you used to have a problem you haven't had for a long time, and you can't remember what - if anything - you're doing differently, but you do know that what used to be a problem isn't any more. Bit by bit all these little epiphanies make for better and better books.

What does this mean for you? Well, it means that if you want to be good at making books you need to make a lot of them, regularly, over time. If you make two books in Bookbinding 101 and six months later you make two more in Bookbinding 201 and then a year after that you make two more in Bookbinding 301 you may be able to say you have been taught advanced levels of bookbinding, but your books probably still aren't very good.

And you need to make different books. Not wildly different - as in one flag book, one photo album, etc. But say you have learned to do a standard sewn, rounded & jointed book. Take that one style and make many, many more. Make them with different papers of different styles and thicknesses. Heavy, light, newsprint, text weight, cover weight. Make them all, just in that one style, and make many of each, and you will learn a lot about binding that isn't in any books. Head down to your local used book store and get some of the older books that are actually sewn. Pull them apart, resew them and rebind them. Bind your newspapers and your pizza flyers, and know that every book you make, no matter what it is, improves your skill.

Monday 27 June 2011

Teaching and Learning

I was folding some large sheets of endpapering this morning, and thought of my first bookbinding course. It was a home study thing, so I was watching a video and didn't have any direct input from the teacher, but I was sure if I followed the instructions exactly it would all work out in the end.

After running us through the whole saga of paper grain, we got down to actual work and she showed us how to fold a piece of paper. She said that if you started the fold at either edge of the paper you would get little creases in the middle, and dictated that you must always press the fold down starting from the middle and pressing towards each side. She said that several times, just to make sure we got it.

Until then I had been pressing from the side and had no little creases. Under her instruction I started pressing from the centre and soon had lots of trouble with creases. But I was paying for the class, the teacher was well-known and respected, and I wanted to do what the teacher said. I persevered, and eventually developed a technique for starting at the centre and folding towards each side and not getting any creases most of the time. But it wasn't easy.

Flash forward a year until I started working at the bindery. The very first day I was told to fold some large sheets of paper. Aha! Something I know how to do! I confidently folded the paper the way I'd been instructed.

Wrong! The bindery manager had apprenticed in London and worked in a variety of binderies for many years before moving to Canada. He knew his folding. Mine was wrong, wrong, wrong. How should I have done it? Exactly the way I had been doing it right at the beginning before I had any instruction, of course. The way that I did it where I had no trouble at all with little creases.

So was the teacher wrong, wrong, wrong? No, I don't think so. The teacher was telling us the way she did it, and outlining the problems she had had that she had solved her way - which is pretty well the only way anybody can teach. It is up to the student to receive the teaching, practice what they're taught, and when they've reached a level of confidence they can then decide whether they want to follow what they were told, or do something else.

Friday 17 June 2011

Making Do

One of the things I love about bookbinding is that you can do it with so few tools. Sure, it's nice to have a press and specially-constructed beaded pressing boards but in a pinch, if you know what you're doing, bricks and smooth hardboard and knitting needles also work.

And it's nice to have a sewing frame that is professionally made of polished wood and a thing of beauty on its own. Sadly, the boss wanted $450 for it, so I had to leave "mine" behind when I left my job, and ever since I've been making do with sewing on the edge of a piece of hardboard and taping the sewing tapes to the back side. Which works fine for one book. Or two. But it takes time to set up, and when I contemplated making a series of books I tried not to think of the time that would be spent taping little pieces of tape onto the backside of the board, and flinging them back when they got in the way of the sewing, and otherwise fussing around with them.

So I went out into the world to have a little look-see, and this is what I found:

It's made of aluminum tubes, is very lightweight, and telescopes sideways to a maximum of 28", for those big books. And it has shelves - a number of them, though I'm only using two here. You get 8 shelves with it, each about 3" wide. As a sewing frame, it works great. The only problem is that you have to elevate your textblock somehow, but I have lots of books handy, and just shoved a couple in to support the textblock.

This tool didn't cost anywhere near $450. In fact, it cost $32.98.

What is it? It's an expandable under-the-sink storage shelf. I got mine at Bed, Bath & Beyond, but I'm sure they can be found any number of places.

Do you have any tools that are really something else?

Tuesday 31 May 2011

Back to the Future

I see today there are lots of posts on lots of blogs, all from people who went to BEA (BookExpo America) last week and are now buzzing about digital books and How They're Taking Over And We Can't Stop It, and How It's The End of Books.

