Book #064 - Double-Accordion with Color

Double accordion...just what it sounds like: two accordions combined in one book. Slit them all from one horizontal edge straight to the center (no farther!) then turn half of them 180 degrees and slide the slits together. We've all done this at some time or other (usually around 4th grade) to make two flat pieces of paper stand up in a more or less 3-D fashion. The covers are flat panels at each end. So the whole thing really does seem accordion-like.

I ws going through old Dan Smith catalogs today, ripping out some stuff to save - product information and so on - and I just couldn't pass up the wonderful colorful pages of paint samples. So that's what the covers are covered with, and maybe I'll glue some more of them inside the book...make it a color palette sampler.

Yes, the top picture background is weird. Isn't Photoshop fun?

Book #063 - Idaho

You know, this state book idea is helpful for when I need inspiration, but making them is going to be tricky. I am having to enlarge my source materials to make reasonable sized books, and as I want them all to be at the same scale I have to take care to do the enlarging exactly the same each time. Then there's the distortion contributed by the particular projection of the source map, which becomes much more noticeable at the larger size. I'd better get a system figured out sooner rather than later if I don't want to do a bunch of the early states over.

Well, anyway - here's Idaho! It has a nice straight western boundary. Someone commented that Hawaii will be hard, but I think not; it borders only water, no other land masses. That'll be a piece of cakewalk in the park.

Book #062 - Pink

This is the kind of book that happens when you are sitting around in the studio visiting with friends. It's made from some of the nifty paint samples that have four different shades of a color separated by nicely perforated lines that fold very well. It's a concertina (accordion) of sorts, but the pages have been glued shut so they are more "page-like." Did I mention that the different colors are also different widths - thus the different sized pages. It needed a little something, and besides, the two cards had to be joined somehow, so I punched holes and wound telephone wire through them with a bunch of pink and pink-friendly beads and buttons.

Do you know how many things the word "pink" means? Neither did I. It is: a color, a flower, a pointy edge, a poke, a hunting jacket, a pair of pants, a boat, perfection, a town in Iowa, a Communist sympathizer, a fish, to pierce with tiny holes...and a few more that are obsolete words. I suppose that is what this book should be about someday. Or maybe about places and/or people named Pink.

Book #061 - Washington

There are some days (like today) when I am busy with other things and have no burning ideas for a book. To get me through those days I am starting a set of little books in the shapes of the states. So that will take care of 50 days worth of books, at the end of which I will have a big map of books. They're to be very simple - pages and cover folded and stapled. Washington is hinged at the top, because that's a nice, almost straight line.

I'm having trouble getting a picture of yesterday's book. It really can't be scanned, and the camera is giving me kittens. But it will get done sooner or later.

Book #059 - Doodling

I'm way late posting this, but I really did make the book yesterday - last night after dinner, sitting around at the table, in fact. We had an old friend over who moved from Seattle and hasn't sat down to dinner with us in a long time. After a few minutes it didn't seem long at all.

I have a 5-drawer rolling Iris cart tucked under the dining room table where I keep my upstairs supplies. (I end up working on the table most of the time anyway.) I found some tabbed notebook dividers, needle and thread and a few Sharpies. So that's what this book is made from. I doodled the cover a bit - don't know what it is. Just doodling. No scissors so I ripped. The spine is sewn and the cover is stuck over the stitching with doublestick tape..

And it isn't nearly as fuzzy as the picture makes it look!

Book #058 - Blank (blue) Slate

A uber-simple book for a busy day. You can barely see that its pages are two shades of blue and that it has a sewn binding. No separate covers...what you see is what it is.

Book #054 - Japanese ledger

A Japanese style ledger or receipt book, daifuku cho. Once very popular as a travel diary and as a guest register at inns, but most commonly as a merchant's account book. Daifuku means 'great fortune,' traditionally inscribed on the cover to encourage great fortune and success in business.

Book #052 - Yellow Question With Music

The book (cover) is yellow. The book (pages) are music.


The question, which occurred to me as I was getting ready to cut the cover down to size, is: Is there any reason a book cover can't be larger than the pages? Are there any reasons why you might like a book cover to be larger than the pages?

I'm going to sleep on it.

Book #048 - She So Pretty...

I found these flashcards at the Dollar Store the other day. I'm always on the lookout for unlikely stuff to turn into a book, and I have a particular liking for flash cards and game cards and such, but these cards were especially interesting in that they had two words to most of the cards and they weren't your run-of-the-mill words either.

No too-cute drawings of apple or kite - very few nouns at all, in fact - but lots of adverbs and adjectives and prepositions, with no pictures whatsoever. So there are ample opportunities to assemble silly phrases and odd combinations of words. Too cool! AND there were three different sets of these. More cool! I am so easily entertained.

Anyhow, I sewed one set into a book (the cards folded so nicely down the center) as seen above. The cover is minimal, just a piece of heavy cardstock glued at the spine. And those are the first eight pages. The story gets weirder later.

