Green Chair Press Blog

Making an Edition, Part 1

Model of book and slipcase I liked the model I’ve been playing with recently and have decided to make an edition of that book. It’s a miniature — slightly under 3″x3″ — called “Summer in Vermont,” with some of my haiku and illustrations and a Turkish map fold at the end. I’m printing the drawings on my Epson ink jet, but will be letterpress printing the haiku from metal type (Bembo). It’ll come in a slip case — that’s my working model on the left, showing the book coming out of the slip case.
The next big decision is how many to make. Since I’m hand-setting the type it’ll be more difficult to increase the number in the edition once the type is broken down. Twenty-five seems to be a good number, but I’ll print enough for 30 in case something goes wrong!
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll report how the edition making is proceeding.

Binding in a Mapfold

I’ve been wanting to incorporate the turkish map fold into one more book structure — how would I bind it into a book with a text block? The first book class I took, with Kumi Korf, made a book with a shadowbox at the end. I used what I learned in that class to make my book Haiku. So I went back to that book to see if it gave me any ideas for. I particularly liked that the last “page” of the book was related to the contents of the shadowbox. Unfortunately the spine construction wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I made a few models and decided to use a spine that would accommodate the text block on the left side and the mapfold on the right. Here’s the model, so you can see the spine. On the left is a piece of folded cardstock that holds the mapfold — a picture of the bridge on the outside opens up to a photo of the inside of the bridge — see the second picture below.

Untranslatable

Illustrator Fuchsia Macaree has created an a-z of untranslatable words in various languages. To the left is age-tori, a Japanese word meaning “to look worse after a haircut.” See them all here.

Prompt challenge: 2013 calendars

Last January I challenged myself to take a word a week and use it as inspiration to make a book (or, really, anything). In April I got busy with other things, and stopped. But not before I had enough ideas for a year’s worth of bookmaking. One week I made half a dozen collages and I’ve used those as the starting point for my 2013 calendar. Despite my spotty blogging since April, I’ve been slowly and steadily working away on the calendar, and yesterday I finished. They are printed, cut, collated and stored in their plastic stands, waiting to be sold this fall. That’s a pile of them on the left. As with all my other calendars, this one has a design and haiku for each month—for July (shown):

wildflower dance—
up to my knees
in pink.

Alphabets

When I first started making books, I endeavored to make 26 different alphabet books. I gave up after a dozen or so (you can see one of them here). I’ve continued to collect them, if not make my own, and recently happened upon a print and fold alphabet, shown below and mentioned on How about orange. And a trove of alphabet books on Brain Pickings including a few I own, such as Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

Another Map Fold Book

I recently found another variation for making a book with the turkish map fold. This one is from Michelle Wilson. She’s made the fold (instructions here) and folded it in half, to form a spine, and then she’s sewn it into a folded piece of paper. This method lets you exploit the hidden folds. Wilson says ‘The text winds between the main pages and a set of “secret pages” between the folds, creating a narrative about what is seen and unseen, remembered and forgotten.’ One of the “secret pages” is shown in the second photo below.