Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Marketing, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: art, blogging, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, jim downey, Science Fiction, technology
I got to thinking about all the steps/stages involved in doing the binding of the handbound editions of Communion of Dreams. Here’s a step by step description (with some images below) of the process of doing the cloth hardcover books:
- Gather the sections from the printed stacks.
- Fold each section.
- Collate the sections into books.
- Punch holes through the center of each section for sewing.
- Sew up the text blocks.
- Paste up the spine of each text block, allow to dry under mild weight.
- Trim each textblock to size: head, tail, fore-edge.
- Paste up each text block again; determine size for, cut, and add endbands.
- Determine size for, cut, then paste up and apply spine liners, allow to dry.
- Determine size for and cut bookboard for the covers: front cover, rear cover, spine.
- Determine size of necessary cover cloth, cut from roll goods.
- Layout and mark up inside of cover cloth for bookboard positions.
- Paste up and mount each piece of bookboard, nip in nipping press, allow to dry.
- Cut corners on cover cloth.
- Paste up and turn in edges & corners, nip in nipping press, allow to dry. This is now called the “cloth case”.
- Determine size and cut cover image for mounting to cloth cases.
- Position and mount cover images to cases, nip in nipping press, allow to dry.
- Trim back first paste-down sheet on front and back of each text block.
- Position text block in case, paste up sewing tapes and front half paste-down sheet, nip in nipping press.
- Repeat for rear sewing tapes and half paste-down sheet.
- Paste up front full paste-down sheet, nip in nipping press.
- Repeat for rear full paste-down sheet.
- Dry under mild weight.
Simple, right? 😉
Well, it is compared to what is involved in doing the leather-covered edition. I might spend some time doing a video version of that. We’ll see.
Oh, yeah — if you’d like to have your own hand-bound copy in either cloth or leather, full information on the limited edition is here.
Jim Downey
Sheets gathered & folded into sections.
Sections punched for sewing.
Starting the sewing onto linen tapes.
Bottom of the sewn text block trimmed off in the guillotine.
Drying time.
Marked up cover stock.
Bookboard mounted.
Corners cut, ready to turn in.
Back cover image positioned for mounting.
Sewing tapes and half sheet pasted out and pressed.
Second paste down sheet prepared and ready to press.
Finished product.
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Failure, General Musings, tech | Tags: art, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, Chutzpah, jim downey, Kozo, MU, technology, University of Missouri, vellum
I mentioned on Facebook the other day that sometimes I stop and consider the sort of chutzpah it takes to think that I should be mucking around with a 700 year-old book. That thought occurred to me following a session in the bindery working on the bible I have blogged about earlier. I had just done some work on it, then had to put everything into one of my presses and let it dry overnight, hoping that I had done the work properly. Hoping really hard.
What follows is a bit long, but might be of interest to some. At the risk of spoiling the suspense, the book came out well, though not entirely perfectly. You’ll see.
* * *
In my last post I had an image of the interior of the spine of the book. This one:
That shows the paper liners adhered to the inside of the spine cover material. If you look at the top of the image, you can see some of the damage which had happened to the book — basically, some tears in the vellum cover at the hinge joint.
Repairing vellum is a bit tricky. You can’t use too much moisture, because it can cause the vellum to warp and shrink, even become brittle. So carefully I removed all the old liner material, then selected some heavy kozo and applied a methyl-cellulose/PVA mix adhesive, allowing the adhesive to dry partially before mounting the kozo to the damaged areas. That’s when I put everything into the press and hoped for the best. Here’s how it looked when I took it out:
One problem – in order to get the kozo mounted securely, I had to flatten the entire vellum spine, losing the nice shaping where it went over the sewing structure cords. We’ll come back to that.
On the textblock, I had to mount some new endpapers before I could add in the spine liners and hinging material. Fortunately, I had some nice handmade flax paper I made some 25 years ago which was a nice color tone match for the vellum. Here you can see it mounted:
Then I was ready to mount the hinging material to the spine. I chose a very heavy type of kozo, which would be strong enough but wouldn’t add much bulk, and applied it so that it conformed to the sewing cords:
Then I cut panels of another flax paper, and mounted those between the cords. Here is a pic when a couple of them have been mounted:
When those were done and dried, the text block was ready to be mounted back into the cover. But I had two problems. One was the spine vellum had been flattened by mounting the repair kozo, as mentioned above. But there was also another problem, part of the reason why the book had become damaged in the intervening centuries: the vellum cover had shrunk slightly, and the text block had swollen slightly, with the result that the cover no longer fit properly.
