Bookmaking – Page 76 – Green Chair Press Blog

A Glue-y Mess

Recently I forgot to clean my glue brush before I left the shop, rendering it a useless stiff mess by the next day. Running it under soapy warm water didn’t make it any more useable, so I started poking around on the web for another solution. But first I got sidetracked when I found the names for the parts of a brush — unrelated to my problem but I like the sound of the word “ferrule” (a metal ring or cap placed around a pole or shaft for reinforcement or to prevent splitting).
Eventually I did discover two suggestions for cleaning up my brush mess, both involving soaking it overnight (or longer), either in soapy water — using dish detergent — or rubbing alcohol. Since I had detergent at the shop, I tried that first. When that didn’t seem to make that much difference, I tried alcohol instead. By the next day, it had done the trick and with some rinsing under water the glue was gone and the brush back to normal.
Anyone else have a good method for cleaning up dried glue brushes?

A Dos-à-dos Binding?

Okay, the picture above isn’t a proper dos-à-dos binding, but that’s the first thing that came to mind when I saw the pictures. Take a look at more of Thomas Keeley’s amusing design work here.
But back to dos-à-dos (or back-to-back, in English) bindings. Two (usually related) books are bound back-to-back, so that they share the same back cover, and open in opposite directions. When the book is shelved upright, one spine faces the viewer while the other faces the back of the bookcase. To read books bound in this way, you read one text in the normal front to back manner, then to read the second text, you close the book and turn the volume over.

The Workmanship of Risk

For an upcoming issue of Ampersand (a quarterly journal I edit), I’ve asked half a dozen book artists to comment on the role of craft in their work. This article grew out of the exhibit New West Coast Design at the San Francisco Center for the Book that emphasised the technical expertise required in creating artists’ books.
This past weekend, as I set about to write an introduction to the article, I thought about what craft means for me. First I hit the dictionary: Craft: an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill. It’s a very old word — the dictionary dates its origin to before 900 AD. Today the emphasis seems to be on the manual skill part of the definition, arising from the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century, a style that was a reaction to the “soulless” machine-made production of the Industrial Revolution. For book artists, the wide range of skills involved in making a book can be daunting: a handmade book might include paper making, typography, a range of illustration and printmaking techniques, calligraphy, not to mention those of bookbinding itself.
In my ramble through my bookshelf and on the internet, I found 2 quotes about craftsmanship that I especially like. The first is from the curators’ statement for the exhibit at SFCB. It’s by Leonard Koren, from 13 Books (notes on the design, construction & marketing of my last . . . ) Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 2001

“I want to present . . . as perfect an object as I can. What it could have been, or should have been, is irrelevant. As the creator, I have the ultimate responsibility to make sure my books are produced according to my conception. . . . The problem with bad craftsmanship is that it needlessly distracts from the purity of your communication; it draws away energy and attention; it raises more questions in the reader’s mind that shouldn’t be there.”

The other, by way of my friend Cathy, is from David Pye’s book The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambridge University Press, 1968

“If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship ‘The workmanship of risk’: an uncouth phrase, but at least descriptive.”

ABC3D

An elegantly simple popup book by Marion Bataille, a graphic and book designer who lives in Paris. The video shows a hand-made mock-up of the actual book to be published in Oct. 2008. [update: It’s now available here]

[youtube wnZr0wiG1Hg]

People of the Book

This week I read Geraldine Brooks’ new novel People of the Book, an imagined history of a real book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, the oldest surviving Jewish illuminated manuscript, which contains the traditional text that accompanies the Passover Seder.
The history of the book is largely unknown — it’s believed to have been made in Spain some time in the mid-14th century, during the Convivencia, when Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived together in relative peace. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, and nothing more is known of the book until the 1500’s, when notes in the margin indicate that it surfaced in Venice and was saved from the book burnings of the Inquisition. It made its way to Vienna and in 1894 it was sold to the National Museum in Sarajevo. However that didn’t assure its survival — during World War II it was smuggled out of the Museum by a Muslim scholar and during the Bosnian War of the 1990’s it was again saved by a Muslim and hidden inside a bank vault.
The plot of the book traces the fictional history of the Haggadah by traveling forwards and backwards in place and time. In the present day, Hanna Heath, an Australian book restorer, goes to Sarajevo to do restoration and conservation on the book before it is put on display. As part of her conservation efforts, she tries to ascertain more about the book’s history. In parallel, the reader learns about the book’s travels and owners as it journeys back in time across Europe.
I am amazed by the amount of research that Brooks must have done to write her book. There’s lots of information about bookbinding and conservation, as well as an incredible amount of historical detail. The adventures of the main, present-day narrator, Hanna, are awfully contrived, but the interspersed stories imagining the history of the Haggadah are much better. Certainly reading it was a fine way to spend a lazy Saturday afternoon!

Pi Day

Pi (π) is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi is celebrated every year by math enthusiasts around the world today, March 14th.
And what does Pi have to do with book arts or letterpress or type, you might ask? The first book I printed letterpress was a small artist’s book with Wislawa Szymborska‘s whimsical poem “Pi,” which juxtaposes the finite, impermanent world with the familiar never-ending sequence 3.1415926535… In my book, the first 200 or so digits of Pi dance across the pages, starting on the cover and skating off the back.
So today, a toast to numbers and letterpress! You can read Szymborska’s poem, which begins “The admirable number pi: three point one four one.“, here. There’s an official (!) web site for Pi day with all sorts of fun facts and quotes and pointers to YouTube videos. And here’s a link to my book. I’ll finish off with this haiku from the PI Day web site:
Three point one
Four
et cetera