Book #047 - Tags and More Tags

Here's an assortment of little books made from shipping tags. From the top, going clockwise:

1. three tags taped together to make an accordion (or a screen?)
2. two tags with a paper spine glued on the short end, a small signature stapled in last
3. three tags tied together with one string - about as simple as it gets
4. the pages are stapled in the fold at the left, the other end of the tag makes a flap, and theres a button holding it shut through the hole
5. just like #2 but with the spine on a long side

center - tag folded in half, pages stapled in at left fold and the whole thing tied shut with the ends of the string

The strings can be used in a lot of ways: to hold the things shut, to attach embellishments or just to hang there and make it look tag-like.

Happy Presidents' Day.

Book #045 - an Unwoven Longstitch

A tidier take on a longstitch. I made the spine first, separate from the rest of the book. As you can see it has five rows of holes (for five bundles of pages - aka "signatures") and six holes each. The holes show up better on this side of the cardboard, which was cut from a used Priority Mail box, but on the other side are all the measuring lines and marks. They show up further down the page. I used the finished spine to locate the holes on each signature, marked with a pencil then poked with a pushpin. When everything had all its holes it was an easy matter to stitch them together. (Remember Sewing Cards?)




The thread broke once, that was a nuisance but I just un-sewed it a bit and tied on an extension; you can see the knot. All the pages were neatly attached to a sturdy spine, ready to be joined to a cover of some sort. Now, the beauty of doing things this way is that the structure of the book is established and you can make the cover out of any number of sensible to ridiculous things - it's just there to protect the pages, not to support the book in any way. You can just glue it into a folded sheet of paper or card stock, as shown, or you could use fabric, or leather, or an interesting cover that you ripped off of an old book. You could glue the spine to the wall and never misplace the book.




There is one further refinement that would make the inside of the book look nicer; maybe that will be for tomorrow.

Book #044 - Woven Longstitch (Improvised)

Very 70s looking, n'est-ce pas? Reminiscent of all that macrame, which I actually wasn't into back then.

What's going on here is two things: first, a woven long stitch. This is simply a long running stitch that attaches the signatures to the spine of the book, basting it, as it were. See the red drawing below. After the basting is done you take the long leftover ends (leave some at the beginning) and weave them back and forth through the basting threads to make a nice, tidy woven decoration on the spine. At least that's what happens when you make the same number of very evenly spaced holes for each signature.

But who wants to do that when you can make different numbers of randomly-spaced holes and improvise a 70s-style macrame/woven/buttonhole-stitched spider web? That's the second thing. (See the blue drawing above.) Making things up as I go along is my idea of a good time, and this required a lot of that so I had a real good time! (So good that I went to bed exhausted and didn't post this until 12 hours later.)

The cover is just one folded piece of paper, the contrasting pieces were glued on later. This is a very simple style of book if you are comfortable with a hand sewing and improvisation.

Here's a picture of a very precise and beautiful (unwoven) longstitch binding, lest you feel that I'm setting a bad example for you. It is pretty, isn't it?

By the way - no matter how many or how crooked, you need an even number of holes in each signature.

Book #043 - Exercises in Asemic Writing

Asemic writing. It looks like writing, but you can't quite read it.

Today's book is more about the content than the construction, for a change. Asemic writing is writing that...isn't. It looks as if you should be able to read it but...you can't. It appears to make sense, but...no, it doesn't. Or does it? Here are some examples that I came up with for today's book with explanations of how they were done. If you want to read up on asemic writing you could start here.

The text above was made by slicing a printed page from a book and then reassembling the slices. In this case the cuts were made horizontally, through the center of the lines of type, so that the letters were split in two. Then the strips were mixed up and offset a bit - however it looked good - and glued back together. The whole thing was then scanned and tidied up in Photoshop; all the little leftover bits being removed.

The two on the left were made the same as the above example, except that the strips were cut vertically so that the the individual letters were preserved and recognizable; the combinations of strips resulted in random mixing of parts of words, creating something that looks like our alphabet but not a familiar language. To the right, circles and rectangles cut (punched, actually) from some pages were glued onto a whole page, breaking up the print in a completely random way.


And finally, the above example was done in Photoshop, using the same principles as described above. I created a line of test and then cut and copied and reassembled it. Lastly I used some shape-distorting tools on it.

You know you can enlarge the images by clicking on them, right?

Book #042 - ahead of its time

A simple book for a long and arduous day.

Book 42 does not contain the answer to the Ultimate Question - it's a self portrait deco. It has white cardstock pages and a tan cover sewn with a pamphlet stitch. There's room for seven contributors; everyone gets a two page spread - a whole face. I'm sure that no one I know has a head shaped quite like that, but these are imaginary - or maybe imaginative - self portraits.
As the host it's my job to do the covers, and you can see I've started a little pencil experimentation. (What am I going to do with that string coming out of my nose?)

