Bookmaking – Page 77 – Green Chair Press Blog

Spring Fever

spring fever The weather has turned warm here in Northern California (that’s the magnolia tree in my front yard) and I’ve been outside as much as possible. But no one ever seems to want to enjoy the season at hand — my mailbox is full of enticing summer bookmaking programs, making me want to skip right to July.
The Wells Book Arts Center in upstate New York has three week-long sessions, with intriguing titles like “Moving Parts: The Book as Kinetic Sculpture” taught by Dolph Smith and “Considering Text and Image” taught by Inge Bruggeman. A brochure is available here.
A new intensive debuts this year in England, at Wellington College in Berkshire, organized by two teachers well known here in the Bay Area — Dominic Riley and Michael Burke. You can find out all about it on their website.
Anyone know of any more?

Paper Cutting

Paper cuts seem to be all the current rage — from Kara Walker at the Whitney in NY to shops on Etsy including Mister Rob, to traditional Chinese designs from jinshanghai, to Pistoles Press (image to left) where Lana incorporates her paper cuts into books.
While I’ve done a fair amount of hand cutting when making pop-up books, I’m a beginner to these more intricate forms. There are quite a few books on paper cutting techniques on Amazon. Online, Lana at Pistoles Press writes about her methods for making paper cuts and wood block prints on her blog. And check out this nice online tutorial on Skinny Laminx’s blog.

Ghost Books

In addition to running Green Chair Press, I’m the current editor of the Pacific Center for the Books Arts (PCBA) quarterly journal Ampersand. PCBA began as a regional (San Francisco-based) organization 25 years ago, to support professional development of book artists, but we’ve grown to have many members across the US and beyond. In the issue that came out this week, I’m excited to have three articles about artists from California to Florida using fabric and fiber in their bookworks.

Mentioned in several articles is Santa Cruz-based Jody Alexander and her ghost books made out of mull (a stiff muslin open-weave fabric that is used by bookbinders to cover the spine of books). Deborah Kogan, who interviewed Jody for Ampersand, says “When I saw the books … they exploded my preconceived ideas about fabric books. I had been thinking of fabric books as fluffy and plump. Alexander’s books are exactly the opposite—they remind me of skeletal remains after every shred of flesh has been boiled away or removed after long exposure to the elements.”

I got to see Jody’s ghost books this week in person as part of the current exhibition at the San Francisco Center for the Book (through the end of April). They are indeed quite ethereal and eerily beautiful! The photograph below is of Jody’s Signs of Life I,II, & III. You can see more of Jody’s one-of-a-kind bookworks on her website.

Hand Debossed Panels

One of the first classes I took at the San Francisco Center for the Book was to make an accordion spine book with a hand-debossed (recessed) panel in each page. For that class (taught by Howard Munson) we made collages to put in the debossments. I’ve used this debossing technique many times since then, mainly for cards but most recently for my newest set of broadsides. It’s a much more elegant way to display artwork or photographs than just gluing them onto the paper.
To make a hand-debossed panel, you’ll need a bone folder and a piece of davey board (or something that is about 1/8″ thick) cut to the size of the panel. The paper to be debossed should be thick and soft (for instance Somerset or Rives). I make a jig by cutting a piece of card stock to the size of my paper, figuring out where the debossed panel should be located, and attaching the davey board there using double-stick tape. (You can see the jig in the photo below.)

Now I lay my paper over the jig, lining up the edges at the top and side. I put a piece of double-stick or rolled tape on the davey board, so that once I’ve lined everything up, I can tack the paper down so it won’t move. To start the debossment, using my fingers, I carefully press the paper against the sides of the davey board. Then, using my bone folder, I work the paper against the davey board. This molds the panel into the paper. Do this slowly at first, as it’s easy to tear or mark the paper. Pay careful attention to the corners.

When all the sides and corners have been worked equally, I’m done.

Binding Flip Books

A flip book is a simple form of animation, usually made of a sequence of drawings or photographs, that, when the pages are “flipped” through by the viewer, appear to create the illusion of motion. I make and sell 2 flip books (here and here), and finding a binding method that would last for many “flips” was probably the most important part of the design. I settled on using staples, hidden by a piece of book cloth. But the binding can also be sewn (see here for an example). Recently I’ve been working on another flip book, and I found a few new (to me!) online flip book resources.
This tutorial has suggestions for how to use Flash to develop your animation, how to facilitate printing using Photoshop, and how to use a butterfly clip for the binding. (That’s a photo from the tutorial, by Computer Arts, on the right.)
To give you some ideas for your own animations, check out Post-it Theater, movies hand-drawn on Post-it notepads. This site has suggestions on how to develop a hand-drawn animation, and this one has suggestions for using photographs.

Turning the Pages II

I’m always on the lookout for novel ways of displaying books on the web, and last fall I wrote a post about 2 videos I found. Last week I ran across British artist Holly Ormrod’s website. She’s a recent graduate of the Book Arts program at Camberwell College, and her portfolio has both artist’s books and book-based installations. She shows off her bookworks with quite effective slide shows. The picture on the left is from an altered book (The Old Man and Sea by Ernest Hemingway). There’s also one entitled Bookworm of a little plastic man tunnelling through a book. There’s lots more, so do take a look.