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.