OK, so I'll say it here. Just a small comment, but I'll say it.

Think of people buying books. It's a money-making opportunity. So you write a book, and you go find a printer and get it printed up, and then you go to some place where people will hear your voice, and you try to sell it. Or maybe you know how to do the printing yourself, so you go out and find books to print and you print them and then you go to some place where people will hear your voice, and you try to sell them.

Everybody's their own entrepreneur. One person can write a book and sell it - and thousands more will try it and fail but that's not the point. The point is that the industry - and the money - is in the hands of the little guy.

Does that sound like the current state of digital publishing?

That's odd, because it's a description of the state of book publishing 350 years ago. Back then, your book was printed by cold type on a handpress, either by you or by some guy who lived down the alley, and you might be hawking your book on the village green, but you had the power to publish your own books, and to price and sell them. Over time, little publishers arose and became big publishers, and a giant industry arose around the process of printing and publishing - one in which the writer and the printer were fairly small cogs in the process. Publishers made money through volume, and volume arose through cheap printing which came via machine-made paper and then huge offset printers and dozens of other money-saving advances, and with each one the amount of capital expense needed to publish a book rose until the little guy pretty much couldn't handle it.

Now, thanks to digital publishing, we're right back where we were in the 17th century. Anybody can publish a book, but they're hawking them on the Internet rather than on the street.

I'm not saying digipub isn't a bad thing for some people. There's a loss of professionalism and a loss of knowledge and lots of books that won't get through to as many people because they don't find out about them when the bookstores aren't there to put them on their shelves. I'm not saying the industry isn't changing - I'm just saying I don't think it'll be the end, and I don't think it's necessarily a disaster.

Last week I had an interview in which I tried to explain being a bookbinder. Knowing that in the average population most people don't really understand bookbinding, I took along four books I had bound - a full goat, an historical full calf, a buckram and one bound in velvet. I slapped them into the interviewer's hand and bid her hold them and turn the pages. She wanted to keep on holding them. Once I figure out how to get more people to experience well-bound books again, I think people will be clamouring to have their books rebound.

Monday 23 May 2011

Jane Austen, Bookmaker

Ran across an article  about the upcoming sale of one of Austen's few surviving manuscripts - this one a partial MS of "The Watsons". What intrigued me for bookbinding was learning that Austen wrote on little sections of paper that she made (presumably herself, since she was very private about her writing), by cutting a sheet of paper in two, trimming the edges, stacking the two pages and folding them in half, to create 8 page sides to write on.

As her novels are quite long, I rather suspect that as she finished her sections she sewed them to one another, to keep them in order and to facilitate going back and re-reading. With only two pages to sew through, she could have done that herself quite easily, and just as easily, if she corrected so much that she needed to replace a few pages, she could cut the thread and replace the section.

The size of the pages interests me; it is said she wrote on small pages but the one photo I did see online shows that each side contains about 25 lines of about 45 - 50 characters each, and the lines are not particularly crammed together; nor is the writing. So I suspect she was making her sections by cutting down a sheet of the paper that would have been normally used at the time - perhaps a crown or a small demy - something about 15" x 20", folded and then trimmed, would have given roughly the right size; a quarto of about 7.5" x 10" (19 cm x 25.5 cm)

When the auction details are posted I will find the size and see how close I came.

Friday 20 May 2011

Shapes and Sizes

Like a lot of romantics, I fell in love with heart books the first time I saw them. No, I'm not talking about the modern version, where you bend two adjacent pages towards one another and push the foredges down to the spine so it makes a heart shape.

I'm talking about the original late medieval/Renaissance-era heart-shaped books, like this one in the Royal Danish Library 


When I started bookbinding, I thought binding a heart shape was going to be easy. So I talked about it to my boss, and saw the slow smile spread across his face - the smile that said "It's harder than you think", and "Why don't you make one and get back to me". Well, since then I've made thousands of [rectangular] books, and he's right. The main issue is going to be shaping the thing, because knives and guillotines are really good at cutting straight lines, but not curves. And I suspect that if you printed it (yes, I know this one was hand-written, but bear with me) on rectangular pages and then cut down the sewn textblock you'd have a problem with accidentally cutting into the text. To say nothing of the agony that would ensue if your knife slipped, after all that work.

So my theory, as yet untested, is that if you're going to hand-print it, you rough-cut the shaped pages, fold and sew them in the heart shape, and put it between two shaped boards, clamp them and cut or sand the textblock down so the edges are even. Then you could apply your edge treatment (this one is gilded but I'm not going there, not at first).

