Filed under: Art, Ballistics, Connections, Guns, tech | Tags: .40 S&W, ammo, ammunition, ballistics, BBTI, black powder, blogging, Discussion., firearms, guns, Hand Gonne, jim downey, technology
[For the AI’s own inscrutable reasons, Facebook considers my ballistics blog “spam”. Unable to get it resolved, I’m going to post partial info about new blog posts over there, here, so people can link it off FB. Please just ignore if shooting stuff isn’t of interest.]
Last Fall I taught a day-long workshop on “Primitive Black Powder Firearms” for the Liberal Gun Club‘s Annual Meeting in Las Vegas. In addition to my own black powder guns, I borrowed a couple of items from friends to help fill out the historical selection, including this very nice reproduction of a 14th century .62 cal cast bronze hand gonne:
[The entire post with LOTS of pics and info on making this historic reproduction gun can be found here.]
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Connections, General Musings, Wales | Tags: Archaeology, art, blogging, book art, bookbinding, Glowforge, Helen Geake, Ireland, Jeremy England, jim downey, laser, Patreon, Phil Harding, Scotland, St. Cybi's Well, Tim Taylor, Time Team, Wales
My wife and I have been big fans of the UK TV show “Time Team” for a long time, and a couple of years ago when producer Tim Taylor decided to try and revive the series using a Patreon model, we were happy to sign on and tell a number of our friends about it. Unsurprisingly, we discovered that the series was also popular in our friends group, especially those who share our interest in English/Welsh/Scottish/Irish history.
Well, about a year ago, one of our friends entered a competition hosted by Time Team about the series, and, well, I’ll let her tell the rest:
Maybe you remember back in October, Time Team asked people to tell them “What are you most excited about Time Team returning, and why?” Like many people I fangirled a bit to show my appreciation, then forgot about it.
So I was very surprised when Time Team contacted me around Thanksgiving to tell me they liked my comment so much they are sending a gift. I asked if they would send it to the friends who had introduced me to Time Team, and given Customs and all they thought it would be less confusing if it came to me.
And she sent it to us: Custom Time Team Trowel #400.
Well, we were thrilled. It’s really cool to hold that thing in your hand, feel a connection to the show we loved.
But we decided that after we’d kept it for a time, that it would be best to share it. To pass it on to someone else who shared our love for the show. For it to become a ‘traveling trophy’.
I spent some time thinking about it over this past busy (and eventful) year, and finally decided to make a simple journal for recipients of the “Traveling Trowel” to record some thoughts and dreams inspired by the show. And of course, there needed to be a box to hold the trowel and journal. I wanted everything to feel informal, yet professional. Sorta like Time Team.
This was the result:
In order to set the stage for the journal, I asked my wife to write the following introduction:
This trowel is magical.
Take it in your hand. Feel the weight of it. The balance. How it fits into your palm. How your thumb and fingers curl around it.
Then close your eyes. Let your mind roam. To somewhere you love, even if you’ve never been there in person. Picture the place. Then channel your inner Phil Harding. Or Helen Geake. Or whichever member of the Time Team, past or present, comes to mind. See yourself exploring the past of the site you’ve chosen, trowel in hand.
Then, if you’re willing, share here where you’ve been. Where the Traveling Trowel has taken you.
And, as a record documenting the history of the Trowel, I mounted my friend’s letter next, followed by my own entry. For that entry I naturally pictured St Cybi’s Well …
Ffynnon Gybi
There, in the valley below the hamlet of Llangybi on the Llŷn Peninsula, the old stone structures beckon. But behind them, the Holy Well itself springs forth.
It is here that the trowel leads me. Without disturbing the ground, I can visualize scraping away the upper layers of dirt. Removing the modern soil. Down past the traces of the 18th and 19th century structures that now dominate the site. Deeper, to the remaining imprint of the medieval surface where pilgrims knelt beside the water, seeking healing for body and soul.
Then deeper still, seeking the foundations of myth of the man who would become Saint Cybi. Perhaps his simple hovel where he meditated, seeking a connection with his God. Perhaps some small artifact which has survived the centuries, uncovered, pristine in my mind’s eye, a holy relic …
The Traveling Trowel will move on. I hope that each recipient will add their own bit to the lore of it. But I also hope that each recipient will give the next person some small memento related to their time with it. Here’s what I made for my friend, us, and the person that I have passed it on to:
Thanks for visiting. And if you haven’t yet, check out the Time Team Patreon page.
