Bookmaking – Page 74 – Green Chair Press Blog

Single Sheet Books

One of the problems with making your own books using an ink jet or laser printer is how to print them without lots of fancy software. My first books of my artwork and stories, with two pages per sheet and double sided, required me to devise an often complicated recipe for the order to print the pages. Then I discovered single sheet books. Because they are printed all on one side of a sheet, once I had a template, they were easy to design and quick to print and put together. They end up being small — from an 8-1/2 x 11″ sheet you get a 2-3/4 x 4-1/2″ book — but very easy to work with.
Earlier this summer when I was making a book out of my haiku poems, I played around with several single sheet configurations. I was reminded how convenient they are to work with, so I wrote up some instructions and made a kit that includes directions for five different configurations and three books to make — each pre-printed and ready to fold, cut and assemble. And it also includes a Word template to use to design and print your own book from a single sheet. The kit is available here.

Edible Printing

After School Snack
by Dawn Forbes

The International Edible Book Festival is held yearly on April 1st. Participants create edible books that are exhibited, photographed and then eaten. Here’s an example to the left, and there are lots more on this website.
I haven’t been to one, but every year when I see announcements about festival “exhibits,” I think about what sort of book I’d make. Recently I saw this Electrolux Scan Toaster prototype bread printer and thought it would be perfect to make such a book. The idea is that you plug the toaster into your computer, put a slice of bread in it, and then print.
Less science fiction is this article on how to print on edible paper with edible ink.

Printing a Book, Old School

At my house we watch a lot of How It’s Made, a TV program that shows how common, everyday items are made. Things like cheesecake, tires, taffy, and canoe paddles. So I enjoyed finding this Encyclopedia Britannica video on book printing and binding made in 1947… it shows the process from author to typesetter to printer to binder. The “How It’s Made” videos are usually about things made mostly by machine, although there are the episodes that intone “the worker has exactly 82 seconds to complete his task”. This video doesn’t say how long it takes to do any particular task, and while there are lots of large scary looking machines, there are lots of people involved too. I’ve seen a “How It’s Made” on book binding (doesn’t seem to be available on YouTube) and it’s all machines.

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via Hang Fire Books

Palm Leaf Books

Palm leaf books are a traditional book form of Southeast Asia and India. They are long, narrow dried and painted palm leaves, strung together on a cord. Being vertical they are a nice alternative to the omnipresent horizontal accordion fold book. (The one to the right is from the Columbia University Library.)
I’ve been thinking about palm leaf books this week (and what I might do with the vertical format in general) after reading Holland Cotter’s NY Times review of an exhibit of one especially beautiful example in the exhibit Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm-Leaf Tradition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. Cotter says “sturdy and compact, they weigh next to nothing. The collapsible format protects them from dirt and light … Such practical features — size, resilience, portability — help explain why … the illustrated book was popular in India between the 10th and 13th centuries. And they suggest why such books and their illustrations have survived into the present, while painting in more perishable media has not … The palm-leaf sheets varied in length, but were seldom more than a few inches wide. They were stacked like slats in Venetian blinds and bound by threads passed through two holes in the center of each sheet. Rather than forming a single surface, as in modern palm-leaf paintings, the sheets in books were meant to be seen one at a time. The sequence for viewing them was determined by the flow of an inscribed text, which was punctuated with tiny paintings.”
Several years ago, I made a book loosely based on the palm leaf (see it here). There’s instructions for making them here.

Pop-up Your Candidate

Carol Barton, author of the The Pocket Paper Engineer Volume 1 and Volume 2, has designed a pop-up card to celebrate the current (seemingly interminable) US political season… You can download and print a PDF that lets you choose your candidate and pop him right into the White House.

Making a Flipbook from Video

I’ve been asked several times about making flip books from a video. This tutorial gives templates for making your own using AfterEffects to turn the video into a series of jpegs that can be printed. He also talks about binding the pages and, in an ironic twist, made some movies to demonstrate his made-from-movies-then-printed flipbooks in action.