This really does sound like a fun thing to try this summer. But I'll get back to you.

Friday 6 May 2011

Wanted: One Engineering Degree

If you read my last post you have your suspicions as to why it's been a while.

Yes, the stamping was a challenge, an obstacle, a learning experience, and a pain. It also took days. So many days, and so many ruined covers, that I ran out of cover cloth, had to go back and get more from someone who didn't want to sell it to me, made more covers, ran out of board, rescued and re-lined board from the ruined covers, and finally, just when the deadline loomed and I had already made my disaster plan, the process gelled enough for me to get my two covers decently stamped.

I want to explain. I'm not only new to typeholders - I'm new to typeholders that fall apart in the middle of a stamp, sending hot metal cascading down onto the prepared foil and making random gold marks, or just burning the bejeesus out of my fingers as I scramble to prevent that from happening.

Here is my best typeholder:
In case you're wondering - no, it's not supposed to come in two pieces. If you don't know typeholders, here's the problem: The brass part holds the type, which must be heated evenly to about 200 degrees (F.)  or so. You have to heat it thoroughly, or the heat will be uneven and the stamping will be uneven, too. The brass part comes inserted into the wooden handle. Over time, bit by bit, with occasionally leaving the handle to get too hot or occasionally forgetting all about it until you smell smoke, the interior of the handle burns itself out. You can see the scorch marks at the top - the inside of the handle is completely charred and disintegrated. You can stuff cloth into the hole inside the handle, or leather, or whatever you will, enough to seemingly hold the brass part in place, but it has a habit of giving way at exactly the wrong moment.

I got my typeholders at a discount because they were used and burnt out. I'm an optimist - I think I can make them work. I even think I can improve them. First, I want to make a handle that is intended to be removable. I would like to be able to heat up the brass section without there being a handle on it that must be cossetted and watched and prevented from burning. Then, when the brass is heated, I want to be able to snap on a handle that will hold it firmly, and get to work. The handle should be easy to snap on and off, and should have heat resistance. I'm thinking the part of the handle that touches the metal needs to have an insulator - maybe a layer cut out of a silicon potholder - but the handle overall needs to be the right size and shape to fit well into my hand, as sometimes I have to apply quite a bit of pressure.

The tang on the brass section is slightly tapered and has a square profile and is about 1-1/4" long. Somehow the handle has got to fit over that quickly and easily. Now that I know what I want, the thing is to figure out how to make it. Wish I'd gotten that engineering degree when I had the chance ...

Friday 22 April 2011

Covers 0, Wine 1

I really like labels. You can print them out and cut them out and then when they're absolutely perfect glue them onto your book and there's really very little chance of ruining an entire cover in the process.

But, sadly, this post isn't about labels. It's about stamping directly onto the cover - which I find nerve-wracking. I'm lousy at it and it's the most expensive way to ruin a cover. If you don't have the money to buy endless supplies of bookcloth and board, or the time to make cover after cover to replace the wrecked ones, stamping can ruin your bottom line faster than anything else. Because one wrong stamp and you're hooped. If you're doing goldwork on leather you might be able to take it out and re-do it once, but with the modern foils on standard bookcloth, even if you have the right chemicals to dissolve the glue, a mis-stamp is still going to show.

The past two days I've been trying to make 2 covers at 6 stamps per cover.
The current score is:
Covers wrecked with first stamp: 3
Covers wrecked with second stamp: 2
Successful covers: 0
Bottles of wine drunk to recover: 1 
Cocktails drunk because ran out of wine: 2

Now I've run out of cloth and as it is Good Friday I won't be able to get more cloth until next week. I don't know why I'm having a particularly bad time with these - I did the same book a couple of months ago and it went fine. My New Age friends assure me it's all about Mercury Retrograde, which will end tomorrow, so maybe it's a good thing I've run out of cloth.

I suspect it's my legendary lack of strategic planning skills, but a planet seeming to reverse in the night sky works too.

So what's this post about? Beyond bookbinder tribulations, I think it's about a big problem with two solutions. Depending on who you are and what your bookbinding problem is, you could go at it in different directions. First - what's so bad about a label? I make you nice book with label inset. Happy label. Happy book. No drinking. Then, if you *must* have the title stamped directly on the book, why not just make it one stamp? A modest little title on the spine. That's what you want.

Wednesday 20 April 2011

Social History and Librarians

Internet research - I loves it.

