The Bard and me, and a secret

Sometime last Fall I was approached to do something to go with the display of the Shakespeare First Folio which was coming to town.  After talking with them I proposed making a binding in the style of books of that era, but with cut aways so that people could see the insides. See the structure.  This Folio is from the Bodlean Library in its original binding.

It was then proposed that the first few pages of the Folio would be printed using the letterpress equipment in the UA Art School on some handmade paper.

Great ideas all around.

Unfortunately we live in a society where public cultural institutions are gasping for air.  Well, not their basketball or football teams but, you know, the school part of the equation.  This meant that there wasn't any money for it.  Like virtually none.  Karen Zimmerman at the Art School is fantastic, and took on the printing of the pages. Which involved getting plates made and finding a student to do the printing.

But, because there were no funds, she had to do it when she could find the time.  Money and time sort of go hand in hand, money sort of buys time.  Karen couldn't get to it until January. She's busy, she's teaching, the holidays were happening.  And she had no money to hire someone to take it on as a project.  It's one thing to ask a student to print a few pages, a whole other thing to do all the leg work that led up to that point.  It wasn't going to be a simple task, it takes time to find the images, she needed the plates to print, send them off, and so on...

I wanted the pages by mid-January.  I was going to go all out, even though it was a volunteer project. (I did get some money for it, but it pretty much just covered the materials.)  Edge treatments, double flexible sewing, endbands, decorative tooling.  I wanted two or three weeks.  I really was looking forward to doing the work, my contribution to culture and all that.

In the end I received the pages at the start of February, around dinner time on a Monday.  I needed to line up a video crew from the library and the local PBS station to film the process, so I couldn't do anything until Wednesday.

(By the way here is the link to one of the videos they produced. It's really nicely done.)

https://vimeo.com/154792425

Wednesday I sewed it. After they left I rounded and backed it,  lined the boards, sewed the endbands. Thursday I laced on the boards, lined the spine, pared the leather and dyed it.  Friday I applied fixative to the leather dye and let that dry, then pasted out the leather and put it on the book.  At that point I watched the clock and let the leather dry as long as I dared and did the paste downs and some simple tooling.  Done.

Not what I had hoped or planned for.  But this does happen when projects like this are taken on; everyone does what they can and everyone moves on.  Who hasn't been there?  I was amazed at the work Karen and her student did, and enjoyed taking the book as far along as I could.  I also tried not to spend too much time thinking about the values of society.

But the one thing it made me want is to develop a super secret system for binders.  I haven't fully developed it but here goes:


NT should be discreetly placed in locations of bindings where the client did not provide enough time to do the necessary or wanted work.

NM should be placed in locations of bindings where the client didn't provide enough money to have the desired work done.


Now where and how exactly I'm not totally sure.  They would have to be done in a way that "civilians" wouldn't really notice. Or if they saw those notations they wouldn't register.  Maybe I should apply for a grant in order to properly research the feasibility of the idea.  We could also add

NG for no guts, but that's probably another concept all together.

The thing is that we can't let anyone know we're doing this!

Anyway here is the book.  I was rather disappointed with it when I was done so didn't take any pictures. But on the night of the opening "gala" I had my iPad and took some.  Bad pictures, but that's perfectly fine.  And I'd do it again.

In the end it was put on a table with a bunch of other stuff about the folio.  A nice place to rest your hands, it seems.  And that's perfectly fine.  It just could have been so much more.

Is this a thing?

I had some students who wanted to make good corners without having to freehand the cuts.  Now, normally I want to only teach the "right" way of doing things because you never know.  Maybe someone will end up doing this work forever, and it will be their life, but if they started out with jigs and shortcuts I wonder if they'll ever rise above that.  Learn to do it right, then pull out the jigs if there's a reason.

It seems to me that people cling to what they first learned and often have a hard time understanding that what they were shown in the most basic of classes may not really be the best way to approach all their projects as their work approaches greater and greater heights.  It sort of reminds me of birds imprinting people as their mother.  They need to move beyond that but they can't.

I had some pieces of aluminum around and a few minutes to kill while I was waiting for stuff to dry.  So I put an end mill into the milling machine, drew some lines on the aluminum and went to town.  I ended up with this:

What mattered was the angle, obviously, and then the distance between the top of the triangle and the opposing edge of the metal. It should be around 1.5 board thicknesses.  This is pretty close to 1.5 of a 98 point board.  Between setting things up and doing the milling it probably took 5 minutes, with three of those minutes being spend on drawing the cut lines.  

