Green Chair Press Blog

Adhesives: Double-Fan Binding

Quick and easy, the double-fan adhesive or millennial binding is a great solution for turning single sheets into an extremely durable paperback book that opens flat and stays open. Its strength comes from the way the pages are glued, using a double-fanning technique that brings glue just a millimeter or so into the textblock. And its “openability” comes from a pop-off spine that moves independently of the textblock.
I learned this method from notes by Dominic Reilly, who learned it from Gary Frost. Currently conservator for the libraries at the University of Iowa and author of the Future of the Book blog, Frost is renowned for devising conservation bindings based on enduring mechanical features of historic bindings that he has “deconstructed” and reproduced. In this particular structure, he sought not only to protect a book’s contents and ensure that it opened flat for easy reading but also to incorporate such modern materials as transfer tape and Tyvek and accommodate laser-printed copies and production editioning methods.
I’ve adapted this structure for my food & exercise diary and Sherlock Holmes notebooks. It’s good for anything that needs to open flat—like a calendar or day planner. It’s also can be used to rebind a favorite paperback book. While it’s an easy book to make, please note that you’ll need access to a guillotine (stack paper cutter) to give the book a final trim.
Full directions and pictures are available here.

Calligrams & Word Clouds

There was a post the other day on the Book Arts email list about David Esslemont’s book My Fellow Citizens, a series of calligrams — a printed text where the typeface or the layout has a special significance — to illustrate President Obama’s inaugural address. Esslemont analyzed the word frequency in the speech, then used various ink colors and text sizes to weight the words — words used most often (nation — 11 times, new — 11 times, America — 10 times ) are large and red, the next frequency groupings are drawn in smaller blue letters and finally black ink is used for all the rest. To the left is a detail of one calligram.
This got me thinking about word clouds — a computer generated visual depiction of a text — that use font size and color to depict the frequency of words in a given text. I’ve seen “tag clouds” on lots of blogs, the idea is to give a quick summary of that particular blog. As luck would have it, that same day I visited the blog of a friend of my Mom’s, with a link to Wordle — a site that generates a word cloud from text you provide. I found the text of Obama’s speech and got this cloud:

Apparently word clouds have been used a lot to look at speeches — this blog has a post called “Word Cloud Analysis of Obama’s Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln’s.” (My most glaring observation looking at them is that Bush used the word “Freedom” in his speech an enormous number of times!)
I wonder if the clouds would be useful to understand poetry? On Wordle, someone made and posted a cloud of e.e. cummings “anyone lived in a pretty how town” — cloud below followed by text of the poem. Doesn’t help me, maybe because cummings’ word play is lost (“he sang his didn’t he danced his did”) but then again it’s only one example… Let me know what you discover with them!

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
with by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

— e. e. cummings

Calendar Planning, part II

My current plan for 2010 is to make a less traditionally calendar-like calendar. My first “calendar” (from 2004) was a reading diary, a journal for keeping track of books read during the year — certainly not traditional.
In poking around the web the other day, here’s what I found to get me going on figuring out what I might do. One I quite like is the “weather calendar” to the right. The tree has a branch for each month, and enough empty leaves on each for the days in a particular month. As the year winds along, leaves are colored each day — green for good weather and blue for rainy weather — to produce a colorful tree that follows the seasons.
Then there’s PockMod… I think my friend Steve Woodall was the first person to tell me about this site, and the post on the Weather Tree Calendar also mentions it. The site lets you construct a one sheet organizer that you fold into a tiny booklet that fits in your pocket. There are templates for a large range of pages — calendars, shopping lists, reference and conversion charts…
Finally, this one by Jill at Beau Ideal is traditional in the sense that it has a monthly gridded calendar. But the typography of the names of people born in a particular month is really fun. Below is June. You can see all the months here.

A Young Mad Scientist’s First Alphabet Blocks

The first books I designed were ABC books, so I seem to gravitate toward anything alphabetical. These Young Mad Scientist’s ABC blocks from xylocopa are appropriately silly. They say “we have noticed that there is absolutely no training in the K-6 grades that prepares students to become mad scientists. In this competitive 21st-century world, the need for mad scientists will only increase, but the lack of basic education in primary school leaves us concerned that there will be no future students capable of leading in this illustrious field.” Here’s a list of the images (I especially like C) and then the blocks with their old-fashioned letters and illustrations.

A – Appendages
B – Bioengineering
C – Caffeine
D – Dirigible
E – Experiment
F – Freeze ray
G – Goggles
H – Henchmen
I – Invention

J – Jargon
K – Potassium
L – Laser
M – Maniacal
N – Nanotechnology
O – Organs
P – Peasants (with Pitchforks)
Q – Quantum physics
R – Robot

S – Self-experimentation
T – Tentacles
U – Underground Lair
V – Virus
W – Wrench
X – X-Ray
Y – You, the Mad Scientist
of Tomorrow
Z – Zombies

Book Collecting: Conch

My poem-books A Word on Statistics and PI came out of a year-long class I took at the San Francisco Center for the Book in 2001-2002 with Emily McVarish and Steve Woodall. My idea was to incorporate my love of numbers into an artist’s book and I spent a fair amount of time looking at how other artists used math and number systems in their work.
One day Steve very excitedly handed me a box of 4 books called “Book of Growth” by Susan Happersett. Each one was a riff on the correlation between plant growth and the Fibonacci Sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,…). The books use a visual language of grids composed of marks increasing (and sometimes decreasing) in Fibonacci progression (1 line, 2 lines, 3 lines, 5 lines) that represent the growth and decay patterns of sunflowers (bloemen), conch shells, leaves and twigs. While all the books use a similar abstract representation of the sequence, each one has different colors and paper and textures. I was just starting to buy artist’s books, and wasn’t sure what I was doing yet, so I got just one of them — Conch (that’s it above). The brittle pink-tinted handmade cover paper reminds me of shells. The books were letterpress printed and hand-bound at Purgatory Pie Press. You can buy the set through Vamp & Tramp (scroll down to the bottom of the page) or singly through Purgatory Pie.
To get a better idea of the marks, here’s a detail from Happersett’s 2005 drawing “Split Tree”. It shows a progression from 3 to 5 to 8 to 13 to 21 marks per grid box.

Detail of Susan Happersett’s ‘Split Tree’ 2005

My Brain Has Always Governed My Heart

This year marks the 150th birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who gave us Sherlock Holmes. To celebrate I’ve designed a blank notebook with a Holmes theme. First I asked my friend Glen, expert in all things Sherlock, for some quotes I might use along with the portrait. He suggested

My brain has always governed my heart

and

I am glad of all details, whether they seem to you to be relevant or not

The first is from The Sign of Four and the second from The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.
I letterpress printed the covers and bound the books using a perfect (glued) binding. I really like the zippy red spine paper as a contrast to the black & white cover (I also used the red paper for endsheets). They are 4-1/4″ x 5-1/2″, with at least 100 blank pages for writing, sketching, or note taking. For sale here.