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: 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: Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Health, Humor, Machado-Joseph, Promotion | Tags: arthritis, ataxia, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, dystonia, health, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Machado-Joseph Disease, medicine, MJD, neurology, pain, SCA3, science, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3
Wait, how can MJD be “hilarious“?
Well …
… so this morning (4/9/22), I got a call from a book conservation client. Since I screen my calls, he left a message, identifying himself, and said he was someone in the University administration. The call was otherwise fairly routine, asking if I could refer them to someone else for a small job they needed done, since I am not accepting new clients. [My website says it’s due to arthritis, which I do have in my hands, but it’s really due to the problems with the onset of MJD. I’ll change the website once I have an official diagnosis.]
I called the fellow back, as I would for anyone who called and left a message. We discussed what the client has, what he thinks he needs, etc. As is commonly the case, he didn’t really need conservation work done (the book is more valuable leaving it alone), but instead just needs a proper archival storage box. Since he’s here in town and associated with the University system, I ask if he is familiar with Special Collections at the University library, since they could easily make a custom box for him (and would likely welcome the chance to do a favor for someone in the administration). He admits that he’s only been in town for a year or two, and was mostly involved with the Medical School. So I tell him who to contact, and what to ask for, and to say I referred him. Easy, simple solution, but the sort of thing that makes people very happy for the help provided and has earned me many references and additional clients over the years.
Then, in chatting a bit, he asked why I was no longer taking clients. I explained that it was due to arthritis, and just left it at that. I told him I’d send him a text with the contact info again, just as a courtesy (as I would do for any client).
After I hung up, I looked again at the name he’d given me. It was a little unusual, and for some reason rang a bell. Then it hit me — he’s the attending physician in the Neurology Clinic I have an appointment with to evaluate my MJD in about six weeks.
I mentioned that I had an appointment with him in my follow-up text with the info I’d promised. We had a bit of a chuckle back & forth over how it’s a very small world sometimes …
Jim Downey
Filed under: Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Health, Machado-Joseph, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Society, Uncategorized | Tags: arthritis, ataxia, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, dystonia, health, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Machado-Joseph Disease, medicine, MJD, neurology, pain, restless leg syndrome, RLS, SCA, SCA3, science, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3
[I’ve decided to be public about my realization that I have the onset of MJD, the diagnosis process, and then living with the disease. Given the rarity of this disease, my hope is that this series of blog posts will help educate others, and perhaps provide some insight into it and related conditions. This is the third post in the series, written about a week after the second, as I started reframe what this would mean for me going forward.]
Been an interesting week, as I have been adjusting to the new normal of having MJD (as noted in my previous post, this is now where my head is at, though I won’t have an official diagnosis for about two months yet). It’s mostly been a process of re-calibrating my body awareness: noting that I have these muscle spasms in hands, feet, and legs, that the pain levels are there, and so forth, and then just moving on with my day. Living with chronic pain from a torn intercostal muscle that’s never healed properly, along with the random aches & pains of various abuses I’ve subjected my body to over the years of living life fully, means that to a certain extent the new aches & pains associated with MJD are just more of the same.
That’s not to discount the disease, nor the pain that comes with it. That’s real. And it has an impact. More pain, even if it isn’t worse pain, takes a toll. It wears me down faster. It’s more distracting, so it makes it harder to focus on any given task, especially creative ones. For the most part, though, I can just acknowledge the pain, listen to what it is telling me, account for it, and then get on with whatever I’m trying to do. So the pain isn’t the problem.
What is the problem is the degree to which this interferes with my bookbinding/conservation work. I’d been attributing the aches and pains in my hands to arthritis for years, and in truth I actually do have arthritis in some of the joints in my hands. That’s the result of the trauma inflicted by martial arts (primarily SCA combat) for about a 15 year period when I was a young man.
But worse than the aches and pains is the stiffness, spasming, and occasional loss of control in my hands. So far, the latter has only happened after I have been working using my hands (specifically while putting up the stamped copper ceiling in the kitchen this past winter). But I know it is just a taste of things to come. Dystonia is a classic symptom of MJD, and the spasms and pain in my hands that I’ve noticed the last few years is only likely to get worse and become more of a limitation. I had already started to scale back the conservation work I do, but now I need to be thinking in terms of finishing up pending obligations, handing off clients to other conservators, and becoming officially ‘retired’ as a book conservator. That’ll be a hard adjustment to make, since so much of my self-identity is tied up with it.