Anyone want to play? It will fit in a #10 envelope, I think...until it gets too thick. Leave a comment or email me (liisa at liisa mannery dot com). I have two people so far.

Late. Tired. 'Night.

Book #041

This book was done at 9PM. It truly was!

Then I started looking for a blog widget that counts down days. And now it's 2:17AM!

So here is a scan of the front of today's book. I know, it looks like a square of paper, but it is a book front. The pages are a cream colored card stock, staggered as on Day #030, and the covers are this brown and pink dotted paper that I can't seem to get enough of these days. The whole thing went together in about 15 minutes. Nice book.

Book #040 Kiss-A-Me

I never get tired of paint samples, especially the names. The best names are the ones that have nothing to do with color; the very very best thing is a whole strip of colors - with no name having anything to do with color. The samples here are all colors of love, romance, kissing, sighing...

The construction of the book is probably obvious: a heart-shaped accordion with glued on covers. The ovals are punched out of paint chips - names included. They are slipped into slits in the pages and then embellished with more color names and shapes. The edges of the pages are brushed with iridescent watercolor...it looks much more shimmery and subtle in person.

Book #039 - a PDX Gluebook

Book #39 is a just-for-fun gluebook. It all started with some tourist literature from Portland Oregon that I couldn't quite get rid of. I ripped up the map to make wide narrow pages then glued other bits and pieces to them. Lastly, I scribbled - my own comments and memories but, even more so, Gordon's comments and memories about his home town. It was an nice way to pass an evening and I heard some good stories and learned a few things. Gluebooks are good therapy, too - spontaneous cutting and pasting - nothing too serious.

The pictures are the front cover and 1 (plus a little more) of the 12 pages in the book.

Book #038 - a Highly Experimental...Experiment

Also highly pink. It just happened that way.

This all started because I had a cereal box, a raisin box and another cereal box that nested just perfectly and I thought it would be cool if I could find enough of the right sized boxes to make a whole book that way. And I might still, with 327 days left in the year. But I did (and still do) have a whole lot of identical pieces of cardboard - hot pink glossy on one side - left over from a previous life, and they're already scored for folding in one place. And I have a LOT of them. Sooooo...

I decided to try out the idea using the hot pink cardboard. It was instructive, as an experiment. Cutting 16 pieces all exactly the right size (2.5 mm smaller each side, each time) was a challenge, as you can easily see in the photos. When I got to the end the original binding idea was obviously not going to work. I tossed around a few ideas and settled on cable ties: two biggish ones to hold the pages together, and two more tiny ones to hold the ends of the biggish ones together. They are easily enough removed if I get a better idea down the road.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It was interesting, but I don't really like it all that well. It's not a lot of fun to put together - far too little room for error to suit me - and the results are...meh. It's heavy, too. But one of these days (like maybe next October) it will dawn on me why this book needs to exist, and then it will become one of my favorites. I'll betcha.

Book #037 - Red Envelopes for the New Year

I had some of these Red Envelopes left from the Lunar New Year. Happy Year of the Ox, by the way. They were the perfect size for a small book cover, and I thought I could just slip a piece of cardboard inside to stiffen things a little, and then glue them to the ends of an accordion-folded page block. As it turned out I decided instead to slit the back of the envelope and slip the end panel of the accordion inside the envelope. It stays nicely with no gluing - always a plus in my book. (Ooh, no pun intended , really.) The accordion is cut from a big sheet of watercolor paper that folded up just right to make 12 perfect size panels. So...you've probably guessed that it's going to be a book about the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac. I already have some faux postage from New Years past...so that's a start.

The envelopes are not only very RED, but the paper has a velvety surface that is just a bugger to photograph - reflects light all over the place. And all that gold! Actually the gold turned out surprisingly well in this scan; metallics are normally impossible. Anyhow, it looks better in the blow-up so please click.

Gung hei fat choi!

Book #036 - Pseudo Belgian

Well. This is my new Favorite Binding. It could be called a variation on a Belgian Binding - that kind of variation that happens when you're trying to do something from memory and can't quite remember how. The covers and spine are three separate pieces that are sewn together. OK, more like woven together - the spine just sits there with the threads passing over and under it. The pages are added last, at which point the whole thing comes together as a single connected whole. It's hard to describe, but it really is very elegant. I think its greatest virtue is that, although there are several steps, you do them one at a time, and none is really what you'd call difficult. So overall it's very easy. I like this book a lot.

Thus far it's empty (the pages are a pretty paprika-ish color) but there seems to be a theme building. The binding is Belgian (sort of) and the thread I used to bind it is Belgian linen (a coincidence) and I was watching PBS while I worked and lo and behold - Poirot! (He was Belgian, mon ami.) So...a book of Belgian? Horses? Endive? Lace? Audrey Hepburn?

Oh, and the window on the front cover is just the top layer of the corrugated board carefully removed to expose the flutes.