Yesterday's post didn't show all of the book's cover, but you could see a comparatively new piece of tape on the bottom panel of the spine, which carried, handwritten in white, the library call numbers of the book when it was at the University of Waterloo (Ontario), whose card sleeve adorns the inside front pastedown. But they got it from somebody else - I know because on the front cover there is a ticket, about 3" x 3":
I love the peek into past lives I get from reading old advertising, tickets, trade mail, and so on. I can't tell, of course, whether this book was bound specifically for Brotherhead's Library in Philadelphia, or acquired by them sometime after the binding, which could not have been earlier than 1853. I might suspect that the rather grand binding meant it wasn't originally bound for the library, because they would have known the ticket would cover it up. But maybe originally the library didn't use tickets - this may have been the original library book, and the ticket was pasted on decades later.

Just a bit of trivia:

A quick trip to Google brought up Trubner's American and Oriental Literary Record for August 1869, which include a letter from Mr. W. Brotherhead himself. Stung by a previous reference to Brotherhead's library in New York containing a mere 3,000 volumes, he listed the (much larger) number of volumes contained in each one of their major libraries - including the Philadelphia one, with 20,000 volumes, and listing their lending policy, which is the same as on the ticket we have here.

It interests me that on the ticket they spell out a policy for dealing with multi-volume novels (all in the same title count as one) because it shows that the "three volume novel" of fifty years before were still normal to find in a library collection. And I'm sure a lover of business, economics, or social history would make a lot out of the various fees involved - such as, that if you expect to have more than 165 book-days per year you might as well take out the whole year's subscription, and if you have to leave the price of the book as a deposit at the library to take the book out, then the really poor people were essentially barred.

The point of this post? Well, nothing really, except I thought the ticket was a historical artefact worth noting. 

You find all sorts of these things in old books. One time I took the spine off a mid-19th century Bible and discovered the mull reinforcing the spine was a piece of cloth from a woman's dress. It was lovely - a pale green flowered lawn - and I realized that if your wife discarded just one dress you had enough mull for dozens of thick Bibles, as dresses back then used a lot of fabric. Another time the spine of a 17th-century book had been reinforced with paper left over from printing a play. I only got a few lines, but it does make me wonder what's inside other books whose spines haven't fallen away.

Tuesday 19 April 2011

Hand Made, Imperfect, and Proud

Machines ruined it for the hand craftsman. Don't get me wrong - I can see the beauty in the utter regularity of machine decoration. It is wonderful. About a hundred years ago it also became normal, and that is where the problem started.

Look at hand craftsmanship throughout the ages and you will see imperfection. The hand simply cannot work with the same precision as a machine, and everybody used to know and understand that. Now almost everybody expects work done by hand to be as exact as work done by machine - or else it is wrongly done. It is bad. It should not be paid for.

One woman came in to the bindery to pick up her rebind. She took a cursory glance at the binding, whipped out a micrometer and started measuring the squares under magnification. She was able to show that one of the squares was different from another by 1/64th of an inch - less than half a millimeter. She tried to refuse to pay for what she called shoddy work. Happily for her she was dealing with a nice polite man who tried to humour her. If she had complained to me I would have asked her to write her name twice on a piece of paper and prove to me that each signature is an exact copy of the other.

Honestly, folks, can we get real here? I present this handsome cover from a series of issues of Harper's Magazine, 1852/1853.
This is handwork from when handwork gained respect. Let's look at what went into the decoration of this cover.

First, rolls were applied to put the gold on the outside frame and the inside turn-ins. This is gold done the old-fashioned way, with glaire and leaf and expert knowledge of  the appropriate temperature and humidity required.

Now to figure out how many different brass hand tools were used to create the cover design. Today that complicated design would be made by submitting detailed graphics to the diemakers and having a deep-etched die made. It's expensive, but - one stamp and you're done. In this example, though, they selected from their large collection of finishing tools, applying them individually to make up the whole design.  You can tell because of the imperfections. Hand placement simply can't be done with machine accuracy - individual stamps are slightly askew or one will be made more deeply than another - examine the photo with that in mind and you can see the tools quite plainly. 

I find a minimum of seven tools: 

2 large scroll corners - one a mirror of the other. 
1 urn shape found at centre of the top, bottom, and sides. 
1 rounded ornament centred top and bottom. 
1 star shape. 
1 leafy scroll filling in the distance from corner scroll to the centre urn shape. 
1 lozenge shape at centre sides. 
plus possibly 2 more: the little flowers on either side of the lozenge at side centre, and the pattern of four dots at the end of the leafy scroll.

