I spent most of the weekend folding paper. It was the first weekend in weeks that I didn’t work, and it was raining, so I stayed in and watched animé with E. while he experimented with Python and I folded and tore paper. It was nice to be doing something that didn’t require focus after the deadlines of last week.

I grabbed all of the remaining 119 gsm Mohawk Superfine sheets off my paper cart and started folding. I thought there were only about 20 sheets (25″ by 35″, grain short), but when I finally finished I realized there had been quite a few more. All told, I folded and tore 46 full-size sheets into 736 4-1/4″ by 5-1/2″ folios. That’s folding sheets of paper in varying sizes in half 1426 times, and ripping through the crease with a bone folder 690 times. No wonder my back hurts!

When you realize the amount of time it takes to do some of these things, it can be really disheartening to price your work for sale. I spent at least 7 hours folding and tearing paper by hand, and over an hour last night assembling the folios into sections. This is light-weight paper; I use six folios per section rather than the usual four, so with eight sections per book I prepared enough paper for about 15 books. That means it took about an hour just to prep the paper for two books. Depending on how I bind them, it will take another hour or more per book to prepare the covers and sew the bindings. If I sell these $18, after deducting the cost of materials I’m making about California minimum wage—and that’s before I even consider the amount of time it takes to photograph each piece, write a description, step through the five page form required to upload each book to Etsy, and deduct the additional fees for each sale to pay to Etsy and Paypal.

There are certain things that I can do to produce more, faster. I could use my Kutrimmer, rather than tear the paper. I could use heavier, larger sheets of paper (which I usually do—this paper is the last of an unfortunate online ordering choice), use four folios per section instead of six, or use fewer sections in the book. I could have made 8-1/2″ by 11″ folios and saved myself a few hundred folds and tears. I could choose to make only specific book structures, those which are faster to produce. I could even outsource, as my husband often teases. But when I start making creative decisions based on production optimization, it takes some of the fun and spontaneity out of the experience.

My Etsy store has been mostly empty these last few months, partly due to lack of time to produce anything to put into it, and partly due to lack of interest. When I produce for the sake of selling, I tend to go into production line mode, and I get bored with making the same structures over and over again. This year I want to explore more and make things for the sake of my own interests, and if they turn out well and I start running out of room again they’ll go up for sale.

I’ve long been a fan of the Japanese Paper Place, which has always had the most drool-worthy selection of Chiyogami papers I’ve ever seen. But, not living in—and rarely traveling to—Toronto, and not being a wholesaler, I’ve had to depend on other retailers to get the papers for me, because the store has never sold online. (Paper Mojo would order any paper for you, but the minimum sheet requirement was too high for me.)

All that just changed.

Really, with all the sharp implements involved in bookbinding and my innate accident proneness, it was only a matter of time before I took the tip of my thumb off. (Don’t worry—it was much smaller piece than the bandage would seem to indicate.)

The last few weeks have been incredibly busy, between work and school. I’ve only been able to grab little pieces of time for bookbinding: cutting boards, sanding, choosing and cutting cover paper. So over time my studio filled with little stacks of books to be, just waiting for a chance to sit down and finish everything.

Well, that was this weekend. Since Friday night I’ve assembled 12 accordion books (shown above) and seven Coptic-bound journals. I think I am booked out for a while. I feel like doing some sewing!

A lot of people ask me where I get the papers I use to cover books. I get them from a few different sources, both online and off, but most of them come from the following resources online:

• Paper Mojo
  Paper Mojo carries a good selection of Japanese prints and will also order any style you wish from the Japanese Paper Place in Toronto (which does not do online retail) with a three-sheet minimum. I also like the Whimsy Press papers and the Pasticcio prints (although I’ve had mixed success using them for covers—they bubble).
• Paper Source
  Paper source has a nice selection of Japanese prints and a limited selection of Lokta bark solids. They also carry a number of Italian text blocks, including a few sizes of photo albums with black pages. Text blocks are sold with cover boards that are already cut to the proper size, which can be a bonus if you can’t cut a 90° corner to save your life.
• Paper Studio
  I just received my first order from Paper Studio today, and I will be ordering more from this store. They have a good selection of Chiyogami and Lokta bark. They also ship USPS Priority Mail, so the order I placed Tuesday arrived in time for the weekend, a fact that I appreciate.
• Hollanders
  I mostly buy text blocks from Hollander’s, although you have to do some comparison shopping on their prices: the graph paper block, for example, is $1.50 cheaper from Paper Source, and Paper Source includes pre-cut cover boards. I do buy Brookfield Letterpress papers here, and Lokta bark papers. Sometimes I buy Chiyogami paper here as well, though their new online store setup makes browsing difficult—it’s too broken up, and displaying two of each paper design means you have to go through twice as many pages.
• Talas Online
  Talas has a very limited selection of Chiyogami paper. They have a great selection of book cloth, and their prices for book cloth are better than Hollander’s. I buy all my book board here, a lot of my page papers, and most of my other bookbinding supplies and tools.

