Communion Of Dreams

All’s well …

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