By Ellen Kuhfeld
Credit the Law of Unintended Consequences for this one.
On May 21, Joanna discussed a room box she’d made, containing a small bookcase.
I commented that since I occasionally bind small books, I’d made a small
bookcase for them. She wrote back suggesting I send her a picture, and things
snowballed from there.
Killer Hobbies is a blog about books that involve
hobbies.
My hobby involves books. I’ve written them, even had one
published professionally. But the real fun is bookbinding. Many bookbinding,
computer, and
fannish terms
are obscure even to book-lovers, so they have links.
I don’t know the
why
of my
bookbinding - I
was doing
chapbooks
way back in the Fifties when I was in high school, for no reason I can really
remember. They were always filled with
something
I'd written or drawn. No blank books, no indeed! That's not the purpose of a
book!
In college, I entered into the wonderful worlds of
science-fiction and comics
fandom.
This was back in the Sixties, the days of printed
fanzines. Some people used
mimeo, but the ink was
filthy and contagious; I went for the clean world of
ditto. The only
fluid involved was alcohol, equally useful as a cleaning fluid. I was a
virtuoso with ditto - six colors, and they stayed in
register! In
grad school I did two issues of a comic book,
Jack's High, where I tried mating ditto colors with
offset printing. The
register wasn't always good, but when it worked, it
worked.
Somewhere in there, Mary Monica (Monica Ferris
these days) decided to write her
persona story. I
published them as chapbooks, and they were quite a hit in the
SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). They earned
her the
Order of the Laurel, one of
the Society's highest honors. Those chapbooks were just the right size to serve
as
signatures in a
book. As a Christmas present, I bound them together -- her first hardcover. Her
first
professionally-published hardcover was later. I've recently
OCR'd
that first series of chapbooks, edited it, and it's now available on Amazon as
The Chronicles of Deer Abbey.
At that point, I was off and running. I read a lot of
fiction from the internet - some of it is fine indeed - and decided I wanted a
particular story in permanent form. I downloaded, proofread, copy-edited, and
laid it out with a publishing program. I bought a
duplexing laser
printer, printed it, and bound it. Since this was a learning experience, I
bound two copies and sent the better copy off to the author, which I've done to
this day with the books I bind - 18 of this sort so far, plus many others.
Some of the stories I dearly wanted in print were simply
too short to make a book - or rather, to make a
full-sized book. Therefore, miniature books. I bind small books the
same way I bind large books; but I make the tools smaller. I started out with
the best how-to book I've met in seventy years of reading and making:
Hand
Bookbinding, by Aldren A. Watson. I learned from the 1963 version, but
there are later editions. Whatever you do, don't get the Kindle edition! The
up-to-date ones are probably better for materials and sources, but you can get
most of what you need from Amazon.
So: the bookcase. It’s Phillipine mahogany, while the
book in front of it, with the coat of arms, is Baltic birch. That’s Mary
Monica’s first hardcover. I bound all the others, too, and for fun decided to
make both hardcover and paperback versions of Ryoko Saotome, the two
books furthest to the right.
You can go to the
website
of a small -book publisher who also makes miniatures (people who make and
furnish dollhouses would love it!) and has some suggestions.
Gabrielle Fox has some
handsome books, and does restoration work.
Peter and
Donna Thomas make miniature books, but they tend to
commit art to the detriment of the
book. Miniature books may be a better place than most to commit
art, but still - I don't approve of accordion bindings, and they go even
further than that.
De
Walden Press has some handsome little books displayed, though they're
out of that business now. Their website is hard to navigate, so the link will
drop you on their index page.
Tony
Firman makes miniature books, and the equipment for making miniature books;
and he has
manuals
that tell you how to make your own equipment. The term "miniature" is
loose: in the US, the books have to be less than 3" in each dimension. In
England, they have to be less than 4". So the book with the bonsai on the
cover is English miniature, not American. Under 1” it’s considered dollhouse
size.
Serendipitously, bookbinding is useful for
self-publishing, which I also do. I prepare the text as usual; but then instead
of binding it, ship it off to a print-on-demand printer. I use
Createspace on Amazon, but there are
many others. For details, visit my web site,
Don’t
call me Little Washuu. It doesn’t say a thing about bookbinding, but The
Lab has my e-mail address.