Whew! Seven tools and twenty individual stamps plus two rolls for each side of the book (and yes, the cover design was repeated on the other side). Today that would be a lot of chances for the thing to go horribly wrong. But back in the day, this was acceptable - probably even beautiful, and nobody flourishing a micrometer would have been listened to at all.

Another thing that isn't acceptable now and was then - look at the bottom left of the photo, where the rolled frame on the outside cover meets itself at a 90-degree angle. Today you are expected to make every effort to butt those lines perfectly, or to use some kind of special corner stamp to avoid having to make them butt together. Now, given the wavy line feature, butting it so the line continues is possible, but not likely. To have the wave continue around the corner without a break, you have to not only be very careful, very expert, very willing to sit with a needle and scrape off the gold that goes in the wrong places - you also have to have made the line exactly the right length so that it can butt perpendicularly at 90 degrees with your other perfect line. In the 1850s, though, it was perfectly acceptable to just run those lines across one another. 

I guess what I'm on about here is that the modern consumer, influenced by what is possible using machines, has forgotten that 'made by hand' means 'made by humans'. When we look at something made by a human and the first thing we notice is that a line doesn't connect exactly, or one thing isn't directly lined up with another - then the problem isn't with the object - it's with us.




Thursday 14 April 2011

Opening New Horizons - Typography

I am luxuriating in a new book about books - "The Well-Made Book: Essays & Lectures by Daniel Berkeley Updike" William S. Peterson, ed.

Updike died in 1941, so this dates from the era of compositors and typesetters and all manner of printing professionals whose jobs, like mine, are well on their way out. In that way it is a history book, and when you read an essay like "Gutenberg and His Relation to Printers Today" you have to remember that today was more than 70 years ago. But these essays and lectures are perhaps all the more valuable for being part of history. The knowledge that was second nature to a printer, book designer, or typographer seventy years ago is rarely learned today, when art school students with computers can design their own book, print it out, congratulate themselves and never quite understand why their book doesn't quite work.

The cover of this book is embellished with a quote:
"The practice of typography, if it be followed faithfully, is hard work - full of detail, full of petty restrictions, full of drudgery, and not greatly rewarded as men now count rewards. There are times when we need to bring to it all the history and art and feeling that we can, to make it bearable. But in the light of history, and of art, and of knowledge and of man's achievement, it is as interesting a work as exists - a broad and humanizing employment which can indeed be followed merely as a trade, but which if perfected into an art, or even broadened into a profession, will perpetually open new horizons to our eyes and new opportunities to our hands." - Daniel Berkeley Updike
(and  before I get snarky comments - no, I don't know how to make an m-dash in this text editor)

When I first became interested in typography, I set myself the challenge to recreate on my computer the exact typography of a few publications (printed covers, title pages, advertisements) from the fifties and earlier. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, but later, when I need to set book titling on a Ludlow (typecasting machine) I understood so much more, right away, because of all the spacing and attention to space detail that I had gone through on those self-imposed exercises.

Just for fun, and because many readers won't have access to this sort of thing, I'm putting up a title page from a late-18th century book.


This isn't a typographer's dream; it's just a normal kind of a title page from the era. Look at how many different sizes of type there are, the switching from all caps to upper/lower case, and the use of italics. And yet somehow it is quite readable, even though there is a lot more information here than you would find on a modern book's title page.

Now, looking at a modern magazine page:




You know, I get it that I'm comparing apples to tangerines. And I totally get it that they're packing five different blasts of information onto the same page, but in real life, where this page is four times the size it is here, I find it quite hard to concentrate enough to read anything on this page. The 1792 Richardson book, well-leaded in quiet and regular lines, is for quiet and careful reading, while the modern magazine isn't really set up for reading at all, just for capturing the odd bit of information that a restless brain seizes upon on the page.

And I totally get it that each headline gets its own font - you wouldn't want readers mistaking one article for another - but I still find it a bit much. I wonder where magazine styles will go in the future, assuming they survive.

Monday 4 April 2011

Don't Shoot Him, He's Only The Bookbinder




When I look at any handcraft, I can't help thinking about the person who made it. Look at the sewing on the left, for example. Pretty ugly, I thought as I prepared to disbind the book. But after seeing what he had to contend with, I can't blame the guy.

This book, by the way, was published in 1872, and this is the binding that was originally put on by the publisher.