The idea is that the notch sets on the corner of the board:

It gets pulled down to the corner and then I cut the edge:

In the end you get this:

One thing to add is that I wanted the length of the piece to be longer than the covering material would be, but it was even more important that my hands be able to grab the ends with two fingers so that I can use it quickly.  My hands are pretty large - I could palm a basketball in the 8th grade, my only real basketball skill by the way.  Perhaps it might be better if it was shorter for those with smaller hands.   Does Trump do bookbinding?  I'll make a shorter one for him. 

I wanted to be able to hold handle it like this:

Today, even though it's a holiday, I put material on ten covers. I decided to use this for the fun of it (did I mention it's a holiday, I should have some fun!) so ended up cutting 40 corners.  It took me around 8 seconds to cut the four corners on one cover.  I think it worked.

But I wonder if it's a thing that I haven't seen before.  Or maybe I've seen it and forgotten about it.  In any event I think it'll be a thing for me at times and for some of my classes.  

But if it is a new thing it might be just to ticket to get that Nobel Prize so that I can shake the King's hand and make up for blowing that opportunity in a windy hanger at SeaTac in 1975.  Some day I'll get over it, I'm sure.  I know.  I hope.

Precision & Pride and Mail Fraud

One more library story before I get back to binding and conservation. I feel I need these posts as a warm up so that I won't pull a finger muscle when I get up to speed with "real" posts.

After I graduated from Washington I continued on in graduate school for a quarter, until I realized that a master's degree in Scandinavian Studies probably wasn't going to really do anything for me.  Or anything I really wanted anyway.  So, instead I got into a program to get a teaching certificate, also at UW.

But I was no longer at the Reserve Desk (mainly because none of my friends worked there any more so it wasn't all that much fun), but liked working in libraries and applied for a job at Government Publications.  It was in Suzzallo Library, a church of a library on Red Square, just across from Odegaard.

(It was the same building where I ended up fixing books for several years about ten years later.  In between I taught high school social studies for a bit, moved to Boston and was on my way without having any idea where I would end up.)

At Gov Pubs I had the job of checking in publications that came from around the world.  It was pretty hard, actually, because stuff would come in from around the world with 15 word titles but really the title was "Report" or "Newsletter" or something like that.  It was easy after a few months of questions but a bit frustrating at the outset.

The best part of the job was meeting this guy.  If you look up "nicest guy on the planet" in Wikipedia you will see a picture of him.  I still talk to him fairly often (and I had this job in the early 80s) and, frankly, think the world would be a better place if he lived next door to us.  I give you a picture of Andy (in the middle) with Robby, his husband.  Robby is very, very nice as well, but somehow Andy ended up with the Wikipedia entry.  You'll have to ask him how he aced Robby out of that recognition.  Andy was one of the librarians, specializing in Washington state documents.

After going to the Torchlight Parade in Seattle one year, and seeing the police motorcycle drill team, I came up with the idea for a Library Book Truck Drill Team.  It didn't exist, of course, but I would tell other student employees about it and asked they wanted to be part of it. It took a few hours of practice every Saturday morning, I'd tell them, but it was really fun doing the parades.  It was hard pushing a cart in formation for a few miles without books falling off, but we modified the carts with better wheels.  The challenge was remembering all the formations and weaving we did during the parade.

Many of them were interested, actually MOST were interested, and I would tell them go to talk to a librarian in Gov Pub.  They would go ask about it, find out it was a joke and everyone would get a good laugh.  Somehow I hope that joke carried on.













That was fun but there was something better.


Anyway, the job was checking in stacks of stuff.  Including lots from Norway who was publishing voraciously because of their oil money I heard.  Lots and lots from Norway.  Like, a lot.  But stuff came from everywhere.

In the envelopes were cards that came with the publications.  "Courtesy of the National Bank of Zambia"  "Compliments of the Republic of China"  "Gift from the Department of Commerce of Guyana"  We got stuff from most countries in the world, and most annouced with cards.  In all honesty I could never figure out why they felt it necessary to include the cards.  Were they afraid we would be confused why we were receiving them, or that we would think we had to pay for them?

I was told I could just throw them away, but instead I kept them.  Then I would go buy a pack of gum or some candy, or find a half used pencil. Something not worth buying, let alone mailing.  Then I would put the insignificant item in a padded envelope, add one of the cards, type out the address and return address, and then mail it to a friend. So they would get a worn out pencil "compliments of the Reserve Bank of Mauritania."

Fortunately they'd toss the envelope before thinking about checking the postmark.

It was almost as much fun as the phone calls, but not quite since it lacked immediacy and I didn't always hear about it.  What's nice is that I still have a few of the cards still kicking around.  Maybe you'll get a half used pad of post-it notes from the National Bank of Norway.