As I wrote here, this past June I attended the Focus on Book Arts conference and took Aimee Lee’s class “Paper like leather, Bark like thread: Korean Paper Techniques.” One of the techniques was joomchi, or paper felting. While time consuming, it was much simplier than, say, needle felting, and didn’t result in pricked fingers. By adding water to hanji (Korean-made paper), you can adhere 2 pieces of paper together, just by patting and pounding on them. That’s what I’m doing in the photo above. Western paper would fall apart with this technique, but hanji is a very long fiber paper and holds together, even when soaking wet. Below are the results from some of my classmates. Small squares of blue hanji have been adhered to white hanji.
Bark lace (made from kozo, see my post here) adhered to black hanji.
Below, tiny pieces of colored hanji (almost lint) have been adhered to a large parent sheet of hanji. The result was cut down into very long strips and then knitted.
One of the first bookmaking how-to books I bought was Shareen LaPlantz’s Cover to Cover. While that book is still in print, LaPlantz other book Innovative Bookbinding: Secret Compartments & Hidden Messages, which published in 2 hand-bound editions in 1997 and 2000, isn’t. That book had hand-bound tip-ins, a secret pocket, a pull-down mechanical, stitched booklets and a hidden tunnel book. Since LaPlantz died in 2003, it seemed unlikely that the book would be reissued. Laura Russell has a nice post on her blog about how the unlikely happened, as well has details about how the book was remade to be print-on-demand. You can see & order the new 3rd edition here.
In June, I attended the Focus on Book Arts conference, and took Aimee Lee’s class “Paper like leather, Bark like thread: Korean Paper Techniques.” Over 3 days, we were introduced to various traditional Korean techniques of manipulating handmade paper and bark. One technique was jiseung, or paper weaving, which transforms strips of paper into cords that can be twined into all manner of objects, including baskets and book covers, like the one on the left.
First Aimee boiled long pieces of kozo, the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, which has long and strong fibers. After it was soft, we each got a piece to play with. The picture below is “bark lace,” where the fibers are tweezed apart to make a lacy pattern. Single strands can be pulled off to make thread.
Then we cut parent sheets of hanji (paper made with kozo in the Korean technique) into long strips, and made two-ply cords out of them, by rubbing 2 strips together in our palms. I think we made 16, enough practice to really get the hang of the motions required to twine the strips as well as to get even tension (something I finally got on the last 2 cords). Here are my first attempts…
Then Aimee showed us how weave the cords (using a basket weave) to make “book covers.” In the picture below, I have reached then end of the cover—the non-woven space in the middle is for the spine of the book. As a non-crocheter, non-knitter and non-weaver, this was all a bit foreign. You can see I’ve dropped (or missed) some stitches, but I quite liked the handwork and repetition. Aimee showed us how to make a round basket as well, but I decided to make several book covers instead so I would be able to replicate the weave at home. While the class was working away. Aimee collected up all our scrap cords and made exquisite little baskets—no more than an inch wide, like the ones to the right.
After the cover was done, I decided to cut my bark lace into “pages” and sew them, using the kozo thread, into the spine of the book. A completely hanji book… (I wasn’t quite done when the picture was taken, and that’s the kozo thread hanging off the back)
I like it very much because it is so unlike my other work—the cover is soft and unformed, the inside brittle. It’s not overly thought-out. Aimee told us that Koreans have used paper from books and official documents (with text on them) to weave baskets and animals and other forms, and this got to be a problem because people were stealing important papers to use in the weaving. I’m planning on letterpress printing secrets or poetry on large sheets of hanji, cutting them down, twining them and weaving to see what I get. Below is the book made by my table-mate Julie. She makes paper and knows how to knit, crochet, and weave. And she makes baskets. This could have been daunting, but she was really helpful when my fingers & brain refused to be coordinated and got me unstuck numerous times. She used her own paper for the inside of her book, and she died the cords with her own handmade dye before she wove the cords.
My friend Suzanne sent me a link to this kickstarter project for an ingenious map using the turkish mapfold. It starts as a square with a tiny city overview. It unfolds to two panes of mass transit. It unfolds again to four panes of the city map. She’s got maps for Berlin and London, and was trying to raise money for a map of New York City. See more on the designer’s website.
In 1900, Arthur Evans, an English archaeologist, digging in Knossos on the island of Crete, unearthed clay tablets with an unknown writing system for an unknown language. He called it Linear B, and it wasn’t until 1951 that the tablets were finally deciphered. Recently I read The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, an account of how the language was deciphered. The book is so well written and so interesting that I actually gulped it down, reading it in pretty much one sitting! Written for a general audience, you don’t need to know about linguistics, puzzle solving, or any language other than English. She walks the reader through the complicated bits and turns the story into a detective tale. There are lots of fun facts in the book, but here’s one that is particularly bookbinding related. One reason the tablets Evans found were buried is that the city in Knossos had been destroyed, probably by fires. The tablets Evans found were clay and the heat of the fire had hardened them into pottery, conserving them for 3000 years. Fox explains that the tablets were meant to be short term storage—at the end of each year the information on them was copied to a more permanent substrate, maybe papyrus, and using water, the clay tablets were melted and reused. Paradoxically, the hardened clay survived, the papyrus didn’t. Linear B is available as a digital font, see below for an example. Fox’s book is really great, I highly recommend it.
Dale Harris had a link recently to a piece about Book Play, Creative Adventures in Handmade Books. From the pages I can see on Amazon, it looks like a traditional “how to make a book” book. But this post has a slide show of the books the author, Margaret Couch Cogswell, makes. The one above is called “the Dispenser” and she says “I designed this book to unspool the story one sentence at a time.” You can also see more of her artist’s books on her website.
By adding water to hanji (Korean-made paper), you can adhere 2 pieces of paper together, just by patting and pounding on them. That’s what I’m doing in the photo above. Western paper would fall apart with this technique, but hanji is a very long fiber paper and holds together, even when soaking wet. Below are the results from some of my classmates.
In June, I attended the 
Then we cut parent sheets of hanji (paper made with kozo in the Korean technique) into long strips, and made two-ply cords out of them, by rubbing 2 strips together in our palms. I think we made 16, enough practice to really get the hang of the motions required to twine the strips as well as to get even tension (something I finally got on the last 2 cords). Here are my first attempts…
In 1900, 