* * *
(a few days later… 4/7)
Something I’ve been thinking more about is the difference in the types of pain I’ve been feeling. This is distinctly muscle pain, as opposed to the kind of pain one has from arthritic damage to a joint, or tendon damage, or a broken/bruised bone. This is the kind of thing pretty much everyone has experienced at one time or another, from over-using a muscle (or a group of muscles). It feels almost exactly like what you experience the day after a really hard physical exertion, except it also feels a bit like what you experience shortly after exhausting the muscle in exercise. Think how your calves/feet feel after a five mile hike in street shoes: tired, twitching, and sore. Then add in how your calves would feel the next day, in terms of stiffness and that deep ache. It’s unusual in my experience to have both of those at the same time, but that’s pretty much what my hands and feet/legs feel when I’m having an episode of the MJD effects.
And that’s another thing: this isn’t constant. Not yet, anyway, for me. It’s episodic, lasting for a few hours, at most a day or so. Then it fades for a while. I haven’t yet been able to identify a pattern to the episodes, unlike my intercostal tear (which usually acts up in response to a change in barometric pressure or certain kinds of exertion). It’s possible that there isn’t one, and no way to predict what might trigger an episode. I suspect that may be the case, given that the episodes typically become longer and more frequent over time, until the pain is pretty much constant.
I’m sure I’ll find out. *sigh*
* * *
4/8
Bad episode today. Spasms, twitches, RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome), and a fair amount of muscle pain. Particularly in my hands. Possibly a connection to the cold front (we’ve had spitting snow and wind today, with a hard freeze forecast for tonight)? Whatever, been a rather annoying day. Particularly so since I had been planning on getting some binding work done, and my hands are just in no shape for it, even with having had them in the microwaveable mitts I use to loosen things up.
As I noted above, this is a psychological blow, as much as anything. I’ve never really defined myself in terms of my job, but it has always been one of the interesting things about me. Conservators are so rare that it’s always a talking point when I introduce myself to someone; they always ask about what sorts of things I work on, what’s the oldest/rarest/most valuable item, et cetera. Even surgeons, who seldom suffer from a self-esteem deficit, will pause and with a note of respect ask how I got into such a profession.
I’ll miss that. And I’m honest enough to admit it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Book Conservation, Connections, Gardening, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Health, Machado-Joseph, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Uncategorized | Tags: arthritis, ataxia, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, health, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, Machado-Joseph Disease, medicine, MJD, neurology, pain, restless leg syndrome, RLS, SCA, SCA3, science, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3
[I’ve decided to be public about my realization that I have the onset of MJD, the diagnosis process, and then living with the disease. Given the rarity of this disease, my hope is that this series of blog posts will help educate others, and perhaps provide some insight into it and related conditions. This is the first post in the series, as I started to come to terms with the realization.]
3/13
I’ve known this disease for almost 50 years. From well before my family even had a name for it. I’ve seen it kill family members by millimeters, and do its best to ruin the life of my sister over the last 15 years.
So, why did it take me so long to recognize that I have it?
* * *
Denial, perhaps. This is not the sort of future one particularly wants to face.
Or perhaps a sense of entitlement? That I have had enough other pain and suffering in my life, that I deserved to be missed by this curse?
Or maybe a lingering perception of invulnerability? It’s said that none of us can really envision our own mortality until it steps out of the shadows and confronts us face to face.
All of the above.
What I know is that I first experienced tremors & cramping in my hands several years ago. The stiffness and ache I had felt I attributed to osteoarthritis — I had abused my hands considerably during my years of jujitsu and SCA combat, after all. At first, I just figured that the tremors and cramping were due to the same.
Except arthritis doesn’t cause tremors and cramping. Some part of me knew this, but discarded the information.
The same was true of the foot/leg cramping, the RLS (restless leg syndrome). I figured it was due to walking. Or climbing ladders. Or digging through turf. Or just ‘one of those things’.
All plausible explanations.
Because some part of me didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility of MJD/SCA3 (spinocerebellar ataxia type 3). As noted, this is not the sort of future one particularly wants to face. Depending on the age of onset and some other factors, MJD can mean anything from almost total debilitation and an early death to prolonged suffering and loss of bodily control. And we’ve seen the full range in my family. Not the sort of thing one wants to particularly acknowledge, since there is no cure and precious little in the way of medical treatment for the symptoms.
What was harder for me to ignore were the moments when I lost my sense of balance. My formerly exceptional sense of balance; graceful, fluid motions on the field of combat or the practice mats of a dojo. Gone now. Oh, routine walking is still perfectly fine. But when I turn my head quickly, or close my eyes while still moving, things will spin/sway/shift for just a moment. That never happened before. Well, unless I got drunk. Because that’s pretty much exactly what it feels like.
