Bookmaking – Page 65 – Green Chair Press Blog

Minature Book Society Conclave

This week is the Miniature Book Society’s Grand Conclave — their annual conference for those little (under 3 inches) books. I checked out their website & they have nice PDF catalogs of their annual competitions. The winner from 2008 is to the right. It’s called Haiku by Stephen Byrne, and the catalog says “16 pp. 1-7/16” x 2-3/8”. Edition of 15 books. Letterpress printed, on Japanese paper. The book consists of haiku which were inspired by sights seen on country walks. The text block is bound into the lid of the ebony box which houses the book.” Past entrants have made some pretty spectacular 3D books, with popups and tunnel books and wiggly long accordions…

Bookmaking Supplies on Etsy

Yesterday, I wrote about bookmaking tools I found on Etsy. Today’s post is the supplies I found, in addition to Susan Scott’s Yardwork bookcloth, that I wrote about earlier.

Piacere Mio sells single jars of PVA.

Diane Falvey of Iris and Lily will custom cut book board to your specifications. She also sells pre-made text blocks.

KarleighJae sells leather hides and pieces — like this amazing green one. 3 pieces of cut Italian Lambskin at least 6″ x 18″ are $25. (She also sells Davey board scraps.) Another shop, awal1, sells faux and real leather in a variety of colors.

The two sisters who run Snippets of Time sell vintage wallpaper samples that can be used for book covers. They also sell other ephemera, like maps and bingo cards.

Ana Buigues of contexto sells leather faux bookbinding endbands, including a sampler of various colors for $3.

Several shops have paper for sale: washimatta sells packs of washi, as does Washi Paper and Pebble Stone Papery. My Marbled Papers shop sells washi, marbled and Suminagashi papers.

Bookmaking Tools on Etsy

When I first started selling on Etsy (it’s been exactly 3 years!) there were few books and no bookmaking supplies. Recently I was looking for unwaxed linen thread, and discovered that there are now lots of shops selling tools and supplies, usually in small quantities with low shipping costs. Here’s some interesting tools I found (tomorrow I’ll post the supplies).

Wren Haven Tools sells these nifty micro scissors in 2 sizes, as well as felt covered weights, boxmaking and bookmaking angle tools for cutting. They even sell a angle for left handed people!

Instead of my manual method for making perfect bound books, you can use Kirk Whitham’s binding machine from his Atomic Binding shop. He’s got 2 sizes, to make up to 5-1/2″ books ($69 + shipping) and the larger to make up to to 11″ tall ($99 + shipping). He’s got heaps of info about it on his website including a you-tube video.

UberArt sells this solid oak book press for $70 plus shipping — years ago my husband made me one with a bench screw mechanism as explained here. Mine presses multiple books at once, unlike UberArt’s, but the materials alone cost as much as the Etsy press.

Randy Arnold sells wooden bone folders, including this one made of ebony with a pearl inlay. Piacere Mio sells bone folders made of bone, as well as single jars of PVA.

Instead of a Japanese screw punch, you can buy this “Bookbinder’s Screw-down Double-sided Hole Punch.” Kristin, of The Indigo Raven, says it drills through 2-3mm of cardstock, matboard, buckram… It has two hole size options: 1.6mm (1/16th”) and 2.3mm (3/32nd”). The punch can accommodate materials up to 3mm thick.

Anatomy of a Book Cover

These little wooden birds were carved by Japanese Americans during their internment in camps during World War II. The bird’s tiny legs are crafted from the surplus snipped off the wire mesh screens over barrack windows. In 2002, Delphine Hirasuna discovered a small wooden bird in a box of her mother’s, and she wondered what “other objects made in the camps lay tossed aside and forgotten, never shown to anyone because they might generate questions too painful to answer.” She’s collected an array of objects, from these birds to teapots carved from slabs of slate, umbrellas fashioned from cigarette paper and chopsticks, paintings on shells and rocks, and weavings of onion skin, and for the past few years, there has been a traveling exhibit of her finds. She’s also written a book: The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946. (Click on this link to see spreads of the book, showing some of the crafts.)
What’s this have to do with bookmaking you ask? I discovered Hirasuna’s book when reading this blog post where she discusses coming up with the title and cover jacket design for her book (which she says “proved as hard as developing the content”). It’s an interesting read.
And by the way, she also explains that gaman means “bearing the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.” There’s an NPR podcast about the exhibition here and an interview with Hirasuna here.

Gutenburg Bible

The Gutenberg Bible was the first substantial book printed from movable type on a printing press and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has one of five complete copies in the United States. They’ve generously scanned many of the pages and put them online, as well as some background information about the bible and Gutenberg. Below is one of the pages and the online exhibition starts here.

The Gutenberg Bible, Volume 1, Old Testament, Exodus, Leviticus

Making a Mini-book, Part VII

Spread from my ballet book This is the seventh (and final) post on my experiment comparing making a print-on-demand mini book with making a similar book by hand.
For my experiment, I made 4 books, all approx. 3.75″x2.5″, using 2 print on demand companies — Lulu and Apple (via iPhoto) — and 2 completely handmade — one using double sided photographic (coated) paper, the other with a non-coated text-weight paper. Is it cheaper and easier to print and assemble an edition of these small books by farming it out to a company like Lulu?
Below is a table comparing the books and production costs.

	cost	paper	construction	lies flat	max pages
Lulu	$5.45	slick/coated	glued	no	100
iPhoto	$6.02	slick/coated	glued	no	20
photo paper	$3.63	matte	sewn	yes	unlimited
text weight	$3.63	matte	sewn	yes	unlimited
Sold on Lulu	$0.00	slick/coated	glued	no	100

NOTES:

For the on-demand books, the cost includes shipping for the minimum number of books (minimum of 3 for iPhoto, 4 for Lulu). For iPhoto, the cost for 3 books with shipping was $18.06, so each book was 18.06/3 or $6.02. For the cost of the handmade books, I included materials and my labor ($25/hour). It takes 30 minutes to print, cut, assemble and sew 4 books There’s a cost savings in labor for me if I make multiple books at a go, since many tasks take practically the same time whether making one book or 4.
Lulu’s site is set up to sell books for publishers. So if I sold on their website, rather than having the books delivered first to my studio, the cost would actually be $0. However this doesn’t work for me for 2 reasons: Etsy, where I sell the majority of my books, doesn’t allow third party fulfillment, so I’d have to buy the books up-front to ship them myself. Second, buyers can’t purchase just one mini-book on Lulu, and I doubt I’d have very many sales of the minimum.
The cost is for a 20 page book. That’s the minimum for Lulu & iPhoto (and the maximum for iPhoto mini-books as well). Each extra page is $.25 on Lulu, less for the handmade books.

There’s one last criteria for my experiment: I showed the 4 books to several people and asked their opinion of the paper, construction, and feel. Each said they liked the iPhoto book best — the slick coated paper made the colors pop and they expected that sort of paper in a picture book, rather than a paper that might be in a book of text only. Lulu’s book was everyone’s second choice, but it was obvious to all that it was inferiorly made. The fact that the books didn’t lie flat concerned only me!
What’s next? Sadly the iPhoto book is too expensive to produce and then resell — I doubt I can get more than $10 per copy and the markup really should be 50% to cover my costs to market, store, etc. the book. It’s too bad the Lulu books didn’t work out, as they are on the cusp of being affordable. I may make a few handmade ones using photo paper and list them in my Etsy store and see how they do. I’m also going to think about what sort of larger dimension book I could make using Blurb — my current work doesn’t really suit their photo book format, but it’s an interesting challenge.