How to make it fit?
Well, I had actually already done one thing: I had placed the text block into a heavy press and slowly compressed it over a period of several days. But that only did so much.
The other thing I decided to try was to force the spine to stretch a bit. I did this by VERY slightly dampening the vellum, then putting a jig in place which would slightly push the front and rear covers away from each other. At the same time, I had mounted some cords the same size as the ones on the text block, and positioned the same way. This jig went on the inside of the spine, and on the outside I used a piece of foamcore which would partially compress, making the vellum conform to the shape of the cords and spreading it just a tich. A couple times over the course of a couple days I swapped out the jigs, using a slightly larger one each time. Here’s the final set, with the spine of the finished book alongside to better help envision what I mean:
That bought me about 3 or 4 mm of space. I worried about trying to stretch it any further. When I positioned the cover over the text block, the spine conformed perfectly, as you can see in the image above. I went ahead and pasted out the endpapers and mounted the text block into the cover.
Here’s how the pasted endpaper looked when everything dried:
And here’s the fore-edge of the book in its cover:
Yup — that right there is what is technically known as an “oops”. The cover doesn’t *quite* come around far enough, with perhaps 2 mm of the text block showing at the widest point. I hadn’t been able to stretch the cover (or compress the text block) enough.
However, the book was solid, and my interior repairs to the vellum damage turned out nearly perfect. Here’s a picture from earlier which shows the damage:
See that crack on the spine at the left side? Actually, if you look closely, you can see there’s a couple different cracks. Well, here’s an image of the spine at the same point with my repairs:
The cracks are still there, but they’re no longer a structural problem. The underlying kozo will now handle the structural forces. That should mean the cover will work as intended, and propagation of the cracks further down the spine should be stopped for at least a couple centuries.
It’s not a perfect repair, and that tempers any temptation I might have to inflate my ego any more. But it’s a pretty damned good repair, one I can take a measure of satisfaction with.
I can live with that.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Religion, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, art, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, care-giving, Communion of Dreams, free, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, promotion, Science Fiction, technology
Remember that 700+ year old bible I posted about the beginning of June? This one:
Well, this weekend I got started working on the book. And I thought I’d share a couple of images of what I found inside, and what I’ve done to it so far.
Here’s the spine of the text block, once it had been freed from the cover seen above:
That’s after I’ve removed the gross chunks of paper liners which were applied between the cords. I’ve since removed all the rest of the liners, first using a jeweler’s tweezers and then a scalpel. Anyway, I want to note the very evident lines of sewing stations (holes punched through the folios) from the original binding. That shows that the book has been rebound at least once.
Here’s another image:
That’s an image of the interior of the cover. Which shows a couple of interesting things. First, you can see how the vellum of the cover molded itself to the spine of the text block over time. That sort of thing happens over *centuries*.
Second, how the supporting cords are laced into the cover. The sewing was done in a way that it wrapped around the cords, which helps to support the overall structure. The cords are then laced into a channel, looped over the board material, and then come back on the inside and are pasted down. This is VERY common of medieval and Renaissance bindings.
And lastly — note that the cover material is an early variety of bookboard. It’s NOT wood. This is a clue to the age of the binding. It means that it is after the introduction of papermaking to Europe. Which is to say, this book was probably rebound sometime in the 14th or 15th century. (Papermaking technology was introduced to Southern Europe late in the 13th century, but it took a little while to disseminate across the continent.)
So, I removed a couple of layers of more modern papers on the inside, and pulled the old ends of the cords out of the bookboard. Then I dampened the board on the inside, put it between moisture barrier sheets, and put it into a press to flatten overnight. Then once the spine of the text block was fairly clean I applied a layer of conservation adhesive (a blend of methyl-cellulose and poly-vinyl-acetate) and some fairly heavy Kozo-fiber paper, which I stippled onto the spine so that it would conform to the existing structure and hold everything in place. Like this:
You’ll note that it extends past the text block on the left-hand side of the spine. I can trim that excess off with a scalpel once everything is dried. I should finish up the rest of the work tomorrow.
