Stop-motion: the art of printing from January Press. How beautiful. There’s nothing quite like a limited edition small press book. I would love to have poetry published like this – how special would that be? Am rather in awe of book printing videos at the moment. Be still my heart.
I stumbled across a truly beautiful short film/clip detailing the process of book production the other day.
It is shot, directed and edited by the talented Glen Milner and was, originally, a clip for The Daily Telegraph.
Focusing on traditional book-binding procedures and techniques, Leed’s very own Smith-Settle Printers are producing, here, a hardback copy of Suzanne St. Albans’ ‘Mango and Mimosa’. The amount of work done by hand is refreshing to see and the end product is one to be truly coveted. You can buy the limited edition copies here.
A few weeks ago, I found this paperwork – ‘Autoconstruccion’ – at the Tate Modern:
The artist is Abraham Cruzvillegas, and the artwork is created out of a collection of receipts, napkins, tickets, drawings, postcards, significant images from the newspaper and other collected paper pieces painted over with striking red wall paint.
Cruzvillegas calls them ‘blind self portraits’, representing his time spent in Glasgow, Cove Park, France, Italy and Mexico. I think this ‘found’ paperwork is fascinating – words painted over – signalling a muffled autobiography of sorts.
A while ago I shared some of my paper-making activities, so I thought I would show you some more paper-binding-book things along that line and post some simple cards that I have made recently. I have optimistic plans to become incredibly industrious and do some serious binding for a couple of Christmas notebooks for certain family members, but lately, I have had birthday after birthday in quick succession. So the post holds one of my cards that I made, with just a simple binding.
Here you can see the simple slip stitch binding along the spine of the card, nice and straight, if I do say so myself.
And here is the finished card in its entirety, with a lovely crisp finish.
Will keep you posted with the Christmas binding. I am thinking along the lines of traditional Japanese stab binding.
While I have been away, I have been intermittently attempting to perfect my skills in my papermaking.
Just a couple of photos of my processes.
The wet paper slurry in my deckle (lovingly made by my partner, Guy):
The paper sheet couched on a piece of felt:
I have been trying to get the paper as thin as possible without distortion or gaps.
The finished, dried piece of featherlight paper:
Not quite there, as you can see by the gap at the top of the page, but slowly, slowly working on it.
