Yesterday I spent a pleasant hour or so binding a new set of my Reader’s Diary books. Many of the books I make are sewn together with needle and thread, but this one uses a wire or spiral binding. It’s a 3 step process: punch the holes for all the pages and the cover using the machine, insert the spirally wire in the holes (machine doesn’t do that), and then press the wire loops closed (the machine helps with that — I stick the book in a slot in the binder and pull down on the shorter lever to apply even pressure to the spine).
I use the binding machine at the San Francisco Center for the Book — it’s great to live so close to a place with lots of equipment I can rent when I need it! Especially this one. I looked into buying a wire binder, but even the low end models are awfully expensive for the amount of use it would get. Tina Kay, who teaches workshops in using the binder, pointed out to me that the cheaper models only bind a fixed sized spine (usually 11″), and I would definitely want a binder that allows me to vary the spine size.
I’m a bit of a word junky. I love to discover new words or meanings for words I didn’t know or even new meanings for words I do know. A good source for new meanings is the Urban Dictionary. My husband Harold found this site when he was trying to prove to me that some word he made up was actually a word (I lost the argument). I used it recently to figure out what crunchiest means in “He was clocked doing 100 miles an hour in the crunchiest of cars” where the car in question was a Toyota Prius. Here’s the definition:
CRUNCHY. Adjective. Used to describe persons who have adjusted or altered their lifestyle for environmental reasons.
For the same reasons I also like to read poetry, especially where the familiar meanings of words are turned on their head. I have a collection of poems that I use to find titles for my broadsides. One line I recently used for a title is A Madness Well Restrained, from At the Mermaid Cafeteria by Christopher Morley (d. 1957). The poem refers to the art and passion that go into the making of a poem. But of course it extends to the making of anything one is passionate about, as in my case, wood type collages with numerals.
TRUTH is enough for prose:
Calmly it goes
To tell just what it knows.
For verse, skill will suffice–
Delicate, nice
Casting of verbal dice.
Poetry, men attain
By subtler pain
More flagrant in the brain–
An honesty unfeigned,
A heart unchained,
A madness well restrained.
 When I’m working out a book design, I like to sit on the floor with a pile of swatch books and my big box of paper samples to figure out the right paper to use. Color, weight, price, and sheet size all contribute to the decision. I’d love to be able to afford any kind of paper for my books and get that paper in small quantities locally. But it never works out that way. Right now I’m working out the design for my 2008 calendar, and I’d like to use colored paper. There are so many choices for white and off-white paper, but colored paper — not so much. I’ve used French Paper for several books. It’s a family run paper mill in the mid-west and they sell smaller quantities of paper from their website. Recently I found out that they have several new lines of paper and I got the new swatch books this week. I’m especially excited about Pop-Tone (that’s the swatches on the right). These are colors I can’t get elsewhere, plus they sell matching envelopes too.
In the Spring of 2006, one of my letterpress students told me about Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods. I wrote down the name but didn’t get around to looking at the site until August. I discovered it hardly cost anything to list my books. I already had pretty good photographs from trying to sell from my personal website, and making sales from my own website was proving difficult, so I took the plunge and opened an Etsy shop. The past year has been quite an education–improving my photography skills, figuring out how to safely mail my orders, doing accounting. This week I’m honored to have been selected as the featured seller! You can read my interview here.
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Every July most of my projects come to a standstill as I spend all my spare time and then some watching the Tour de France. Here in California the real-time TV coverage starts about 3:30 AM, which is too early even for me. So I watch the final hour when I get up in the morning and then the 3 hour re-broadcast in the evening. This year I thought ahead a little bit and folded another set of my haiku and Winter books during the commericals. Now that the race is over, I guess it’s back to work for me!
Biking was the subject of some of my first bookbinding projects. After I first learned to make boxes, I practiced by making a few “Bicycle Emergency Kits” for friends. The boxes had handlebar tape for the hinge and handle, and inside I made dividers for each part of the kit — a spare tube, tire patches to fix flats, food rations and a little book of silly instructions for dealing with emergencies including a quarter for a phone call in a pocket in the back.
When the San Francisco Center for the Book got a 