I’m in the process of planning my next Kickstarter project, which I’m hoping to have up early in March. This time, I’m trying to make sure that I really nail down my costs before I settle on my reward levels but this is proving to be trickier than anticipated! I want this time to offer a leather-bound version of the novelette, but in talking to various bookbinders, the answer to “How much does this cost?” appears to be “How much have you got?”.

The wide variation in options means that we can go from a very basic leather binding with nothing much more than a label on the spine to say what the book is and who wrote it, right the way up to complex bindings with inlays, gold tooling or gold-edged pages and everything in between. Before I can really know the price, I need to know what the design is but I won’t start the design work until I know that the project is going ahead. That creates a bit of a catch-22 situation as I need my costings to be as accurate as I can get them to ensure that I don’t end up under-budgeting.

Now, I have bound in leather once before and was chuffed as a small horse to hear from one of the bookbinders I met yesterday that my work is of a professional standard. Indeed, I was told that if I pitched up at this particular bindery with that as an example of my work, I’d be offered a job pretty much on the spot. It’s hard to express just how happy that made me as I obviously want to do as good a job as possible for my supporters!

At the moment (and for the foreseeable future), I don’t have the equipment needed to bind in leather. Once you start doing case bindings with a rounded spine, you start to need presses and other equipment that I both can’t afford and don’t have space for. But there is another option: to find a bindery that will allow me to hire space and provide a mentor under whose tutelage I can work so that I can make sure I don’t do anything wrong. That’s something I’ll be looking into over the next week or so, and it is my preferred solution. I adore making books, and working with leather is just a delight, not least because of the fabulous smell! And it would be a fantastic opportunity to hone my skills, so I am hoping that someone, somewhere does indeed go for a leather-bound hardback once the project is up online!

If you want to be amongst the very first people to know when Queen of the May goes live, join my mailing list and you’ll find out before anyone else!

Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, some photos of the leather-bound journal I made:

It’s amazing how much you can achieve through creative procrastination. I finished up the first draft of my next novelette, currently titled Queen of the May although that might change. The transcription from my handwriting wasn’t too bad, but it has resulted in a lot of errors because my writing has a tendency to get a bit scrawly when I get over-excited. The first first draft came in at 21,673 words, a number which is steadily decreasing as I tidy up the copy.

But I have to confess that editing out weird typos is not exactly the most thrilling of pastimes, so I’ve been putting a lot of energy into planning my next Kickstarter project and, this time, getting my costings spot on. I’m talking to Oldacres in Hatton Garden again for printing as they did such a great job last time, and between us we’re trying to figure out how to do a better job on the paper cover for the hardback.

Last time, we used just normal paper stock with a laminate finish. It looked really good, but it was a bitch to work with when binding. Not only did I have to deal with the paper fibres swelling, as is their wont, but the lamination worsened the problem meaning that I had to tape down each sheet in order to work with it. Since then I’ve done a couple of bookbinding courses at Falkiners, both of which were fantastic. I learnt some new techniques and got to play with some materials that I’d never have used on my own, and that experience has altered my thinking on how to bind the next set of books.

Firstly, I want to use Japanese paper for the paper-covered hardbacks. Japanese paper is made differently to western paper and because its fibres are random, rather than being all lined up as in our usual paper, it doesn’t curl when wet. This makes it a joy to work with. Japanese papers are also stronger, so you can work with a thinner stock which allows you to get much crisper, cleaner lines. But when you buy decorative Japanese paper, it has usually been screen printed, so although we can buy white sheets, how we print it is something that we’re still trying to work on. Oldacres are currently experimenting for me with some samples from John Purcell Paper, a wholesaler. I am very anxiously awaiting the results!

Secondly, the methodology I used for the silk covers last year turned out to be horribly, painfully time-consuming. I translated my “design” into blocks of colour, cut the right shapes out from appropriately coloured dupion silk, bonded them together and then sewed over the joins with embroidery. A very time-consuming process. The embroidery alone took 16 hours per cover. Beautifully as they came out, I cannot go through that again! So now I’m looking at the possibility of screenprinting, or maybe just doing a simpler embroidered design. This is going to require some serious and careful thought as it will have a big impact on the cover design. (You’ll be glad to hear that I’m not going to be doing the design myself this time!)

I’m also looking into possibilities for a leather-bound version. I’m talking to a number of binderies about my options, both for them to provide the binding service, and to explore whether there is any way that I can work on the leather bindings myself, under supervision. Whilst I worked with leather in my second Falkiners course, I have neither the equipment or the experience to do the leather versions myself. BInding in leather, even if it’s just an A6 novelette, is going to be far from cheap, but the results will be stunning.

