#eratta

Remember two months ago when I said I wasn't wild about doing another paperback-to-hardback conversion? Well. More fool me. (I did try and find a sewn hardback to take apart, but apparently this book was not sold as a sturdy hardback. Cue rant.)

I've tried debossing with leather before, so obviously, for embossing, I decided I'd just pick the most complicated design possible. I had to modify the skull a bit--taking out the IX, which did NOT cut well, and I had to make the lines around the glasses thicker.

After several hours of cricut cutting and experimentation, here is the cover pre-leather. (I also had to floss the skull's teeth with an awl to get some fuzz out, which I found very funny.)

Then, leather:

As you can see, I lose a lot of details in the teeth there, so I went around the edges with a heated brass stylus.

I bought a special skull stamp for the spine: it definitely wasn't made for heat, because while it did serve the purpose, it also came with a metal handle which made handling it awkward. (Oven mitts did not give me the necessary amount of dexterity. I ended up sort of wrapping a paper towel around the handle. My cousin has since informed me that we do own fire resistant gloves, but I did not remember this at the time.)

The stamp was also a pain to get even: it had to be at juuuuust the right temperature and pressure, or you'd either get too much or too little, as shown. It was also pretty picky about foil, but the brass color matched the endband cloth and insides best anyway, so that worked out. (White was a definite no.)

The other fun bit of this was doing the edges: I did them with black foil, but as we established in my earlier foiling experiments, that's not the most reliable. I think I got the best results so far on the top, but kept getting flakes on the others. I ended up painting the outside edge with ink, and then foiling on top of that. The bleed onto the pages ended up looking pretty neat, but since I hadn't done it on the top, I didn't do it on the bottom so that it wouldn't look weird on the inside. I'm not sure the foil added as much gloss as I was hoping for so next time I might just do the ink.

I. THE BRAILLING

I manually transcribed the entire poem using PerkyDuck. "Isn't there a free program that will do that automatically?" you may ask. Yes. There is. It's called BrailleBlaster, and you just paste in your text and it transcribes it for you. It even automates the page numbers. Delightful! However. When embossing via BrailleBlaster, you cannot set the left margin to 6", which is what I needed to do to be able to fold it like a booklet.* I even called their customer support, had a hell of a time explaining what I was after, and their final conclusion was that wasn't possible but they were entertained that I was trying to do it in the first place. (I also tried importing BrailleBlaster files into PerkyDuck. No go.)

*The pages are not double sided: I have a $100 embosser, and the kinds that do double sided run more like $5,000. I think I could have done it manually if I'd fiddled with the offset but frankly life's too short.)

So! Manual transcription it was. It's kind of soothing.

I was using Grade 2 Braille, which contracts a lot of common words or letter combinations. (e.g. "because" two letters: "be"+"c", and "mariner" is four letters: "m"+"ar"+"in"+"er".) I would love to tell you that I'm a prodigy who casually memorized all the contractions and shortforms, but what I actually did was turn my reference text into a cheatsheet:

The part where I had to proofread it was less soothing, and felt more like I was learning to read again by sounding out words. I think I ended up going over it two or three times, and I'm sure I missed some things, but such is life.

II. THE PRINTING

For reasons that will be obvious if you think about it for a moment, braille paper is dot matrix. So to print each seven-sheet signature, I'd print 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and then I'd flip it over, reload it, and print 14,13,12,11,10,9,8. Since the first page is the title page, the braille page numbers and what the computer thought the page numbers were were one off, and I ended up making a chart with both computer and braille page numbers so I wouldn't lose track.

There was also a subplot where it kept cutting off at 15 lines; eventually me and a friend figured out that there was a light sensor on the embosser that would detect when there were no more pages, and it would cut it off there so it wouldn't break itself by dry firing. Great system, when you consider it's made for people who can't just glance over to see how much paper is left. Terrible system for what I was trying to do. I ended up taping a tiny piece of paper over the sensor, and then it worked fine.

III. THE BINDING

I did my first (well, second, but first that I had and could photograph) braille binding a couple years back, and did a Coptic binding. The problem with that, as you can imagine, is that with nothing to brace the spine, and with all that space between the pages, it tends to twist. So I wanted to try it using @queercore-curriculum's embroidered spine method.

Unfortunately I did not remotely comprehend the embroidered spine method. Fortunately dj, who still does not have a tumblr, did (and also helped with the spine design, and ended up sewing a decent number of the signatures herself when I got insanely frustrated): between that and @gempothospress figuring out how to make the blackwork work properly line up on the backside, it was very much a group effort.

