Communion Of Dreams

At long last …

It’s been five years since I last wrote about my efforts to come up with a satisfactory cover design for the premium leather edition of Communion of Dreams. Well, needless to say, a lot has happened since then. Not the least of which was getting, and learning to use, my Glowforge laser.

And now I’ve finally resolved the many different design and execution issues to my satisfaction, to the point where I’m completing the promised leather-backed copies for my Kickstarter supporters. Here it is:

This is going to be a bit about this binding, and how it differs from the hardcover cloth binding.

First thing, the sewing is different. Rather than just being sewn onto linen tapes, the books are sewn onto heavy linen cords:

Why the weird arrangement? So that those cords provide additional texture to the spine of the finished book, along the location of where the tree branches are (see the first pic above). Once the sewing was done, the text blocks were glued up and rounded slightly. All of that was very straight-forward.

However, as noted in that blog post in 2016, the problem I had was trying to achieve the raised texture of the tree for the rest of the cover. I played around with a bunch of different solutions, until I settled on using the laser to cut out a slightly abstracted version of the Burr Oak image:

That’s in the bed of the laser. The material is archival 50pt board. Trying to cut out such an image by hand would take me hours, probably. The laser does it in about four minutes. (Though I did spend some considerable amount of time coding the design so the laser would do it.)

Here’s the image free of the surrounding board:

That is then pasted onto a sheet of paper, and the book cover boards are mounted on the back in the appropriate location. Then it is time to mount the leather, and impress it such that the tree is in relief, with this result:

(Actually, that was a practice piece, not the final version pictured above. But I forgot to take an image of the final version at this stage.)

The edges of the leather are then turned-in, and the corners formed. This gives you a finished case (what bookbinders call the cover).

Next, need to do the titling. And this is where the laser once again comes in very handy, though it took me a while to get just the right technique worked out. After the design for the title is done, the leather is masked and then engraved with the laser to an appropriate depth:

Once that is done, the engraved areas are cleaned of residual charred leather, and gilding size applied:

Once that cures, then it’s time to apply the gold leaf:

Now, that’s real gold, in multiple layers, about $25 worth. This process is different than traditional gilding done by bookbinders, so I had to work up a whole different process to do it (based on my experience with traditional gilding). The result is very satisfactory, though, since I have a much greater range of options for the final design.

Once the titling work was done, it was time to prepare to mount the text block to the case. First, I tear the outer page of the outer signature, and trim the cords to the appropriate length:

This combination, with the two liner tabs, will make for a *very* secure mounting to insure the cover and text block stay together. Then, you fray out the linen cords, so that they will not present excess bulk inside the cover:

Then the whole thing is pasted out and mounted inside the case, similar to how the hardcover cloth bindings were done. Once everything is dry and secure, I added endpapers of hand-marbled paper I made:

Giving the finished product:

I tried a lot of different color combinations, and have decided that this is the one I think works the best (and echoes the original cover nicely). My Kickstarter backers have the option of choosing a different color, but henceforth this will be the only color option available for other collectors.

Next, after finishing these bindings: designing the premium leather binding for St Cybi’s Well.

Jim Downey