The other week when I was preparing the book blocks for my most recent set of notebooks, I realised how hard it is to neatly trim thick blocks. These notebooks are about the same size as I think my Argleton book will be, but they were very difficult to trim to size by hand.
I tried all of my cutting implements, with varying results. My scalpel was by far the worst offender. The blade is not very stiff, so it tended to bend as I cut, leaving me with very wobbly results! My big craft knife was the best, although that tended to wander off piste a little resulting in what might best be described as ‘terraces’ in the cut.
Worst of all was that it took me nearly an hour and a half to trim four book blocks. Oh dear. That’s not very time efficient! If I have to make about 80 books for my Argleton project, it’s going to take me a solid week just to trim the book blocks. And that’s not even counting how long it takes to cut the book boards, the ‘hard’ bit of a hardback cover.
So, if the Argleton project is successful, the first thing I’m going to do is buy this:
It’s a TrimFast ream cutter and it can trim 110 sheets, or up to 1.5cm of paper, at once. It has ‘laser light paper positioning’ to make it precision cuts easier, which is great as I am nothing if not a perfectionist. I will be able to cut not just more quickly, but also more accurately and with sharper right angles. Honestly, trying to get everything square is a nightmare at times! Especially as three of the four implements I have bought for marking square angles weren’t themselves actually square. Harumph.
So this is what some of the money raised via Kickstarter will go to. The rest will be spent on materials for the books and to subsidise my time – I’ll have to take a few weeks away from my normal work to get everything finished up and as a freelance that’s actually quite a big deal, so having enough money to cover that will be a godsend. Well, to be more accurate, it will be a generous-person-like-you-send!
This hand-made tome is the kind of book I can only aspire to make!
Created by Ross MacDonald as a prop for The House at the End of the Lane, a film by Steve Smith, this is a gloriously OTT book.
The interior is filled with collages of images and text from period books. Most of the text is German, taken from 15th century books. Many of the images are from the same period, for the sake of authenticity. But for the sake of what looks cool, there are images from other periods as well. The ones on this spread include two diagrams from Georg von Welling’s 1735 Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum, a number puzzle designed by Ben Franklin, a Celtic knot, a diagram of a microbe and a heraldic device. One other pages, there are bits of electronic schematics, some diagrams and handwriting from George Washington’s school notebook, and diagrams of crystals and fungi from a 19th century dictionary.
I do hope that one day I’ll have the skill required to make a book like this. It truly is gorgeous and would be a joy to own. Somehow, I imagine Neil Gaiman already has a whole library of books like this.
It also reminds me a little of The Book in The Books of Hay, although instead of human skin, The Book is bound in leather so black that it sucks all light in. Indeed, your eyes would struggle to see it, unless it wanted you to. But that’s another story…
Over on Kickstarter, they say that projects with an introductory video end up raising “way more money” than those without. Well, it has taken me a while but I’ve finally managed to get this all important video together for Argleton.
I have no real experience with making videos, but luckily I had my lovely husband on hand to help. Even though he left the BBC three years ago, some video editing mojo clearly rubbed off on him!
But even with Kevin’s help, I had to have two stabs at recording the original footage. The first lot was just too ponderous and rambling to really work and wasn’t even amenable to cutting. Second time round, I had a better idea of what I wanted to say, but even then I had to do take after take after take to get something useable.
If you’re doing to do a Kickstarter project video yourself, then I recommend you read Robin Sloan’s guide first. I found it very helpful, but would add a few more points.
Plan your video in small chunks Think about three or four main points you want to cover and then plan what to say for each point separately. Make notes for each section and even write out what you want to say. Practice reading it out aloud a few times to make sure that it flows and change anything that makes you stumble.
Record each chunk separately It’s almost impossible to do a long piece to camera without screwing up, so record in sections that are 45 to 90 second long. Because you’ve practiced what you are going to say before you started recording, you should find it relatively easy to get a good take.
Pause before and after It makes it much easier to cut footage together and add effects like cross fades if you have some leeway, so when you hit record, pause for a while, say your stuff, then pause again before hitting stop.
Pace yourself Don’t talk too fast, but don’t talk too slowly either. Unless you’re speaking slowly for effect, a ponderous delivery will make you sound like you don’t know what you want to say. (My video suffers a little bit from this.) If you talk too fast, you make it harder for people to understand you.
Listen out for background noise Sadly, there’s nowhere in our flat that’s as well lit as our lounge, and nowhere noisier either. The human brain is great at filtering out background noise, but mics will pick it all up, especially bass rumbles from passing buses or lorries. If you don’t have somewhere quite, try to time your takes for in between the buses.
