Bookbinding II Bradel bindings at CBBAG

By the end of week 3 we had sewn a text block with concealed cloth jointed endpapers, rounded and backed, trimmed and decorated the top edge, sewn end bands, attached the boards and covered in full paper. I chose one of my paste papers because I like my own cooking.  Next week we start on our split boards binding.  An old form but a good one.

Five Kinds of Black

This just finished for customer Jason Logan  at The Toronto Ink Company who is in the fascinating trade of making ink by hand from peach pits, sea shells and other unlikely materials.  Photographs are by Kristn Sjaarda.

This modification of a classic "clamshell" box combined with Jason's "advertising" graphics made for a dual purpose structure that shows off the five bottles of Jason's hand made ink while protecting the  bottles in transit.  Jason liked how the reference to the clamshell box's usual use in libraries to house valuable books went sympathetically with the notion of the ink as a material in the creation of manuscripts both ancient and modern.

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.