Jim Downey
Just a note: none of this is for sale. And yes, I took some minor liberties with the official Time Team design to better fit my personal aesthetic and the capabilities of my laser. No criticism of the original design is intended.
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Brave New World, Connections, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Health, Humor, Machado-Joseph, New Horizons, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Society | Tags: art, arthritis, ataxia, balance, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, fasciculation, genetics, guns, health, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Machado-Joseph Disease, medicine, MJD, MMJ, neurology, neuromuscular disease, pain, peripheral neuropathy, SCA3, Science Fiction, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, St. Cybi's Well, travel, vertigo, Wikipedia
For about 30 years, I’ve been a conservator of rare books & documents.
That came to an end yesterday when I met with my last institutional client and explained that I need to retire officially as a practicing conservator. Since they follow my blog posts and social media presence, this did not come as a surprise.
As I was driving home from the meeting, I was working through a fairly predictable mix of emotions. Guilt, because I know that this means that important works in their collection won’t get the treatment they need anytime soon. Relief, because now I won’t worry about accidentally damaging some important/valuable book or document. Loss, because my career was now over. Pride, because I know that I have done good work over the years, and made a real difference. And disorientation, because for some 30 years a big part of my identity was being a Book Conservator in private practice — something almost as rare as many of the items I have worked on over the last four decades.
I think anyone who reaches retirement age probably has some mixed emotions about actually retiring. But for most people, they’re ready to retire — to live life on their own terms, to travel, to just get out of the office, to get away from annoying co-workers.
The problem is, I wasn’t ready to retire. And I had already arranged my life so that I lived it largely on my own terms. I’ve traveled. I didn’t have an office I had to go to. I don’t have co-workers who annoy me. I had honestly expected that I would continue to do conservation work until old age claimed me, since the work is typically not strenuous.
MJD had other ideas, as I’ve noted.
So, officially, I am no longer a Book Conservator.
Yes, I am still many other things. An artist. A writer. A cool, handsome guy who is just 64 and certain that he’s still a babe magnet.
OK, maybe not that last one.
But the point remains that there are still many facets of my identity that remain, even though I have of necessity set aside the title “Book Conservator”.
I suppose “Retired Book Conservator” still sounds pretty cool.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Art, Book Conservation, Brave New World, Connections, Feedback, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Guns, Health, Machado-Joseph, Predictions, Preparedness, RKBA, Science Fiction, Travel, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: art, arthritis, ataxia, balance, black powder, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, fasciculation, genetics, guns, health, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Liberal Gun Club, Machado-Joseph Disease, medicine, MJD, MMJ, neurology, neuromuscular disease, pain, peripheral neuropathy, SCA3, Science Fiction, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, St. Cybi's Well, travel, Utah, vertigo, wabi-sabi, Wikipedia, www youtube
Recently I drove out to Las Vegas, for the first post-Covid national meeting of the Liberal Gun Club (I can be seen at several points in the video, wearing a red & white flannel shirt). It’s a drive I’ve made previously in two days (about 12 hours each day), but I decided that it would be wise for me to split it up into three days each way, to better reduce my stress and better accommodate the unpredictable episodes of MJD symptoms (since I didn’t want to take any of the painkillers or MMJ stuff that help me manage those episodes while I was driving).
It was a good decision. When I had an flair-up of symptoms, I knew that I could take a break without feeling a lot of time-pressure.
And it gave me more time to think.
To think about this past year, and where I’ve found myself. To think about the LGC event (particularly after it was over, and I could reflect upon what happened there). To think about the near-term future.
As I noted yesterday (and in this series of MJD-related blog posts generally), it’s been a challenging year. And there’s nothing like going naked (in the sense of not taking any meds) for a prolonged period of time to show you, honestly and clearly, what your real condition actually is.
Mine isn’t bad. But it is perhaps a lot worse than I had realized, in my day-to-day life. That’s because being able to take things that help manage it means that I can largely ignore the symptoms. Without those meds, though, the truth tends to be a little sharper edged (as is the pain). While teaching a black powder workshop I had hand spasms that were so bad I couldn’t hold onto the gun I was using at the time, let alone manage to load it. So much for the idea that being focused on a given task (which I was) would be enough to set aside that symptom. I verbally walked my students through the process, and we got on the other side of it fine. But it was a sobering moment.