What’s behind you? When you are setting up your shot, think about what is behind you. You should never be surprised by something in the background, and there should be nothing there that looks distracting. No lampshades growing out the top of your head, for example.
Keep it short A video that goes on too long is likely to be boring. I’d say three to four minutes is a maximum.
Think about cutaways A four minute headshot is both hard to do and boring to watch, so think about other images that you can add on top of your narration. Screenshots of blog posts about your project? Footage from your work so far? Even a shot of your hands (watch for this in TV interviews!) breaks things up enough to make your video more watchable.
I learnt a huge amount from doing this video and i know that there’s even more to learn. I have no doubt I’ll be making another video before the project completes, so hopefully the next one will be much better! And I also hope that the lovely chaps at Kickstarter are right and that this video helps me to meet my target of $2700. I’m already 27% there, so please do lend your support and get me to 100%!
I haven’t had much time to spend playing with all the new bookbinding-related toys I got for my birthday, but I have managed to get a couple of new booklets made. Here’s a look at how I’m progressing. I really do need to get on to a one-day course soon to make sure I’m not learning any bad habits.
Inspired by the How To Bind A Book video (sadly not embeddable) and the books I bought, I had a go at my first hard-back pamphlet this week. I sewed two blank paper signatures and trimmed them square (-ish, as I don’t know where my set square has gone to!) to form the innards of the book, or “book block”.
I then found a random bit of cardboard that I could cover with a nice sheet of paper that was left over from when I was designing wedding invitations two years ago! I cheated a bit and used the spray mount glue that was also left over from making invitations. I know that PVA or wheat paste is preferred, but I’m going to use everything I have lying around the flat for my practice booklets before I start buying new stuff. I then attached the cover to the book block using endpapers.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the result. I have learnt a little about measuring and allowances for the spine which will play into my next attempt. The booklet still gapes, and even squishing it under a pile of heavy books hasn’t fixed that, but I think that’s related to the issues around having not quite enough play in the spine area. I also feel like I didn’t sew the signatures together tightly enough. There’s a gap between them in the middle of the book and although it’s not a significant problem it does look unsightly.
Right, now the photos:
The cover has little metallic flecks in it:
The endpaper! Not brilliantly glued down, but still, functional:
If you look at the biggest size of this photo on Flickr, you can see that there’s a bit of an unsightly gap between the signatures. Need to get my sewing tighter:
I really can’t wait to get myself onto a bookbinding course! I’m considering raising the money to pay for it via a Kickstarter project in which I publish Argleton as a hand-bound pamphlet. Whaddayareckon? Good idea?
Making a blank booklet is one thing. Binding a book full of text and pictures and stuff is definitely the other, mainly because you need to get all your pages in the right order. Unfortunately, the right order is not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…
If you think about an 8 page booklet, made of two sheets of paper each with four pages on, the 1st page (the front cover) is on the same sheet as the 8th page (the back cover). On the other side of that sheet you’ll have pages 2 and 7; the second sheet will be 6 and 3, then 4 and 5 (the centre spread).
Although it’s really not that complicated this ‘bookletisation’ – more properly called imposition – can get a bit mind-bending if you’re doing a book that’s made up of lots of smaller booklets – more properly called signatures. So let’s say you have a 64 page book, and you’re going to bind it using 4 signatures of 16 pages printed on 4 sheets of paper (each with 4 pages) that will be folded in half and sewn in the middle. That means that your page order starts:
The pattern is relatively straightforward, but you wouldn’t want to be laying it out by hand! Instead there’s imposition software which takes a PDF ordered normally and then shuffles it all about depending on how many sheets of paper you have in each signature.
Searching the internet for something that works for Mac, I came across this great review of the three main ones: BookLightning, Cheap Impostor and CocoaBooklet. After looking at all three, I decided to go with Cheap Impostor, as it is shareware, which means that I can play with it immediately and pay for it when I know I’m actually going to use it properly. So far, it does the trick perfectly.
I took the most recent version of Book of Hay and ran it through, printing it out on A5 sheets to fold into an A6 booklet. It’s kind of amazing to see your work in proper book form, rather than as one long document on screen. It really changes your relationship to it. It is no longer just a long stream of words, it’s actually broken up in to proper pages and, as you read it, it behaves like a proper book. I can see this being very useful in the writing process, as it will give me a better sense of what the final thing will read like.
I can’t wait to get Argleton, my current short story effort, finished now so that I can get the first draft bound up into a pamphlet. I’m trying to think about what sort of binding would be best for it, what would match the contents most accurately. It’s a whole new way of thinking about writing and it’s bringing back some of the excitement that has been missing over the last few months.
