Month: April 2007

Bookmaking for Kids

San Francisco BookMy friend Cathy Miranker runs the youth program at SFCB. She coordinates (as well as teaches) bookmaking classes in the public schools all over the Bay Area, from San Jose to Marin. She’s planning a summer bookmaking institute for teachers this summer — 3 days of bookmaking ideas. I’ve helped her document and photograph the books the kids make, and the stories and pictures are always amazing in their inventiveness (even kindergarteners). Be sure to take a look at the gallery of kids’ work that Cathy has assembled for the book center’s website. UPDATE: Check out Cathy’s blog about bookmaking and kids.

Paper for laser printing and letterpress

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I’m always trying to find paper that I can print on a laser or ink jet printer and then letterpress. Lots of paper for ink jet and laser printers isn’t cotton or archival or it’s coated. Text weight letterpress paper for books is often expensive per sheet and usually (at least for where I live) has to be mail ordered.

For this book I did of a friend’s poems, he wanted to include both photographs and letterpress. After some experiments, I found that the photos reproduced well on Mohawk Superfine using a color laser printer. I’ve used Mohawk Superfine for other letterpressed books, and it’s reasonably priced. Plus, I could get parent sheets from a local Kelly Paper, rather than mail order.

Making a hard bound book was going to be too expensive, so to make the binding special and affordable, we decided to sew the sections through the cover onto tapes and then weave the tapes into the front & back.

Spine showing sewing

Front cover

Linoleum Block Prints

Maia’s Fish In my quest for finding appropriate printing methods for my books and broadsides, last fall I took Maia de Raat’s “Introduction to Linoleum Block Carving”, at the San Francisco Center for the Book. I’ve carved linoleum blocks before, but Maia had a set of Japanese wood carving knives that she let us try. Wow! So much easier than the cheap Speedball knives I bought at the art store. She suggested we get knives at McClains.

For the past several years, SFCB’s had a fund raiser called “Steam roller prints” where large-scale linoleum blocks carved especially for the occasion are printed using a steam roller (You can see pictures of some of the past events here. One year Maia did a print of fish (seems to be her favorite subject!)