Making Books is Fun! (to watch)

Just discovered this great video and had to re-post for my bookbinding friends :)

"Back before inkjets, printing was a time-consuming laborious process, that took teams of people working together to produce just one book. Now days, any crabby person can sit at home and crank out stuff on a blog or even make internet video. This movie will make you happy as you watch others toil for 'The Man' under primitive conditions."

Such a wonderfully tedious process. Impressive, isn't it?

     

Playing and Writing

I’ve been in a little vacation for the past two weeks and neglected a bit my online presence, my blog and even my Etsy shop. But that was for good reasons--my sister visited me in Portugal so we were going to places and having fun. We also worked together on our bookbindings and made all kind of artistic experiments. It was great.
 

Here’s what we did one day, inspired by a book from 1893 which we bought at an antique fair in Porto. The book is huge and has hundreds of pages filled with beautiful handwriting about the accounting of a shop. I guess the person responsible to fill it should have had some calligraphic skills. Just imagine how much time was spent to write it!

The book really got us in the mood to play with text, so here’s how our calligraphy experiments came out:

Text written by my sister with a bamboo pen and brown ink 

on paper cream paper aged by hand.

Text written by me with the dip pen and china ink 

on recycled paper stained with acrylics.

Next days we also made handmade and decorative papers. It was fun!
 

The Silver Book

Very rarely I make a custom order in Etsy. It’s quite difficult because I like to have my liberty of creating and most of the times it’s the vintage materials that I work with that define the aspect of my books. But I do agree to make a custom book when I really like the idea of the customer. In this case, the request was quite a challenge as I never made such a big book before: 9 cm. thickness, a book with black leather cover and silver fittings and lock.

The owner is such a wonderful person who totally trusted my choices and suggestions, so I really enjoyed collaborating with her on this joint project. I’m really glad that the book is in such good hands as hers – just take a look at the pic below, how wonderful it looks arrived at home!

And another book

Yesterday I finished one more book. This one is so dear to me. I made it for my Etsy shop but this is one of those books that are just so hard to let go :)