A moment that drove home the idea that it was time for me to make some changes. Specifically, that it is time for me to pretty much completely retire from conservation work. As I noted in this blog post last May:
As a conservator, I can’t afford to celebrate my mistakes. There will of necessity come a time when I need to stop doing conservation work, out of respect for the items entrusted to my care. That time is rapidly approaching; indeed, it may already be here.
I think I crossed that line sometime this summer. So the time has come for me to (mostly) stop doing conservation work altogether, at least in terms of being hands-on.
That’s a big change for me. I’ve largely defined myself as being a book conservator for 30 years.
* * *
Western Utah is stunning. But also bleak. And more than a little alien to my Midwestern eye.
I think those vistas, and the mental space I was in on my drive home, helped me realize something else.
That I’m ready to start writing a sequel to Communion of Dreams.
I hesitate even mentioning this, since I had so many people after me about the long delays in writing St Cybi’s Well. But I decided to share it to help offset the seemingly ‘bad’ news that I need to retire as a conservator.
So here’s the deal: don’t ask how it is going, or when I expect it to be done. I’m at the very beginning of the whole process, and it is likely to take years. I may occasionally mention things about it. Or not. But asking me about it is not going to get any additional information beyond what I volunteer, and will just annoy me. You can wish me well with the writing, but leave it at that, OK?
Thanks.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Health, Kindle, Machado-Joseph, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Just over a year ago I did a write up on completing the leather bindings for Communion of Dreams. This is going to be a similar documentation of completing the leather bindings for St Cybi’s Well.
Unlike the sewing structure for CoD, the sewing for SCW is exactly the same as for the hand-bound hardcover edition. Since I have already done a thorough documentation of that process, I see no reason to repeat it here. Instead, I’ll just refer you to that original post: Turning words into books.
And likewise, a couple of months ago I did a post about the actual design of the cover of the leather edition of St Cybi’s Well, so there’s no reason to go over all of that again. You can find that post here: Well, well, well …
The first thing in doing the full edition of 14 books, I needed to cut out sufficient “stones” of bookboard to form the relief on the front cover, and get those each laid out and mounted on the heavy bookboard. This was made possible by the use of my Glowforge laser to cut through the heavy bookboard. The “stones” were laid out such that one blank space was left for the mounting of a real slice of Preseli Bluestone from the quarry at Craig Rhosyfelin on the outside of the leather:
My Kickstarter backers selected what color leather they wanted for the cover of their books, and I ordered in the leather that I didn’t already have in stock. It’s all high-quality bookbinding goatskin:
I calculated how big of a piece of leather I needed for each book, and made a jig cutting those out:
Then those needed to have reference lines laid out, the corners cut and all the edges pared down:
The Communion of Dreams leather covers had the slight raised image of the Burr Oak tree, which was made using an archival board with a thickness of 0.02″. The archival bookboard I used for the “stones” of the St Cybi’s Well design were 0.10″ — five times as thick. Because of this, some additional work was needed to make sure that the leather conformed to the “stones”.
The first step was to saturate the outside of the leather with distilled water in the area of the front cover:
The the inside of the leather was pasted out with adhesive:
And the front cover was positioned. A barrier of plastic film was put on each side, then a sheet of foam core was positioned to cover the entire front cover. That was then placed between two press boards and the whole sandwich was put into my large nipping press. The press was cranked down, and the sandwich was left to dry overnight. The next day, this is what the end result looked like:
Then I mounted the rear board, as well as the spine liner, and turned the edges in (be sure to read my Wabi-sabi post about this):
After all the covers (the bookbinding term is “cases”) were finished, I mounted the text block as per usual. At this point, they were books, but they weren’t finished.
First, I wanted to get the endpapers mounted. Typically, this would just be done by tipping in the endpaper, then pasting it out and sticking it in a press for a quick nip. But I wanted these books to be a little more hand-fitted, so I pasted out the slightly over-size endpaper, then carefully by hand laid it out in position before pressing:
This makes the hinge joint a little more flexible, and the book friendly to open and read. A small thing, but with a book of this quality, an important one. Once the endpapers were mounted, I trimmed the excess off.