Because of the spacing of the signatures, there were some big gaps:

What I should have done was glue down some decorative paper on the back of the spine before punching the holes, but since I didn't do that, I micro-spatulated some strips of paper in between there. (I went with one with a fun texture.)

The endpapers are also textured; I'd originally planned to use them for Moby Dick, and a few years ago I sewed an entire text block of Moby Dick that I ended up not using, so I cut them off and repurposed them.

The cover art is HTV. The albatross came through perfectly. The boat has been haunting me all afternoon. I'm gonna call the fact that it looks pretty beat up ~thematic~ and leave it at that.

IV. THE CONCLUSION

I had what I thought was the perfect fabric, a sort of two-toned blue/black. I had exactly enough for the cover (thanks, Fitz!) and then proceeded to fuck it up (RIP) by first: gluing the cover (which is made of two thin pieces of board glued together, one of which has a rectangle cut in it) on upside down, so the window was on the bottom half, and then: leaving too much space around the spine.

So I made a new one with the blue moire, of which I have...plenty. Cover went fine. Got the paper window in perfectly. Did a practice run with the stamping machine (known hereonout as The Machine, to keep with my Princess Bride equipment name theme.) Measured it, then, like Icarus, though I could make a measurement adjustment on the fly and have it come out correctly. Reader, it did not:

I spent like ten minutes trying to convince myself that it was fine. But. It wasn't fine. So I started over.

Anyway. Covers 3 and 4 are what you see in the final versions. I eventually figured out that if I taped a few layers of watercolor paper on top of the cover to test the location in The Machine, I could make sure to line it up exactly correct. I also figured out that I could do this by adjusting the placement just slightly between stamps:

So maybe I'll try and do that on purpose at some point, though I'm sure that's when it'd ultimately fail me.

Anyway, the punchline of all of this is that after all of this, over the course of a few months, I made an error that was a first for me, and everyone I showed it to. The endpaper curled when I put paste on it, and I didn't notice. You kind of have to laugh:

Initially I tried doing the cutout by cutting the leather into strips, making sort of a flower pattern on the back: I was unable to get the leather to curve with that method, so I ended up gluing it to the edge of the board with PVA and then shaving off the remaining bits with my paring knife.

I then added the backing page to the front cover, and used thin fragments of paper to make an inside joint with the collage page:

The snow on the mountain and then moon are foil quill--the moon is from a very high-tech stencil I made with a hole punch.

I did a lot of practicing for the tooling on the cover and spine, and only set a handle on fire one time, so I think I should be commended there. For the first time I tested my theory of "draw the design on the foil in sharpie and then tool over it," which worked fine, since the sharpie is only on the plastic layer on top. So I'll keep doing that going forward, it made a lot of things easier.

So the first question was, how to get the cover on. Because PVA dries fast. I didn't want to use paste, because I was afraid the water would fuck up the boards, but in the time it would take to get glue on the whole board, the first glue would have already started to dry.

The answer:

dumping some glue onto the board, and slowly unrolling the fabric while my girlfriend frantically went ahead with a silicone scraper. So basically, curling.

For decoration, the first thing I knew I wanted to do was make a glow-in-the dark cheshire cat, so I started off by putting lines of masking tape up next to each other, drawing the design on with a sharpie, and then cutting on said lines to make a stencil. I then thought the cover looked a little empty, so I added the title. (Intermittently adding additional layers of glow in the dark paint.)

Then I peeled the tape off and the edges were a little wonkier in places than I'd hoped for. So, obviously, I had to do an outline. And I had all this imitation gold that I'd failed to make work on the page edges of my Good Omens bind, so obviously....

This also ended up requiring a ton of touch-ups: I just did the gilding adhesive directly onto the book cloth, which isn't the recommended method but I didn't trust my ability to keep my hand steady enough for primer. I did have to do two layers. (Pictured above is a bit of gilding adhesive waiting to be dry enough to put more gold on. It takes half an hour or so, and then the sealant that goes on top takes 4 hours to fully cure. So I did not do this on every single letter, though I considered it for one insane second.)

The endpapers are butcher paper a teacher friend kindly stole obtained for me. Getting them on required another frantic glue fest, with the assistance of @eebeesee, who was very nice about it.

Obviously, it was too big for the press. So here it is under a piece of chipboard, the glass top of the coffee table (surprisingly heavy,) 50lbs of dumbells, and then, for good measure, my actual book press plonked on top. Also required the assistance of eebee because keeping all of that aligned was kind of a four-arm operation.

The chipboard still warped a bit because, again, it's chipboard.