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 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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Last bit of the cover stock from the damaged poster. This is the Buttonhole Stitch Binding from Keith Smith’s Non-Adhesive Bindings book. I didn’t fold the cover all the way over to the spine in this one, just made flaps like a dust jacket, and the spine is only folded double from where the cutout is made. The result is that the spine doesn’t feel as substantial to me as the others did (only two layers instead of three), and I found when I pulled the threads tight I wore grooves in the edges where the threads went over the top and bottom. But I like the way the vertical threads cross the horizontal lines in the drawing.

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Folding paper can be relaxing. We have broad window sills in our condo, about 21" deep, and sometimes I’ll work there, folding the paper into sections while listening to an audio book and watching the people and the traffic below me. I’ll get into a rhythm of picking up a large sheet of paper, matching the corners and finger-pressing the fold, and setting it aside, and then moving to the next sheet. Then I’ll crease all the folds with a bone folder and tear them (or not), restack the paper, and make the next fold on all the sheets.

Now if only I could motivate my butt to get out the PVA and make some cases.

One more journal in the Long Stitch bindings series. This is a sibling journal to About the Size Journal #1: same size, same paper, same poster, but with a variation on the spine stitching.

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Playing with some more long stitch bindings. This is the classic Long Stitch through Slotted Cover binding from Keith Smith’s Non-Adhesive Bindings book, except that I poked four holes in the spine instead of using slots. Like the Running with Scissors journal, I used part of a damaged Jay Ryan print for the cover, and 24 lb Mohawk Superfine for the pages. The journal measures 4-1/2 inches wide by 5-3/4 inches high and has 192 pages in 8 sections.

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I’m shaking things up a bit with my bookbinding and trying some new things. I’ve been inspired by some of the work Dennis Yuen has done with exposed bindings on hardcover journals, but I haven’t done any long stitch bindings in quite a while (since summer 2006, apparently), so I’m practicing, and my first result is the Running with Scissors journal.

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