Strange Journeys In Books

Kickstarted Mothership 1e a few years ago and finally got my hands on the physical copies. I saw someone on reddit complain that they didn't release a hardcover copy and someone responded that you can't do that with such a small booklet. Challenge accepted...

Enter: the bradel binding...

A9-ish sized notebooks... Handmade book cloth on the first set, blue-grey cow leather on the second, hand marbled endsheets I did a little while back.

A set of tiny A9 books I'm working on. These are going to get the leather treatment (with what leather scraps I have lying around) and homemade book cloth.

Covered in a leather-like furniture upholstery vinyl. This will be my bookbinding crafting notebook for jotting notes, ideas, diagramming.

Also had a chance to work in some ebru marbling I had tried out a few weeks ago.

I purchased this finishing press awhile back and it works great except for one small thing, the legs used a L hook and tension to stay attached to the press, which is to say, they always were falling apart.

I also went ahead and hammered in some nails to help with setting spine bands. The nails were kinda crappy and bend all over the place trying to go into this hardwood, but they don't need to look good to function.

I made the boards and signatures for 4 coptic stitch notebooks last summer and today I finally got around to finishing them on stream.

I loved the rainbow yarn but my god was it a pain to work with. Part of the issue was that I didn't have a needle that really worked well with it and all in all the two yarn sewn books were an uphill battle.

I've rounded up my favorite book covers that I've come across in my book hunting ventures of the past year and I wanted to share...

And... see which is the best or weirdest of the lot!

Lets start off with one you all may recognize from a previous post... The uncanny depictions of the crew really just stop me in my tracks every time, especially Holly lol.

Next up might be a bit of a cheat, this is the foldout endsheet to Rendezvous with Rama, I think it still counts because the cover has a little port hole for you to see a bit of the art through. The image is stunning and I still have no idea how this book hasn't been made into a movie yet.

Next is one of my wife's favorites. Theirs a lot going on here: pensive floating ape-man, mysterious pilot clutching a stuffed elephant... and is that the Mortal Kombat logo I see on the console?

A worm of worms... nuff' said.

And last we have this goofy cover for Galactic Dreams. These Harry Harrison books seem to attract some wild art.

Here are the projects that got (mostly) done during the Friday stream: the rebinding of Albert Camus' The Plague, and my rebound notebook.

The sumi endsheets...

The handmade paper was a real pain to work with but at least it doesn't seem to have a noticeable grain direction/pull. I ended up doing the casing in over the weekend, just a quick glue and press, didn't run into any misalignment or warping issues. The last step will be applying the title and by line and it'll be done.

This was a rebind of my daily notebook (I had only used half the text block from last years so I split the block) re-cased in this quarter leather bind. My first time working with leather, and I especially like how the color pairing with the saturated read goes with the mottled opal paper (a craft store find).

What I learned for next time: 1) 2mm cover margin for each side's shoulders wasn't enough, 4 or 5mm might work better. I had to carefully trim the board on the rounded back case to make a smidge more room for the shoulders to rest in, poking a small hole through the spine cloth in the process :l

2) Don't forget to account for vertical case space for the headbands! I didn't and paid the price (had to remove the headbands on my notebook). On top of that I figured the leather width would make the case the perfect size for the text block, which was correct for the quarter part of the binding. The parts of the board with the paper covering were pretty much flush with the text block ~too close~

I think the paper turned out pretty well, it is a bit on the thick side so we'll see how well it folds over the board. It also met with Kira's approval.

My question now is: What is the grain direction? I didn't really shimmy the deckle/mold when I lifted up and a tear test didn't reveal any insight so I guess we'll see.

Finally got around to making the custom paper for the cover of my hardcover rebinding project of The Plague by Albert Camus.