Soon, I’ll have my costings nailed down and then I’ll be in the right position to start my next Kickstarter project. I have had a few ideas for exclusive rewards that I’ll be listing, but their numbers will be very limited indeed. I’ll be announcing the project through my mailing list first so if you want to be amongst the first people to know when it goes live, join the mailing list now! I send out very few emails and I manage the list using Mailchimp so you can set your preferences for type of email and can unsubscribe at any time without any risk of your email address winding up in the wrong hands.

I’m very excited to be planning my second Kickstarter project. It’s been 18 months since I put Argleton up, and the Kickstarter community has expanded dramatically over that time, so I’m eager to see what sort of support it’s possible to get now. My goal will certainly have to be a bit higher than last time in order to pay for a designer and my time: If writing is to be sustainable, it has to provide me with a modest living, and I would be very happy indeed if it could do that independent of the behemoth that is Amazon.

In the meantime, though, there’s only so long I can put off doing that edit!

Whilst watching this video of John Carrera’s project to reprint the Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary, I spotted that he had a nifty little device for putting holes into his book signatures, making sewing large numbers of books much quicker and easier.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to buy a jig like this? Is this standard bookbinding gear? Or would I have to find someone to make it for me?

I’m reminded by Simon Goode of the the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a collection of translated poems by Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyám. In 1912, a version of the book was bound by London bookbinder Francis Sangorski, who had a bit of a thing for shiny. Simon summarises:

The book took more than two years work to produce, bound in full leather with inlays of silver satinwood and mahogany. The Rubáiyát featured more than 1,050 precious and semi-precious stones – rubies, topaz, garnet and turquoise.

The rest of the tragic story is explained in this video:

Maria Fischer has made a beautiful book where the illustrations are sewn in thread. She says:

the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams.

It really is a beautiful piece of work – do go and have a look!

Thanks to Peter Harris for emailing me the link.

Last Wednesday’s inaugural Bookbinding Club, held at The Lamb on the wonderfully named Lambs Conduit Street, was a runaway success! Ben O’Steen and I were joined by about half a dozen others, and much beer, food and conversation was had. Not a bad turn-out, given that the weather was so vile.

I took a few of my notebooks and my most recent Argleton prototype to get some feedback. There may even be some pictures of said prototype floating about somewhere, as cameras were present! Overall, feedback was good, especially to the prototype, which made me very happy.

We did have a fairly heated discussion about whether or not some of my books were, and I quote, “wonky”. Certainly I’m aware that it can actually be quite hard to get a book to come out perfectly square, even if you’ve carefully measured everything out. Sometimes, it’s just a bit wonky. Ben contended, however, that wonkiness is part of the charm of hand-made books and that, in any case, the wonkiness I was complaining of was so minor as to be unnoticeable.

We’ve decided that our next meeting will be in two months, on the last Wednesday of November, 24th, and then again on the last Wednesday in January, 26th, conveniently skipping over that awkward Christmas period. It’ll be at The Lamb again, 6pm. If you’d like to come along to the next meeting, here’s an Eventbrite page to sign up to. You don’t need to – you can just decide to come along on the night – but if you do it’ll give us an idea of numbers.

The theme for the next meeting will be paper! Please do bring along samples of paper, whether for covers, construction, endpapers, or book blocks, to discuss. We look forward to hearing about your favourite paper. I’m hoping that, by November, I’ll have finally found a good, affordable paper for making fountain-pen friendly notebooks. If so, I shall certainly share!

Inspired by the wonderousness of The Stationery Club, Ben O’Steen and I have decided to run our own Bookbinding Club. We’re going to get together at 6pm on Wednesday 29 September at The Lamb on Lambs Conduit Street for our inaugural meeting.

Anyone who is interested in bookbinding, whether or not they practice, is welcome. If you’re curious about how books are made, just beginning to make your own (that’ll be me then!) or an expert, we would be delighted to see you.

Each get together will be themed, so for this first one, please do bring along any projects you have that you’re in the middle of, stuck on, or have finished for us to discuss. And if you’re a beginner, we’ll talk about how to make a simple book so you can go home and get started!

You’ll easily be able to spot us – we’ll be the people sat with the piles of books and stationery out on the table! If you’re coming, please feel free to leave a comment here so that we can get an idea of numbers.

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.

Tor.com have a bunch of fabulous pictures, so it’s well worth heading over there to read the rest.

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…

Hat tip: Kevin Marks

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:

16 – 1
2 – 15
14 – 3
4 – 13
12 – 5
6 – 11
10 – 7
8 – 9
32 – 17
18 – 31
30 – 19
20 – 29 etc.

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.