The next step was to mount the thin spiral cut from sparkly blue commercial glitterpaper using the laser. This was a visual reference to a similar image in the book. The trick was to mount the narrow, somewhat fragile, spiral of paper without distortion, damage, or excess adhesive. To do this, I first positioned the off-cut of the spiral using low-tack tape:
Then I pasted out a sheet of waste paper. Carefully laying down the thin spiral on top of the waste sheet, I lightly tapped the spiral so that a thin application of adhesive was transferred to the back. I carefully lifted the spiral off the adhesive, supporting it across the center with a micro-spatula. I was then able to position it into the void of the off-cut:
Using a narrow bone folder, I then pressed the thin spiral down along the entire surface, and then removed the off-cut:
This was then given a quick nip in the press to set the adhesive.
Once all the endpapers & spirals were mounted, it was time to mount the blue “water” inside the well design:
With the “water” mounted, I masked that area and did the title etching in the laser, using the same technique I developed for the titling on Communion of Dreams:
The titling done, I added a small tip-in sheet with the colophon and edition number:
I mounted each slice of Preseli Bluestone in the appropriate place on each book. Here they all are, arranged so as to re-create the “well” design with each stone in the proper location:
And they’re all done. 9 of the 14 bindings are going to their new homes, and one is staying with me. That leaves these four bindings still available for adoption:
If you’re interested in adopting one of these books, and perhaps a matching # copy of Communion of Dreams, feel free to contact me for the details: jim@communionblog
It’s likely that given my MJD, this will be the last edition of bindings I ever do. Not a bad place to end a career. But we’ll see.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Brave New World, Connections, Failure, General Musings, Health, Machado-Joseph | Tags: art, arthritis, ataxia, blogging, book art, book conservation, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, fasciculation, health, Japanese, jim downey, leather, Legacy Bookbindery, Machado-Joseph Disease, MJD, neurology, neuromuscular disease, pain, peripheral neuropathy, SCA3, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, St. Cybi's Well, wabi-sabi, Wikipedia, Zen
“Jim Downey was a noted book artist, conservator, and author who, at the height of his skills, was betrayed by his body with the onset of Machado-Joseph Disease in his early 60s …”
That could be the opening line of my obituary some (hopefully many!) years hence. Or perhaps a change to my Wikipedia entry.
But the thing is, I don’t feel betrayed by my body. Not in the least.
Yes, I likely have MJD. And yes, it has started to cause me physical difficulties in accomplishing things, as well as additional pain, as I have been outlining here on the blog.
But we all live with limitations. Of strength. Of endurance. Of skill. Of intellect.
I can’t fly like a bird. Should I say that I am therefore ‘betrayed’ by my body? Of course not.
I can’t think as rapidly or as clearly as I could when I was, say, 40. Again, that’s not a betrayal. That’s just change that comes with being a normal human. Of living a normal life.
There’s a Japanese concept of wabi-sabi that informs a traditional aesthetic common in the culture. It has roots in Zen Buddhism, which I studied and tried to embrace as a young man. It can be a difficult concept to explain, but concerns an appreciation for that which is imperfect and/or impermanent in nature and beauty, as all life is imperfect and impermanent. A classic example of wabi-sabi is an elegant teacup which has a flaw (perhaps broken accidentally), but made more beautiful by the application of a gold filling to repair the cup and make it functional again. It is an understanding that all things can only be fully appreciated by respecting their limitations, and that experiencing the thing in the moment, as it is, with all the flaws it has.
As I noted a couple of months ago, I’ve been working to finish the leather-bound edition of St Cybi’s Well. Though this has been complicated by the onset of MJD, I’m almost finished with the edition of 14 books. As I was working to “turn in” (the process of folding the leather around the edges of the bookboard for the cover) the covering leather on one of the first of these books, I made a mistake. My hand slipped. And the tool I was using, my favorite thin bone folder, marred the cover.
Dammit.
I took a deep breath, finished what I was doing, and set the cover aside to think about it later. When these things happen, the >worst< thing you can do is panic and over-react. A lot of times if you just leave it be and revisit it later, you can usually mitigate the damage with a little careful pressure, or extra moisture, or one of several other techniques.
I turned my attention to the next cover.
And as I was finishing that one, almost the exact same thing happened. Not in the same place, but a similar, though worse, tool mark. Like this:
Gawddammit.
We all make mistakes. “It’s inherent in hand process”, as is commonly said by artisans. But making two very similar such errors?
