Could it finally be a faint bookbinding routine that I’m sensing? My poetry book is coming out early February, so I’m once again at a stage where I have time to date other kinds of books, too. This year was not an ideal year to be selling and shipping handbound books to predominantly overseas destinations (Australia is still unreachable, but thankfully most other destinations seem to be suffering from fewer delays than earlier in the year) and it felt wiser to simply take a step back and focus more on writing instead.
At the end of November I got the chance to move my bookbinding studio to my writing studio (making my home is simply a home, not a home/workspace, for the first time in my life) and it has done wonders to my wellbeing and motivation. Not meeting people is easier when you have more than one place in which to feel lonely. Binding books is easier when you have more room to do it. And so, in December I finally made a bunch of books. All sewn boards binding style with semi-soft covers and wonderfully flexible hand feel. Some of them are already sold, but most are available in the shop.
A full dozen of vintage kimono silk notebooks makes a beautiful stack! These are a fine example of recycling - all these silks have first served as kimonos and have now been turned into book covers. Some fabrics I only have tiny scraps of, just enough to make a single spine and nothing else - making these books rare treasures, once again.
And speaking of treasures, earlier this year a very, very kind stranger surprised me with a gift of gorgeous papers from her own collection - now I’ve been able to put some of them into use as endpaper. The endpapers in a sewn boards binding are drummed on, that is, glued to the covers only at the very edges, which made it possible for me to use this amazing floral relief paper without squishing its soul out of it.
And then there are exceptional situations when I feel the need to stray from my rule of creating one of a kind books. These green and yellow materials spoke to me and said they’d much rather be born as book twins than anything else. And so there is now an identical pair of notebooks available (you can buy just one, but you could just as well buy both - they’re lovely and you could give one away and be book twins with someone amazing).
Making any plans about what next still feels like tempting fate, so I’m not going to actually go there, but I am going to say I’d enjoy making a zine or two next year, or at least an artists’ book that, for a change, isn’t one of a kind. I’ve got a big stack of blank and dotted grid signatures folded and ready for their endpapers, so there’ll be room in my books for your words, too.