Book #030

Here's a picture of the cover of today's book. Unfortunately I am having some infuriating problems with my computer. Can anyone explain to me what to do when my scratch disks fill up?

The inside of this book is the interesting part; the pages are kind of unusual. But it will have to wait. Silly scratch disks.

OK. Scratch disk gods have been appeased and here is a picture of the inside of the book. The pieces of paper that make up the pages are all the same size but are folded in different places, so the pages are graduated in width. They are arranged in a single signature, so (in this example) the light colored paper is both the shortest first page and the longest last page. The dark brown is the next shortest and next longest...and so on. At the center, the light paper has been used again, and folded in half, so the centerfold pages are the same size. I think it would be fun to put an image on each page, and plan for the exposed parts of the images at the edges to combine to make a different picture when the pages are lying flat.

All of which makes me think of fore-edge painting. Fore-edge painting is an old art, still practiced by a tiny handful of artists, in which an image is painted on the very edges of the pages of a book. I don't mean that the edges of the book are decorated in a way that can be seen when the book is closed. The painting is done on the face of the pages, and the image is visible only when the pages are fanned - it is invisible when the book is closed. Here are two examples. I appropriated these images from the website of fore-edge artist Martin Frost so I could show them to you, and I'll remove them in a few days. Do go to Frost's website - and prepare to be wowed.