There are also a couple of stores in San Francisco that I visit on occasion:

• Paper Source
  I usually order online from Paper Source, but sometimes if I need something in a hurry or I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll go to their store on Fillmore.
• Kozo Arts
  Kozo Arts does not sell paper online, but they have a lovely selection of Japanese papers in their store on Union Street, and this is where I buy the monkey paper—when they have it in stock. They had a store in the Westfield Mall downtown for a while, but it’s closed now.
• Flax
  Flax is a large art supply store at Market and Valencia in San Francisco. They have a huge paper room with an overwhelming amount of decorative paper from all over the world. I sometimes buy novelty papers here (this is where I found the Italian dog print) or Chiyogami, but I usually only go when I need some other art supplies.

Because I haven’t been busy enough lately, I decided to take a graphic design course this summer through UC Berkeley’s extension program. I’ve actually been wanting to do this for several years, but my last company didn’t have a tuition reimbursement program, and my current employer does. Yay!

Our first assignment was an alphabet book (really a scrapbook, though I somehow glossed over that part in my head when I was thinking about the assignment), in which we were supposed to work with images that visually resonated with us. In my case, I decided that the things that resonate with me are (1) book structures (duh), (2) typography, (3) paper, especially the Japanese papers, and (4) the color red.

I decided on a gatefold book structure because I thought it would be cool to have the upper and lower case letters facing each other in their own book. Each letter is cut from a different Chiyogami/Yuzen paper, with the upper- and lower-cases matching. As a bonus, if you’re kinda geeky, you can create the entire periodic table of the elements: Fe, He, etc. The typeface is Helvetica Neue Bold, chosen mainly for its uniformly wide strokes which were easy to glue, and also because I figured I would have lost a finger for sure if I had to cut serifs with an Exacto knife!

The paper is Mohawk Superfine 100lb text. Each side is a single section of 13 sheets, pamphlet-sewn into the spine. My measurement for the front and back cover boards did not take into account the hinging and additional width of the spine piece (since I sewed the sections into 5/16" wide spine boards with 1/4″ for the hinges), and as a consequence the sections are slightly too far apart: I would have preferred them to be almost flush. But on the whole I like the way it turned out.

(I dropped the color red from the mix. I have a stunning silk-like red book cloth that I almost covered the book with, but I decided it would detract from the Japanese papers, and I went with black instead. It was a smart decision.)

I was having so much fun with the Gocco the other day that I didn’t want to stop with the inclusion cards, so I made some folded cards using a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge that I took a couple of years ago and converted into black and white line art.

It might go up on Etsy, but not yet. One thing I realized a few weeks ago during the list-something-every-day experiment is that you have to list frequently in every category you want to sell in, because otherwise you’re depending on someone looking at (for example) books to look at your store to buy your cards. So I took down the few gift card/tag postings that I had, because listing something priced at $3.50 multiple times at $0.20 per listing cost more than I would make from the item. I think I need a few more card styles before I start listing in a second category.

You’re probably sick of hearing about my Etsy store experiences by now, but indulge me just a little longer and join me in celebrating the week when the number of sales surpassed the number of items in stock. In fact, I’m now faced with a problem I didn’t consider when I first began selling three months ago: I’m running out of stock!

But instead of making new books, today I’ve been enjoying my newly laid out workspace and playing with my Gocco printer. I sold my old desk on Craigslist this week, and now my studio has just one desk, the giant paper cart, my comfy chaise, and a small drawer unit that I’m using as a side table for the chaise. The middle of the room is a large open area where I can spread stuff out on the floor. The paper cart has enough space to not only leave the paper cutter up there, but to have a workspace beside it, so I set up the Gocco printer there and was able to leave the computer and other works in progress on my desk. When I had two desks in here I usually just had paper stacked on the second desk, so it wasn’t a usable workspace. This is very happy-making!

I designed business cards today for my Etsy store and ordered a set from Vista Print. What I liked about Vista Print: they had an Illustrator template that I could download to ensure that the resolution, size, and printable area were all set correctly; their price, at $19.99 for 250 cards, seemed about right; and I’ve found a few people who ordered from them and were happy with the results. What I didn’t like: being forced to go through seven screens of upselling during the checkout process. No, I don’t want address labels, note cards, magazine subscriptions, pens, $25 from Google, or any of the other items they were hawking—good grief! I almost went elsewhere. But when I finally got to the last checkout page, there was a field for a Promo Code, which gave me the idea to Google for “vista print promo code” and led me to this rather old blog page which still had valid links to promotional deals on the site. So instead of $25.73 with shipping, my order came to $9.73. The moral of this story: the internet is your friend.

The other exciting thing that happened this week is that my new paper cart arrived yesterday—all 136 pounds of it. I bought the large one, so the shelves are large enough to hold 23″ by 35″ sheets of Mohawk Superfine, rolls of book cloth, full sheets of book board, weights and other tools, AND my giant Kutrimmer paper cutter on top, where it’s usable, instead of on the floor, buried under weights and other tools.

I also finished off some new Coptic-bound journals, the first of which (shown above) is now available in my Etsy store. The remainder will be going up over the next couple of weeks. I’ve now gone through almost all of the prepared sections of paper I had on hand a month ago: they’ve turned into 15 books. Wow!

Having gotten a few practice runs out of the way with the Running with Scissors journal and About the Size journals 1, 2 and 3, I was ready to commit to a hardcover version. I ended up doing this one twice; the first time the binding was perfect, but I pricked my finger during the sewing and bled on the cover. Gah! So I cut the stitching and took the pages out and made a second case.

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