That was likely thanks to MJD symptoms. Which I had been working through.
I quit for the day.
And as I thought about what it meant, I had to consider how I thought about myself, and my art. I am now an artist/artisan who has this additional limitation, this new part of who and what I am. Allowing that to be reflected in my art — indeed, embracing it — was the only honest thing I could do.
It was time for a little wabi-sabi.
So I did this:
A little gold leaf, to embrace the imperfection.
In fact, I added a wabi-sabi element to each of the 14 books. Because I made more mistakes as I finished the edition. Not all of them had tool marring, but many did (and, curiously, all along the top edge of the covers). I decided that for the edition to be complete, for it to reflect this particular moment in time, each needed to have a similar flaw/enhancement, though each one is unique.
Here they all are:
As a conservator, I can’t afford to celebrate my mistakes. There will of necessity come a time when I need to stop doing conservation work, out of respect for the items entrusted to my care. That time is rapidly approaching; indeed, it may already be here. I’ll know more after my neurological assessment tomorrow.
As an artist, I’d be a fool deny my mistakes. Because denying them would be to deny myself, and what has brought me to this point in time. This particular, wonderful, moment.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: Amazon, book art, book conservation, book design, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, Communion of Dreams, Kickstarter, Legacy Bookbindery, Science Fiction, St Cybi's Well, writing
Last May, I wrote about the process of designing and executing the artistic leather bindings of Communion of Dreams. Now that all of my Kickstarter backers have made their choices, I thought I’d give a preview of the process of designing and executing the artistic leather bindings of St Cybi’s Well.
I had a piece of Preseli Bluestone from the quarry at Craig Rhosyfelin (which is the source for the Stonehenge Bluestones in the inner ring). This site appears in a scene in chapter 8. Well, I had the stone cut into 14 slices (two times the magical number 7). Which I then used to construct a “well” as the cover design. The center of the well has thin blue leather to represent the water in the well. Like this:
Each of the 14 leather-bound copies will have one actual slice of the stone mounted on top of the leather, and thirteen ‘stones’ of bookboard under the leather for bas relief. In this way, all fourteen copies of the leather-bound edition will be connected into one “well”. Here are two examples:
As with the titling for Communion of Dreams, the letterforms are etched using my Glowforge laser, then infilled with real gold leaf.
The other major design decision was what to do for the endpapers. Communion of Dreams had marbled endpapers. For St Cybi’s Well I wanted something different. Thinking through the various visuals in the book, one recurrent image I used was of a Celtic spiral. A symbol of whirlpools and infinity, but also of the transition between realms of reality. Combine that with the ‘healing energy’ in the novel characterized as being a luminous blue. So this is what I came up with: a thin sparkly blue spiral, cut with the laser from commercial glitterpaper stock. It will be mounted onto black endpapers, one each on the paste-down sheets front and rear. Here’s an example:
I do have all the text blocks sewn up and ready to use. I’ve ordered the leather, and soon will be completing these bindings. There are five text blocks and five stones (numbers 1, 4, 5, 6, and 11) still available. If you’re interested in one, you can still choose your color of leather. Details here. Once I finish the nine books for my Kickstarter backers, I’ll just finish the remaining five in leather of my choosing (and raise the price).
I’ll post pics when I have the first batch finished.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Uncategorized | Tags: Anglo-Saxon, art, Beowulf, blogging, book art, book conservation, book design, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, calligraphy, chained bindings, Cheryl Jacobsen, Dragon, Early Medieval England, Glowforge, goatskin, Grendel, jim downey, laser, leather, Legacy Bookbindery, Longship, vellum, Viking, Wikipedia
For many years, whenever I’ve given lectures, or taught classes about the history of the book, I would discuss the incredible value of books before the advent of the printing press (1454). I’d tell people that there was a reason such books were carefully guarded, even chained to a library shelf: they were about as valuable as a new car would be today, and you didn’t want them walking off.
Well, I was partially correct. Now, having done my part in creating a completely hand-made, hand-calligraphed edition of Beowulf, I can say that the value of such a book is AT LEAST that of a new car. An expensive one. Maybe two. I don’t actually know how much this book is worth. But I know that I put over 60 hours of labor into it. And I have a good idea of the cost of that much calligraphic-quality vellum. And I’m sure that Cheryl Jacobsen, who did the beautiful calligraphic work, must have hundreds or even thousands of hours of labor in the project.
