Regular visitors to this blog may remember some ceramic book covers I made. Well I have worked on them a little further and made some new ones.
As I mentioned in the first post on this, I intended to make my own paper. I used a commercial/craft paper pulp mixed with water for this, no magic tricks or alchemy, and what I have is 9 sheets of reasonably white, soft paper, around A4 size with a deckle edge.
They vary in weight, from quite thick to very thin (so thin they are easily torn) and I also made about the same amount with added material, namely shredded and torn pages from the original book, Margarets Choice:
A very satisfying process, with lots of potential for adding unusual substances to the mix, for extra texture, colour and stability. Of course, I could just go and buy some lovely stuff from my local craft store, but where’s the fun in that, eh?
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For this next book I made a mould of a piece of old steel cut from a boat and made two terracotta cast peices, drilled them before they hardened fully and set them to soak for a couple of days. I used this stuff to cast one of the Helvetica ‘a’s a while back. It’s a kind of reddish plaster mixed with iron powder, so when you’ve had it in some water for a while and then expose it to the air, it rusts! As I couldn’t use the original peice of steel (it was to be made into a sculpture by Ben) I thought this was a good alternative.
The terracotta cast is very heavy owing to the iron content, which is a nice counterpoint to the choice of binding. I decided to use coptic binding for this, as well as commercial cartridge paper for the book stock. I like the idea of the delicate, exposed threads holding the rough and heavy covers around the clean, regular pages. The book measures approximately 210mmm x 95mm.
[...] did a couple of test prints (on the nipping press) before using the last few sheets of hand-made paper I produced last [...]