Creativity is not necessarily tied to prolificacy, and I can be prolific, if not creative. These are all from last weekend. The nice thing about bookbinding is it’s easy to get handsome results without a great deal of skill. Much as I hate to admit it, the only real skill involved when using premade text blocks and beautiful papers is cutting a straight line and not getting glue all over everything.

I order album blocks online from Hollander’s. They have a number of different sizes and they offer discounts if you buy in blocks of five, so I usually do. Paper Source sells similar blocks, but they include pre-cut cover boards. I don’t think the price difference is worth it. I usually cut all the bookboard I need when I receive the book blocks, so that it’s handy when I need it.

I love the look of this Italian dog print paper but it’s awful to work with. It wrinkles like crazy under the glue and requires a lot of patient smoothing. This book is for photographs of Megabyte, of course. Her name is rubber stamped onto the bookcloth over the spine.

This graph paper journal block is from Paper Source. The quality’s not bad, and I like that it’s graph paper, but I think for journals I prefer cutting down Mohawk Superfine or Canson Ingres and creating the book block from scratch. The machine-made ones don’t have the same character.