Yet More Books

I seem to be on a book binge.  Guilty guilty guilty.

When I posted on Monday I said I was hoping to get to Dick Blick for board for hard covers, which I did. I also got marbled paper to use instead of the map of Rome, and dark brown book cloth to go with it. And some turquoise blue book cloth to go with flowered Japanese-ish paper I'd picked up at Papersource, a paper crafty store at Deer Park. And another exacto knife handle, and a box of #11 blades, and a small pair of sharp scissors, and some cheap brushes to use for glue, and a box to keep it all in.  

I did order myself a sewing frame, and now am impatiently awaiting it. 

And then I realized that I didn't have any paper that would go nicely with the red marbled and brown book cloth, to make endpapers out of, that wasn't too heavy. Fortunately, I escaped from the office early enough on Wednesday to get to Papersource before they closed (early, and were closed yesterday). Where I got the paper I wanted, plus another sheet of fancy paper, and coordinating book cloth. My excuse is that the fancy paper and book cloth were both half off.  

Wednesday night I took the binder's board up to the big paper cutter, and discovered that it was too wide.  Grumble grumble grumble. Cutting it with an exacto knife was not fun.  And then I discovered the remaining large piece was still too big for the shear. Grumble grumble grumble. A proper Stanley knife worked better. So I did get the boards cut for two books, after putting away letterpress blocks. I also cut paper for book pages.

Went downstairs, started covering the boards with the turquoise book cloth, and discovered I'd cut the boards an inch too small in one direction for the pages I'd cut. I decided to make new pages to fit the cover, and carried on.  So now I have to cut another set of boards to fit a set of pages. I've had an idea to make that easier - get Ron to rough-cut the board down with the Universal Mangler, then trim it on the shear. We were going to try that yesterday, but didn't get that far.

I did get the inch-too-small book done:

It is a Japanese-style binding, where you sew through the cover and pages. Besides the size issue there were several others that jump right out at me, but I've decided not to list them.  

The finished page size, including the part sewn into the binding, is 5-1/2" tall, and 7-1/2" wide. IIRC there's 40 sheets in it. I was originally thinking of making the patterned paper the outeside, but I wanted the book cloth for flexibility. Now that it's done, I like the plain outside with patterned endsheets. It's kind of, oh Ghu, this sounds so pretentiously artsy-fartsy, a surprise for the user to open it up and find the fancy paper.  

So now I need to go back to Dick Blick and (hopefully) get another roll of turquoise book cloth to make the book this one was supposed to be, which will have pale turquoise pages. May do that tonight, or on the way home tomorrow.

Worked on the interior of another hard-backed book a little bit yesterday, no pictures yet, since there's not much to see at this point. 

And then I did two more little booklets, out of the map of Rome paper:

This time I paid more attention, and have the map grid square to the books, and words right-side-up on one side.

Both have more of the generic off-white paper for the pages. I had an issue cutting it, so the pages are 5" (instead of 5-1/2") tall by 4-1/4" wide. End sheets are light olive cardstock.

And the backs. The blue behind them are the sheets that were supposed to be for the blue hardback book I finished yesterday.  I turned these two out fairly quickly, I've gotten to the point where I know what I'm doing with these little booklets, and the only issue is some see-through in the light-colored areas on the one on the left above.

Yeah, I'll have books for sale at Military History Fest. Ron has reassured me that they're good enough to ofer for sale.