If you haven't seen a lot of older sewings, you might not know - this is an example of hand oversewing. Rather than sew up and down along each fold of the textblock, several folds of paper were gathered into one chunk, and that was sewn by stabbing through the chunk, front to back, moving up a bit and repeating. In this case, there were three stitches taken to sew together the whole chunk up the whole length of the spine (page height is 11-1/4" or 28.5 cm). The shortcomings are obvious, I think - the pages can't open flat unless you press them open to the point where the thread either breaks or tears through the paper to the spine. It's flimsy, and it looks horrible.

But I can just see the binder. He'd be working for the publisher, who had loads of books he wanted put into boards quickly and cheaply. Publisher's boards were intended to last just long enough to get the book safely into the customer's hands - after which the customer would theoretically take the book to his binder to have it rebound to match his library.

So the binder had to do it fast, not well. The book was presumably going on to another binder who would "fix" this temporary sewing.  And he had an extra problem. This book is more than 600 pages long, and the normal size of one section is two folds - ie, 8 pages. But here and there throughout the book are twenty or thirty pages that were published in folios - ie, single folds of 4 pages. Single folds are hard to sew because the thread tends to cut right them, so the binder gathered up three or four of them and oversewed the lot at one go.

He also had swell to think about - how much the 75 or so layers of thread needed to sew 600 pages in 8-page sections would swell the width of the spine. The fewer layers of thread you have, the less swell there is, and oversewing changes many layers of thread to only one. The double-fold sections, which were not oversewn, were sewn "two on" - meaning one sewing pass sewed on two sections rather than one - again, to reduce the amount of thread used and to reduce the swell.

So yes, it's ugly. It's bad bookbinding. But in the circumstances, totally understandable.

Monday 28 March 2011

Family & Friends Specialty Bindings

The last little while I've been getting ready to go away for a few days, and making a present for the friend who is going to put me up. I don't know what books she likes, and what she has and what she lacks, or even what would be a good idea to give her. So I made her a box.


and I started to think that this is going a little far. And I started to wonder whether there have ever been professional boxmakers, or whether it's always been left up to the bookbinders to make fiddly little boxes that don't even have a textblock in them.

Bookbinders have always made slipcases and boxes - for most books. Heavy books need wooden boxes - bookboard just isn't strong enough - and I suppose those would be made by a finishing carpenter. But for normal books up to about 10-15 pounds, or 4.5 - 7 kg, the bookbinder is usually the lucky devil who gets the job.

Thomas Harrison, author of "Fragments of Bookbinding Technique" said there is no such thing as a cheap box. Hundreds of boxes the same can come cheap, but on individual one is always expensive. Customers always want a special box, and they can't believe that sometimes the box can cost more than the binding job. I used to explain it this way: when I make a slipcase I need 5 boards cut in 3 different sizes, while a drop-back box uses 13 boards cut in 9 different sizes. The 3-tiered staggered box above took 26 boards cut in 12 sizes. Which, as I said, is maybe going a little far - too far away, perhaps, from the bookbinder's purview, and you won't see me making these commercially. But for family and friends I'll go the extra mile.

Another family and friends specialty of mine is when I rebind a book that was not printed on folded sections, and turn it into a sewn book with folded sections. There are a couple of ways of doing this - the ugliest, in my opinion, being the most common method where you gather up enough single sheets to make a section, lock-stitch through them (like, with a sewing machine) and then sew them together through the lock stitches. It's been done for ages (the first one I saw was an "art book" published in San Francisco in 1906) but it's so ugly it makes me shudder. You can see the lockstitching and the sewing in the gutter; it's a rat's-nest of thread. Still, it is a useful technique to know and I have used it when making a Very Big Thick Book (22" x 28") where the paper couldn't be made into folded sections because you would have needed pages 44" x 28" and the paper didn't come that big.

But let's say your friend bought a little perfect-bound book that she uses all the time and it's falling apart. So you disbind it, and then you use hinging tissue to put the pages into sections which you then can fold and sew in the normal way. Sounds easy, but needs a steady hand and a lot of patience because it's really time-consuming. Like, days and days and thank heavens it's only 60 pages. And of course swell becomes a problem, because each page is now 1 piece of tissue's-worth wider at the spine. But the resulting book is so nice that I'll sometimes go for it.

Oh, and that box I made - if you've never seen one before, it closes up:




and then when it's closed it looks like this:
The little studs that you can see are optional - I put them in this one to make sure the trays didn't come away from the case. I've also made it without the studs and that works for me, but then I just keep my endbanding silks in the box, so it doesn't weigh much.


