I mentioned that I was in an Artist's Book Class, right? So, this class goes at an absurd rate, and basically we make on average anywhere between 2-4 books in each class. It is an all-day class, but I find the pace rather extreme.

The troublesome side is that I rarely have time to pull together stuff to put inside the books, so they are mostly blank-paged. So far we have focused more on the binding techniques. The other difficulty is that between the intense bending and folding in this class, and the sitting in front of a computer for 6 hours in my Saturday class, I have pains stretching well beyond my back (which I am still struggling with and soon to see a doctor about hopefully) and into my neck, jaw, and legs. I'm gonna have to do some crazy figuring on this one, and boost the stretch times from once every 1.5 hours to more like 5 minutes every hour.

The perky side includes the production of many pretty things that actually give me ideas for writing. I think I often work from form to content... seeing the shape I want before I know what's gonna work within the shape (this is a new thing I'm playing with. so often I end up with endless scraps and pieces of stories that fizzle out because I don't know where to take them, but what if I have an artificial design to begin with, follow it, and allow myself flexibility when it is required? will my projects come together more? it's an idea.) I feel pretty good about these things... especially as it's just me learning it all out. So here they are:

This is my first book. It is Pamphlet-Style, 3-hole.


This is the second one I did, also Pamphlet-Stitching binding, but 5-hole and with a cut folding overleaf and an fuzzy-paper insert.


These next four were all done on the same day, and they are different types Stab bindings. The first one we did was the Japanese 4-hole:


This one is called Noble Binding, and I used specialty paper for the cover this time, and black Rives for the inside paper.


This one also uses a specialty paper, and the binding is called Tortoise-Shell.


The binding on this one is a variation on Hemp-Leaf binding that drops off the bottom line of stitching. The cover is also an overleaf cover with a little weird design for fun.


This is one of the books we did today, the one I'm really excited about because you can do multiple pages, multiple editions at the same time, and then pop a cover on the glued pages. This is what most book presses use, and it's called Perfect Binding. We also did a couple different Accordion Books today, but I'm gonna try printing on them this week, and so they're not complete enough to show yet.


And this is the book I'm most pleased about so far (along with the never-ending book, despite my printing woes). We took all day last week to learn this, the Hard-Cover using a selected Stab Binding to hold the covers in place, but I'm extra pleased because I managed to "find some content," as my teacher puts it. I took several stories I'm thinking about making a unit, wrote a new section of it, and added eleven black-and-white pictures of rocks I took this summer. I think it looks pretty sweet, and besides that, I'm planning on reading it in about another week, and see how the material seems as a group... whether it fits, and what it might need. So, basically it is a single edition of a piece I hope to continue working on, but it rather beautifies the revision process for me. Here 'tis: