Tedorigawa Bookmakers

Bookbinding This week I made another coptic-bound, B6, 100-ish-page notebook. The right page has lines for writing while the left page is blank for drawings, doodles, and shading exercises.  As you can see, the cover is both purplish-grey and red book cloth with the purplish-grey the same book cloth as my June 5th notebook. The point of this notebook, like the other previous similar notebook, is t...

Bookbinding In bookbinding this week we have, for your visual pleasure, a novel. We have an A6-size, about 60-page, case bound edition of The Dead of Winter: A Novelist’s Kanazawa Afterlife. Printed, folded, sewed, and cased in fairly quickly (for me) in a day or two. Most of the time was attempting to align the title on the cover and spine. Properly. I think I succeeded in that endeavor. Case bou...

Bookbinding I made a B6-size, Coptic-bound, mostly blank, 120-page, seven-signature notebook for my visual pleasure. Meaning, I made this notebook for myself to use as a notebook, a depository for my doodles, ideas, plans, and to expand my horizons. One horizon I wish to improve on is cursive writing. People my age were taught cursive in school, maybe elementary school. This has fallen by the ways...

Bookbinding In bookbinding this week we have, an A6-sized, 45-ish page mystery novel completed for a friend who also corrected my Spanish as the mystery takes place in Madrid. This is the second time I made the same book because I totally screwed up the first one; cover was wonky, endpapers didn’t set straight, signatures were loose. I didn’t like it so I remade it.  The first version was B6 in si...

Bookbinding I made the spine different from the front and back covers. Before last week, it had been about five years or more since I did a quarter binding. For some reason, it was quite stressful.   The front cover also has the title. Adjusting the printer, book cloth, and position was an added stress, so the entire book seemed to be a stress-festival. But I accomplished it and felt good about th...

Bookbinding Kanazawa has two rivers. The Saigawa and the Asano-gawa (gawa meaning river). Next to the Saigawa near the Sakura Bridge is a restaurant serving good French-fusion food and wine, whiskey, and beer. It is called Frérot. I fashioned a book for Frérot called Frérot. It is about 120 pages, 7 signatures, and case bound. The right page is lined (faintly) while the left side on alternating pa...

Bookbinding In bookbinding this week we have, for your visual pleasure, a book One Year in the making. Solaris Libri. This is, I’m assuming, Latin for Solar Book. (If Google translate is accurate with dead languages.) It is an A6 blank notebook of five signatures of five folios each for a total of 100 pages. The only printing in the entire book is the title pages: Solaris Libri and under that Expo...

Bookbinding In bookbinding this week we have, for your visual pleasure, the second barf bag book of the month titled: Sumerian Beat Box Tunes (for those who are without sin). It is seven signatures of four folios each for a total of 112 pages. The right page is lined, the left page is blank. It is B6 in size and link stitched and cased in. However, unlike most cased in books, this one does not hav...

Bookbinding We are often urged to recycle and reuse. I did just that recently on a quick trip to Hanoi that netted me some Vietnamese paper and three barf bags from the flight over. And back.  Here’s a small tip. Red-eye flights are good when you land in the evening, not so good when you land in the morning. I made one A6, 100-page, blank notebook with one barf bag with the creative title Bee Crea...

Bookbinding This week we’re looking at a 100-page, A6-size, coptic-bound notebook with lines on the recto (right) side and nothing on the verso (left) side. The main difference between this notebook and others is that this book has a collage cover. I spent several hours combing through a pile of fliers I get in my mailbox, otherwise known as throwaways or direct mail, to find designs, colors, shap...

Bookbinding I cased in The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street novella. It’s B6 (which is B5 folded in half), nine signatures, and 125 pages. In making this book I discovered a warning I must pass on to my listeners/readers. Warning: Keep your fingertips away from sharp objects like exacto knives. Exacto knives are frequently used in bookbinding and, from experience, I realize they cut not only pap...

Bookbinding Aside from finishing a novella (see Fiction, right below), I printed it out to make a physical copy. It’s B6, 125 pages, and includes the Japanese holiday for each month (except June and December which have no holidays) plus other words (also in Japanese). I made a cover for the first page, sewed the text block together, and made a ten-minute tutorial (see Talkies, below). Fiction I fi...

Bookbinding Not truly amazing, but nothing this week. I got involved in a gardening project and tuckered myself out. Hopefully, more to come next week. Fiction I finished the first draft of The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street. But immediately found or thought of some changes that need to be made. Please remember that there are 12 chapters for each month of the year. • First change: A character...

Bookbinding A smaller version of the larger Benengeli’s Zuihitsu. The title combines two important books: Don Quixote (1605) and The Pillow Book (1002). Cervantes claimed the Benengeli wrote Don Quixote. Sei Shonagon wrote The Pillow Book which someone called a zuihitsu. The smaller version is A6 in size with 9 signatures of four folios each and 144 pages (versus the five signature of five folios...

Bookbinding Last episode I cased in Our Truckin’ Book but the book boards splayed out as if I had cut them perpendicular to the grain rather than with the grain. This episode, I tore off the cover and repaired it with the proper grain. But the same book cloth so it looks similar. This week I printed out two copies of Benengeli’s Zuihitsu. One is A5 and one is A6. This week, I cased in the A5 versi...

Bookmaking I finished Our Truckin’ Book which is an art book I’m hoping artists will finish. It is 100 pages, A5 in size (half of A4), and blank, of course, for artists to fill up as they wish. Hopefully. For Our Truckin’ Book to be completed, I need at least one artist’s physical mail address so I can send them a physical ie real book. The artist will send the book to the next artist and hopefull...

Bookbinding I went to Tokyo for four days. Before that, I finished a client’s hardcopy of The Briefcase Case. I presented it to the client in Tokyo. Other than making that particular book, I didn’t make any other as I was busy going to and from Tokyo by shinkansen. Fiction I’ve got three bits of fiction floating around my computer and brain.  One: Zuihitsu. It has two plots that are coming to end...

Bookbinding This week in bookbinding I made a quick collage-covered A6, 50-page book: The Battered Briefcase Case: A Marsh Mystery. It is a murder mystery. A man is accused of murder and hires a private investigator to find the real killer. The investigator discovers someone in Spain might have information about the real killer. In Spain the investigator meets his one true love. This is a short st...

Bookbinding   This is a120-page, A6-size blank notebook with a collage cover. The important part is the collage cover. As is most of my collage covers, this was an experiment in two ways: first, could I film the process? Second, did it look okay? Top right is the front cover. Top left is the back cover. Off by itself is the book opened up so you can see both the front and back at the same time. Fa...

Bookbinding You’re going to get a quick and easy Japanese lesson unless you already speak and read Japanese in which case this might be boring? Rhinoceros in Japanese is Sai with the accompanying kanji being 犀. The English river in Japanese transforms to Kawa with its kanji being three vertical lines; one is not straight: 川. Together they form one of the two major rivers that flow through Kanaza...