I Made a Book

The Mirage
three needle, single sheet Coptic bound book using recycled materials
7 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches

The boards used to belong to a college yearbook. The pages were cut down from larger pieces I did years ago and meant to bind but never got around to it. They were single folded sheets, then, which would have been easy to do as a Coptic binding with single-sheet sections. But I've been wanting to try out one of Keith Smith's single sheet Coptic bindings, so I decided to cannibalize some old work to practice on.

Why single-sheet Coptic? Because I've got all kinds of single sheets of things that I want to turn into books, but I don't want to stab-bind them. I want the pages to lay completely flat.

It's not perfect. Because I was working with single, unfolded sheets, it was a little too easy to get them flipped upside down. Which I did. Which meant that the center section of sewing is a little skewed because the center holes in the flipped sheets did not line up properly. Also, though this is actually less annoying, those pages are now upside down. I'll have to go in and rework them so that they make sense. Story of my life. Boys and girls: Never attempt bookbinding while drinking bourbon. It's a bad combination for a lot of reasons. Like blood.


When Art Attacks

Hark! A Book!

I needed a square(ish) format book for journaling, and I like working on kraft paper, so I rounded up some grocery bags and also grabbed some brown packing paper from the recycling bins at work. The boards are recycled from a kids' book.

Dada Book

These are a few pages from the Dada book I've been working on. It's made of pages from Real Simple magazine. Some of the images in the magazine are great for collage, but I find the overall tone is pretty insufferable. What better use to put the left-overs to than to rip them up and turn them into a Dada-esque journal?

I had intended to use it mostly for collage, but I've ended up using it for "evening pages." Some of the folks in one of my art groups are working through The Artist's Way. I had planned on working on it with them, but I decided that waking up any earlier than I already do--just to journal--would be cruel and unusual punishment--4am is plenty early enough, thankyouverymuch! So, I've been doing some very quick pages right before I go to bed. I'm finding that it's a nice way to cap off the day--sort of like getting in the last word.

This is a crappy picture, taken with my ubercheap digital camera. The book is small and chunky: 5.5 x 4.5" and about 1" thick. I used a coptic stitch to bind it, which was a bit of a challenge. The clay-coated magazine pages are weak and brittle, so they crack easily. I had to remove a couple of signatures because the holes ripped open as I was sewing the binding. I ended up with 13 signatures of 20 pages each.

Dada Book

My poor little car is dead, dead, dead, so I’ve been a little preoccupied, a little freaked out, and generally very cranky about the whole thing. I hate worrying about transportation problems. Last night, I was suffering from extreme grumpiness and thought a book making fix would help improve my mood. There’s something about the smell of beeswax and the rhythm of folding paper and sewing bindings that I find calming.

Since I’ve been playing around with glue books, I’ve been going through stacks of magazines, ripping out images. I decided to make a Dada book out of the left-overs. I took a stack of pages I’d torn out of various lifestyle/interior design magazines and made a little (4.5″ x 5.5″) coptic bound book out of them. It’s 13 signatures of 20 pages each, so the whole book is 260 sheets (520 front/back pages). It’s *cute*.

My plan is to do quick journaling and collage in it, with the emphasis on quick. This isn’t going to be a pretty, carefully crafted altered book sort of project. Since the pages are chock-a-block with ads and fashion/home decor advice, I’m planning on the book being a commentary on those things. I think that will tie in nicely with the overall concepts of Dada–reuse of junk/trash, anti-aesthetic, anti-culture, and silly, obscure references.

I haven’t taken pictures of the book yet, but I’ll post them when I do. I’ll probably also post scans of pages as I finish them.