Two Eccentric Bindings for The Mad Hatter

George Walker's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass"

See them at the Osborne Collection in the Lillian Harris Library in Toronto

beyond the scroll case

Some nice results from Beyond the Scroll Case.  Boxes are built up with thin card around various shapes, trimmed with leather and covered with an amusing paper.

Laura the Printer's Devil gets her chance on the Albion at Massey College Print Room.

The new Aga Khan Museum in Toronto

Last Sunday Mary, Manu and I attended the pre-opening of the brand new Aga Khan Museum in Don Mills.  Devoted to historical and contemporary Islamic Art, the museum has extraordinary exhibition space and was showing some of its best stuff. There was everything from an enormous 15th C. carpet to a miniature book about 3" tall. I had been working on producing one of the exhibits for the opening, a series of flip books  by Pakistani artist Bani Abidi and gladly accepted their invitation to the "soft" opening. The final preparations were still being completed- no labels yet on the exhibits, pieces of masking tape indicating the positions of as yet uninstalled work-but that took nothing away from the experience of this beautiful building. We wandered around for an hour or so, missed the tour of the glass roofed mosque as I had to get to work and finish the flip books!- and left altogether impressed. Definitely worth a look.

all you ever wanted to know about linen thread

This from Isabel Tipton who was in my Coptic Bookbinding class last week. I casually mentioned that linen 25/3 cord thread was a common size for bookbinding but that after 35 years of binding I didn't really know what the numbers referred to. I received this in an email yesterday and felt you all should know. Also I love such beautifully clear expressions of this kind of highly specialized knowledge and vocabulary. One day Pointyhead Press will publish a collection of this kind of writing. Thank you Isabel for getting the ball rolling. To wit:

"We were talking in class about the 24/3 linen thread. 24 lea is 24 x 300 divided by 3 or about 2,000 yards per pound. Isn't knowing that going to make a big difference in your life? Cotton is 640 yards to the pound, same sort of figuring out."

"The standard measure of bulk linen yarn is the lea, which is the number of yards in a pound of linen divided by 300. For example a yarn having a size of 1 lea will give 300 yards per pound. The fine yarns used in handkerchiefs, etc. might be 40 lea, and give 40x300 = 12,000 yards per pound. This is a specific length therefore an indirect measurement of the fineness of the linen, i.e. the number of length units per unit mass. The symbol is NeL.(3) The metric unit, Nm, is more commonly used in continental Europe. This is the number of 1,000 m lengths per kilogram. In China, the English Cotton system unit, NeC, is common. This is the number of 840 yard lengths in a pound.

 

Coptic bookbinding at MISSA July 2014

Some very fine work from my students at Metchosin International Summer School of Art. The papyrus text blocks were sewn in Ethiopian 2 needle, kettle stitch style and covered in leather decorated with a design cut out of thin goatskin onlaid and laced onto the base leather with strips of vellum. Designs varied from Christian to Cabalistic, pagan to peonies. It always amazes me how much application people bring to the making of these beautiful, personal and quite impractical book forms.