Over the next week I'm making a few books for my exhibition, I thought I'd do a bit of a photo diary of the process I use to make books. The books I'm making are going to be french/coptic sewn, hard bound, 2 section, screen printed, and lovely :) Book binding is a really interesting craft with loads of opportunities. You shouldn't think that you can't do this at home, because really it doesn't require any specialist equipment (I will however be using a massive guillotine machine, but there are ways around this which I'll explain when the time's right!).
This weekend has been mainly planning out the book, working out the page layout and printing off a draft. As I'm going to be screen printing the book, I've printed my draft out in black and white and will later this week print out acetates to burn the screens (at a later stage, I'm going to do a few posts about at-home screen printing, too). However, there's no reason why you couldn't just use print-out sheets to make a book either!
My book will be a two colour print, for this reason I'm working on 'doodle' style overlays that will go over the printed sheets. For this I'm just using tracing paper and doodling away, like this:
One important factor to remember when book binding is the number of pages. My book will feature 2 'sections', each of which will be a piece of A3 paper folded in half 3 times giving 16 pages per section (or 8 leafs). I've therefore planned out 32 pages for my book, taking into account the very front and very back pages that will be attached to the books end papers.
Later this week I will show you how I lay out the page designs on an A3 piece of paper, fold it, sew it and finally bind it. Please bare in mind that the process I'm going to be using is quite an intermediate method of book binding, and I'm mainly doing this for illustrative purposes only. After this photo diary, I'm going to be posting a step-by-step tutorial of binding a pamphlet style book that requires minimal sewing.