And then recently, I started just dropping things. Particularly tools, when I was tired from using them after a couple of hours. My hands would just stop working for a moment, and the item would slip from my grasp.
Now, I can be as clumsy as the next person in just routine day-to-day stuff. But when I’m working with tools, my focus, my control, is exquisite. It has to be, in order to be a book conservator, as I have been for thirty years. I don’t just start losing control of my tools. Let alone dropping them.
But I have.
* * *
Just before New Years we got together with my sister and her family. We’d had visits during the pandemic, but they had been brief, sometimes outside, more superficial. For whatever reason, as we were talking about how she was doing in her struggle with MJD, we got a little deeper into the details than usual. And as we talked about her symptoms, it was like a checklist formed in the back of my mind.
A checklist of symptoms. A checklist with each box ticked.
I realized that it was possible that I had been experiencing the onset of MJD. I scheduled an appointment to see my GP, far enough out in the future that I figured that the Omicron surge would be past, and it would be relatively safe to talk with her.
I didn’t put it out of my mind — how the hell could I? — but I was able to convince myself that it made the most sense to just wait and see my doc, and likely then see a neurologist after. Because MJD is rare enough (like 0.005% of the population rare) that my GP had zero knowledge of it, as I knew from previous discussions with her about family medical history. But I did start paying closer attention to that checklist. And I did some more reading on the latest research and medical information about MJD. It turned out that there had been a LOT of additional research and publications, and the disease was now much better understood than the last time I had dived into the literature some five or six years ago.
After digesting that, I was reasonably certain that yes, I had the onset of the disease. I shared those thoughts with my wife and a couple of very close friends I knew I could trust to not freak out or over-react. I still wanted to wait and see my doc, then a neurologist, and get the results of the genetic test that would confirm whether I had the disease, and to what likely degree, before I said anything to my family or other friends.
* * *
Last Tuesday (the beginning of March, 2022) I saw my doctor. It went as I expected, with me explaining my suspicions and how they matched the symptoms of the disease. What I didn’t expect, as we discussed it, was that her questions about the disease sharpened and confirmed those suspicions. She agreed with my analysis completely, and I left the appointment convinced that I have MJD, and that I had likely experienced the first onset three or four years ago.
I’m still waiting to get an appointment with a local neurologist (through a referral from my GP’s office for insurance purposes), though that will probably happen in the next week or so. Everything above is what’s been playing out in my head as rehearsed dialogue for that meeting. Time and time again.
So I thought I would write it down. Like being a care-giver, it helps me to process and understand what I am going through. Perhaps I will make it public. Perhaps it will grow into something like Her Final Year, as a way for me to share my perspective and help others who experience ataxia or have someone in their life who does. We’ll see.
For now, I will keep these thoughts to myself. But will update as seems useful.
* * *
3/16
Today it was a week since I was told by my GP’s office that they had sent over a referral to the local university Neurology Clinic, where they actually have at least one person on staff who is familiar with ataxias. (I went and looked at the public profile info about the staff on their website).
Since I wasn’t quite sure how the University referral/scheduling system actually works, I called the Neuro Clinic, and chatted with the nurse who answered the phone. Yes, I can be funny and charming if necessary. Looks like my case is already in discussion with the docs there, and I should hear from someone soonish about actually getting in to get an appointment/evaluation. The nurse I spoke with said that the process usually takes a month or longer, and that it has happened in just a week means that it’s on a fast track. Looks like I’m special. Woo-hoo — lucky me!
* * *
3/18
Haven’t heard from the Neuro Clinic yet — hadn’t really expected to, but still …
I’m used to chronic pain. From the joints I’ve abused, from the intercostal tear in my side that I’ve had for a decade+, from the ache of bones broken in a full and vigorous life.
So the extra pain in my hands and feet isn’t really a change. And it’s not like the pain is any more intense or distracting. But it is a change. Like using a larger hose to fill a pool; the volume of pain has increased. It fills me up faster, reduces the energy/attention that I have for other things.
It’s like being out of shape, and discovering that you just can’t run as far or as fast as you used to be able to. It catches you a bit by surprise, and there’s a part of you that just wants to deny that something so fundamental has changed.
I told a friend (one of the very few who knows about this) that I’m currently uncertain whether or not I’ll put a garden in this year. It’ll depend on what I find from connecting with the doctors. Oh, I’m sure that I *could* put in a garden, but how much would that take away from other things I want to accomplish through the summer & fall? I’m being a little more cautious about how I commit myself, not knowing what resources I’ll have available.
So I hope the scheduling nurse from the Neuro Clinic calls next week.
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 