What follows is documentation and explanation of my contribution to this incredible work of art. It’s photograph-heavy, so I’m going to put the bulk of it after a break, but here’s a glimpse of the finished product, to entice you:
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, Failure, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: Amazon, book art, book conservation, book design, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, Communion of Dreams, Kickstarter, Legacy Bookbindery, Science Fiction, St Cybi's Well, writing
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
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Failure, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, book art, book conservation, book design, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, Kickstarter, Legacy Bookbindery, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
Last week I went through the mechanics of turning words into books. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about the economics of that, as well as being an author.
When I set up the Kickstarter for St Cybi’s Well lo these many years ago, a lot of my estimates in deciding on what goals to shoot for were based on … blind faith, to be perfectly honest.
I’d published Communion of Dreams, and had some sense of the possible income that could generate, as well as the amount of work that went into writing/editing/formatting it. But I really had no idea what the costs would be for printing and hand-binding copies of that book or the yet unwritten St Cybi’s Well. I had a pretty good handle on how much time it would take me to do the hand binding, based on my book conservation work. And likewise, what the cost of materials would be, other than the printing. Now that I’ve gone through all of that with both books, I have a much better idea of how costs break down, so I thought I would share all of that.
Based on 55 copies (edition of 53, plus two author/artist proof copies), the actual out-of-pocket expense runs about $50 per copy for the two different books. That covers the cost of the oversize archival paper (so the grain/drape of the pages is correct for hand binding), the printing, and going to collect the printed pages. It also covers the cost of archival bookboard and cover cloth. (The leather copies are two or three times as much, depending on the actual leather used.) Were I to bind a single copy, it would take me about 2 hours of labor. If I bind multiple copies at a time, that drops to about 1.5 hours of labor. (Leather is about 2x the labor.)
My Kickstarter goal was $17,000. Which succeeded. After deducting the fees paid to Kickstarter, and the costs of the different “rewards/premiums” for the backers, I wound up with about $12,000. Which, truthfully, isn’t a bad advance for a relatively unknown author.
It took me seven years of writing work to finish St Cybi’s Well, rather than the one or two years I originally expected. That was both embarrassing and stressful, since I made promises to people I didn’t fulfill. But it’s over, and everyone seems happy with the end product, so let’s just talk about the amount of labor that went into it. I’d conservatively guesstimate that I have something on the order of 2,000 hours of labor in writing, rewriting, editing, and then composing (the last is mostly thanks to my Good Lady Wife) the book. That *might* be as much as twice as long as it took me to do the same with Communion of Dreams, though spread out over a longer period of time. So, do the math, and I earned about $6 per hour.
That’s just the Kickstarter, of course. Now that the book is done, I’ll continue to earn money on purchases of the downloads, printed paperbacks, and special order hand-bound copies. How much is hard to say. I have had about 40,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams, though a big chunk of those are free downloads. Still, with Amazon’s system, 2/3 of every sale goes to the author (as opposed to like 5-7% for conventional royalties with a publisher), and that adds up. To date, I’ve only had about a thousand downloads of St Cybi’s Well, and most of those have been free downloads. Which has been a little disappointing, but we’ll see how things go over time.
As for the printed paperback copies, there I earn a bit more from Amazon than I would for the downloads, but not a lot. And they don’t amount to very many sales. The signed copies I sell directly do a little better still, but again, that’s just a handful of books per year.
As for the hand–bound books, there I do make a lot more, about $150 per copy. But my conservation labor is billed at $200 per hour, so at 1.5 hours of labor, I’m making half of what I would professionally. The return on the leather bound copies is even worse.
So, why do it? Why even offer those books on the websites?
Because I enjoy it. I enjoy knowing that the books that I create will be enjoyed, perhaps cherished. Read, and passed down to children and grandchildren. Like most artists, I’m willing to trade some financial reward for that satisfaction, and I can afford to do so. Maybe it shouldn’t be the case, and it wouldn’t be the case ideally, but we do what we can under the circumstances.
Anyway, my books will be available for free download tomorrow (the First of the month, as always). Give ’em a try. If you like ’em, you’re always welcome to either purchase a download or one of the physical copies later, if you can afford to do so. But don’t feel guilty if you can’t; as noted I can afford to give them away, and take joy in knowing people read them.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 