Saturday 19 March 2011

Dustjacket Removal Redux

Yesterday I talked about why we should take the dustjackets off our books. Today, driving across town and listening to  "This Is My Music" on CBC Radio 2, I heard the host, international concert pianist Jon Kimura Parker, tell this story.

In the early 70s, still a child, he was taken to see a concert given by the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein, whom he met backstage. He asked for an autograph, and Rubinstein gently told him that if he gave one to him, he'd have to give one to everybody - but that one day, Parker would have Rubinstein's autograph in gold.  He was happy and excited about this promised treat, but realized a few days later that Mr. Rubinstein had not asked for his address, and that it was unlikely the autograph would ever materialize.

A few weeks later a biography of Arthur Rubinstein came out, and was promptly bought for him. He read it for some time, and then one day the dustjacket fell off.

And there, stamped on the cover in gold, was Arthur Rubinstein's signature.

You'll never know what's there until you look.

Friday 18 March 2011

Placating My Conscience

Got another email from Oak Knoll this morning, and am thinking about how great specialist book stores are - even if you don't buy their books, which isn't really fair for them but that's life.

If I'm researching a topic, my first stop is to go to my local bookstore (it's easier to get to than the library) and see what books they have. But bookbinding - unless your local bookstore is huge (hello Powell's) your chances of finding something are small. The library - well, I can have the library deliver some bookbinding manuals from the central collection, but they're basic titles that I've either already got or don't need. Once you've scratched below the surface of a topic you need a wide selection of really obscure titles, and that's not the public library's mandate.

Enter the specialist book dealers. They're out there, lurking in the internet's ocean of information. They may have a hundred titles, or more, on whatever topic I have in mind at the moment. Plus, they very kindly type up a detailed description of the book and its contents. So I can hone in on the few books that cover the topic I want, without bothering anybody or making them spend their time helping out. So their listings are an instant online bibliography for whatever obscure topic I want to know more about.

Once you've got the title you want, I go online and see if I can get it cheaper somewhere else. I know it's perfidious, but I have no income right now. My conscience does poke me in the eyeball from time to time, but I placate it by promising to buy from my source whenever I can. And then I close my eyes and try to imagine wealthy patrons heading their way. I don't know if that works, but if it does and the store stays in business forever, it's worth a try. Or I mention them on the blog. Which may not work but it's the best I can do.

Thursday 17 March 2011

Dustjacket or Eyesore? You Be The Judge.

Let's talk dustjackets - and what's under them.


Dustjackets were originally strips of plain paper, wrapped around a newly-bound book to keep it clean until the bookseller had a chance to sell it. But a paper wrapping meant nobody knew what book was underneath, so dustjackets started to be printed with the title. Well - as long as you're running a printing press anyway you might as well put something more interesting on your strip of paper, so dustjackets began to sport brightly-coloured illustrations and bold lettering, and they became works of advertising art on their own.

All very logical, but with that change your bookshelf filled with quiet browns, maroons, and tans turned into a dizzying array of bold graphics and bright colours.

Which gave me headaches and a decorating problem.

I've got - well, I don't know - at least a thousand books. No, make that 2,000 ... make it more. I've got bookcases packed against every spare bit of wall space, and when I ran out of wall space I put two back-to-back, one across one end, and bingo - a 3-sided bookcase island. Trouble is, each bookcase was a major source of eyestrain, as all the brightly-coloured dustjackets competed with one another.

So one day, I took them off.

And what to my wond'ring eyes did appear:






This intricate 7" x 9-1/2" gold foil stamp was buried under the bright green garden-printed dustjacket of the "Reader's Digest Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers" for 20 years before I re-discovered it.

The colour of the cloth cover isn't clear here - it's a medium brown, nothing too bright. And the spine just has the title, stamped in the same dull gold. So to summarize: I had the choice of a gaudy multi-colour printed shiny plastic-covered dustjacket, or this elegant oasis of quiet beauty.

I'm sure you already know where I'm going with this. I took off all the dustjackets that could come off. And my shelves became restful and pleasing to the eye. Even my modern hardcovers had, for the most part, plain cloth spines with foil-stamped titles, some of them quite beautifully done.

Of course, some publishers are still my enemies. There's no point in taking off the bright dustjackets on your Harry Potters, for example, because the book underneath is exactly the same. So those books go on the shelves that aren't readily seen - the bottom shelf, or the ones in the hallway.