Oh, and speaking of tomorrow … remember, the week-long give-away of my books starts then!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Religion, Science Fiction, University of Missouri, Writing stuff | Tags: art, Bible, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, calligraphy, jim downey, manuscript, MU, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, University of Missouri, vellum, writing
It isn’t the oldest, rarest, or most interesting item I’ve ever worked on. But it’s not everyday that a 700+ year old book comes into my shop for conservation work. This one did yesterday:
Here’s the official description of it, for those who might be interested:
Bible. Latin. [Biblia Latina] 1300. Bound in parchment ms. with neumic notation over boards ; leaf [103] torn with part of 1 column wanting; small stain on p. 1 partly hides incipit; trimmed, headings mostly lost. Prehumanistic minuscule script; rubricated. Lectionary? with different pen on final 2 leaves. Contents: Prol. in libros Salomonis — Proverbia — Ecclesiastes — Canticum canticorum — Sapientia — Ecclesiasticus — Joshua — Isaias –Jeremias — Ezechiel — Daniel — Osee — Joel — Amos — Abdias — Jonas –Michaeus — Nahum — Habacuc — Sophonias — Aggaeus — Zacharias — Malachias — Job – Judith — Esther — [Novum Testamentum]. Cover is a manuscript leaf of a parchment page with nuemes and a Gothic script with red initial letters from about about the same time.
It’s been a while since I shared any images from my conservation work, so thought I would.
In other news: still plugging along on St. Cybi’s Well. It’s going well.
Have a great weekend!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Connections, Feedback, NPR, Predictions, Publishing, tech | Tags: art, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, jim downey, Kickstarter, Legacy Bookbindery, literature, NPR, predictions, Science Fiction, technology, WIlliamson Oak
Remember this?
But that doesn’t mean that the book has to have an old look. Not at all. I’m playing around with some design ideas which will incorporate the cords, but which will feel more modern. Watch for some preliminary posts on that in a couple weeks.
OK, how about this?
Well, this afternoon NPR’s “All Things Considered” had a good piece about the tree, and the drought. And already I’ve had people ask whether it was the same one I had written about/used for the cover of Communion of Dreams.
Yup, that’s the same one. Here’s from the NPR website:
Well, can you take a guess what sort of design motif I’ve decided to use? Here, take a look:
Now, if you look at those images closely, you’ll see that there are a pair of lines just to the left of the tree trunk. Those indicate where the spine will be, just as with the paperback edition of the book:
Now, that’s all well and good, but how to create the ‘raised cords’ effect overall? Like this:
So far, so good. Now let’s test how it would look with some calfskin adhered down over that:
OK, I like that. But how will it look with goatskin? Here’s that:
OK, keep in mind that these are just tests to see how the leather looks over the raised cords. I’m happy with the results. But now I need to convert that simple bas relief 2-dimensional effect into a fully functional 3-dimensional sculpture which also happens to be a comfortable-to-read book, using some of the cords above as part of the actual structure of the book.
Sound difficult? Yeah, but remember that this has been my profession for over two decades. I like a nice challenge.
Just thought I’d share that little progress report.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Cassini, Government, MetaFilter, Music, NASA, Saturn, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Weather, YouTube | Tags: art, Blood Sweat & Tears, Cassini, Communion of Dreams, hurricane, jim downey, MetaFilter, music, NASA, photography, Saturn, science, Science Fiction, space, Spinning Wheels, The Rose, www youtube
The Rose
The spinning vortex of Saturn’s north polar storm resembles a deep red rose of giant proportions surrounded by green foliage in this false-color image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Measurements have sized the eye at a staggering 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) across with cloud speeds as fast as 330 miles per hour (150 meters per second).
A fascinating short video and full explanation can be found on NASA’s site:
PASADENA, Calif. – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided scientists the first close-up, visible-light views of a behemoth hurricane swirling around Saturn’s north pole.
In high-resolution pictures and video, scientists see the hurricane’s eye is about 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide, 20 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Thin, bright clouds at the outer edge of the hurricane are traveling 330 mph(150 meters per second). The hurricane swirls inside a large, mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as the hexagon.
Very cool. If I ever have reason to revise Communion of Dreams, I would certainly include reference to The Rose since most everything happens on and around Titan.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 