This week I’ve been working on the four books that I’ve been documenting on the Design and Making a Book step two & step three pages. However, working on the books has meant less time for writing about them. Tonight I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures, but haven’t had time to explain what they are. Will do that tomorrow, I hope.
What fascinates me is how the books change during the process. I have a picture in my mind of what the finished product will look like, but it seldom is totally accurate. Materials sometimes seem to have a mind of their own! Papers that I plan on using magically shrink or get cut in the wrong direction forcing me to use alternatives. Sometimes I just don’t like something on the sixth or seventh try. One of the advantages of working on several pieces at once is that I have time to step away from one choice and come back to it later. Sometimes a paper I am considering for one book, will end up in a totally different place.
The Black Palm book is a good example. My first thoughts on the endpapers were just wrong. The second (the tigers) put William Blake into my head and I have been quoting “Tyger!, Tyger!” all week – mainly to myself. I’m very pleased with the outcome. I had no plan to use leather on any of these books. It involves a lot of work to pare it down and I have been preoccupied with a lot of other stuff. When I was trying to decide what to use as the spine for this book, nothing was working — until I noticed a piece of black leather. It was just the right size and worked beautifully. The result is that this is probably my favorite book in the batch and not at all as planned.
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