I threw the dustjackets away - at least the modern ones. I know book dealers who would cringe at that, because used books sell better when they have the original dustjackets, but I do not care. I bought these books for me and their resale value - if any - doesn't worry me.

Tuesday 15 March 2011

Well, it's a start.


Just got a big fat envelope from the Alcuin Society. If you’re into books you should know these guys. They put on the only commercial book design awards I’ve ever heard of - the Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. If you’re a member, each year they’ll send you the catalogue of the prizewinning entries, with input from the judges. If you’re studying book design you’ll do well to study that catalogue, and to go see the prize-winning books, which are exhibited in Canada and in some international shows.  And no, they’re not paying me to say this. They don’t even know I’m saying it.

My big fat envelope contained the latest edition of the Society’s newsletter: “Amphora”, which I would go on to talk about except I don’t want to turn this post into a fave rave and besides, I have other things on my mind.

I thought for Post #2 I’d go with my definition of a book. Definitions are slippery – you think you’ve got them wrestled to the ground and then exceptions pop up and start the argument all over. So I’ll just say what I think.

What I call a book is one of those things you find on the shelves in library. More properly called a codex, the basic form hasn’t substantially changed in the past 2,000 years. I see them as a protective information storage and retrieval system designed to handle text printed on paper.  It’s important, so I’ll break that down:

Protective: the covers protect the textblock. The beginning and end pages of the textblock are sacrificial (and therefore usually blank), and are intended to protect the actual text. The pages ideally have wide margins which protect the words from accidental destruction by handling, sunlight, mice, dogs, etc.

Information storage and retrieval: the information is contained in words which must stay in order but need to be accessed out of order.  So the words are printed in order on pages that are usually numbered for easy reference. And if you’re really intent on providing easy information retrieval you might include an index, table of contents, cross-references, etc.

Why the definition? Because when you look at a book – whether you want to print one or bind one or repair one – you need to keep all this in mind.  When a book has problems it’s often because the person who made it lost track of its purpose.

It’s nice if the covers are pretty. It’s great if they provide information or help sell the book. But if your idea for a cover is something that wrecks the textblock, I’d say you need to go back and rethink.

Maybe a cover made with chicken wire is incredibly artistic and clever in light of the book’s content – but is “I want this book to shred itself under the customer’s very eyes” really what you’re thinking?

Maybe it’s way cheaper to cover a heavy book with lightweight paper but when the covers accidentally rip off before the customer pays for it – is that really a saving?

Repairs. There are many schools of thought, ranging from the ludicrously over-protective to the cavalier, but that’s for another day. I want to go read my “Amphora”.

Monday 14 March 2011

What, Where, Who and Why


Books. Big, fat, shiny ones. Little itty bitty ones. Modern and old. Thick and thin, hard and soft, paper and leather and cloth.  That’s what we’re talking about here.

And so, it seems, is the rest of the world. Suddenly, new technology threatens our good old paper and we fear we may be the last humans ever to know books – how they look, how they smell, the feel of the paper and the weight in our hands.

Now, I don’t particularly fear this myself. I’ve got an e-reader. It came preloaded with 100 novels, most of them classics, and I’m still holding on to my hardbacks of the very same books. I’m even in the market for more. Because a book is more than text.

Books are about illustrations and graphic design and types of paper and why you use one and not the other. Books are about typography and physics. Not the textbook kind of physics, but the applied kind. How the stress of opening the book and thumbing through its pages falls on some places in the book structure and not others and why. Why some books fall apart and why some can only be made to stay open with an axe.

Some books are about fine leather and superb decoration and others are all about sturdiness. Some are about bright colours and others are about subtle, delicate text.  A well-designed and carefully-produced book can enhance the reading experience.

That’s what this blog is about: the physical presence of books.  I’m curious, and I have some knowledge and no objection to knowing more.  As a hand bookbinder I have done everything from basic thesis binding to rebacking 18th-century bindings to fixing that glossy picture book from the 70s where the pages keep falling out. Six years of that means I have had lots of thoughts about papers and glues and structure, and I mean to muse on these things.

So who do I think is going to read this blog? Possibly no-one, of course. But just to start out, I'm thinking that you might be a student, whether just learning or more advanced. Maybe you're an artist who wants to make a book and is wondering where to start. Maybe you're a librarian or have a job taking care of some pile of books - yours or someone else's. In which case I want your job.