Book #002

Here's the second book of the year. It's a Braille abecedarium, with holes for the dots. It wasn't a great success, in fact, I chose not to use the covers I'd made for it...seemed like a waste. Still, I really like this particular structure - sometimes called a "flag" book. The pages are individual sheets attached to the folds of a long accordion spine. In this case the spine is over 50" long and one continuous strip of heavy paper. (If you've ever made a long accordion out of several glued-together pieces of paper you know how very cool continuous is!) I had salvaged it from a fashion photographer friend who gets the blue-grey paper for backdrops.

Anyhow, I had a bunch of reject 4x6 inch photos handy, and thought they'd make good pages. I punched the big holes and then got this wild idea to add a raised image to each page: "A is for Anchor" and so on. So I drew (hah!) them with hot glue. It's been a long time since I used hot glue and I had forgotten how awful it smells and how it gets runny and bubbly when it overheats. Things went alright up until about "H is for Hat" and then it was all downhill from there. Plus, I felt sick. Ugh!

The book did have its interesting and worthwhile aspects (besides just doing it on schedule). One was seeing how the holes lined up, or didn't, and what intriguing views there were through the pages...especially from the original photo side. It was a little hard to capture in pictures but I think you'll get the idea from the images above. The other was the undulating snakiness of it. I've made these kinds of books before but never this long...it was sort of like playing with a Slinky.