Instant books from the Internet

For a while now I've been experimenting with instant books using text downloaded from the internet. One of the most instant methods is Japanese binding.

You just download the book you want from Project Gutenberg or wherever, load it into a word processor and format it the way you want. Then you lay it out in double columns and print it on A4 paper. 

Each sheet is then folded backwards and assembled into a text block. Add a sheet of decorative paper at either end and sew. Voila!

The beauty of the procedure is that you don't have to use a book production package like Publisher, or faff about with double-sided printing. Just lay it out in two-column format and press the print button.

I must admit I got so lazy I didn't even do the internal supporting twists of paper, just stabbed the text blocks with a thin awl and sewed right in.

The result is rather fetching. And it shows that quite long books can be produced relatively easily, so you aren't limited to slim volumes of contemporary verse.

The next step is to print the text on Falkiner's short grain A4 paper, designed specifically for books, and set the quality to max.

Incidentally, the books are The Wrong Box by R.L. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (l); The Story of Tsing Sung and the Exponent of Dark Magic by Ernest Bramah (c) and Saki's Anti-Christmas, three stories by H.H. Munro (r).

Four Poems by Rimbaud

Well, the rebinding of the Sylvan Press edition of Four Poems by Rimbaud: the problem of translation is complete and I'm quite pleased with it.
The book is all about the difficulties of translating poetry in general and Rimbaud in particular. Do you go for a straight transliteration so the message gets through loud and clear, or do you try and reintroduce rhyme and metre at the risk of changing the meaning?
So I made a label that auto-translates from English into French by pulling a little vellum tag. Smart, eh?
The book's size was coincidentally ideal for a couple of papers that have been hanging around the Invisible Bindery for years. The box was covered with another lovely crinkly paper with flower inclusions from Kate's Paperie, the book with a charming Japanese printed washi, again floral but very regimented in hexagons.
However, a couple of bloopers revealed how out of practice I am.
The nasty misalignment of the text was broadly corrected when I re-sewed the text block, but one sheet had been slightly misplaced by the original binder (curse him) and I failed to spot that. I should have flattened out all the sheets and made absolutely sure they were aligned as God intended. The result is one page that is still skew whiff.
And I should have lined the box in white paper before pasting on the flower paper, which is very gossamery. The effect is not bad but a bit greyer than I had intended.

Four Poems by Rimbaud

One of the many things that drives my wife nuts is my habit of straightening pictures wherever I go, however absolutely parallel they might appear to less observant (or, as she puts it, picky). Even in other people's homes, though I do try and restrain myself until the owners are out of the room before doing them a favour and correcting their picture alignment.

So you can imagine my distress when I opened this slim volume, Four Poems by Rimbaud: the Problem of Translation, and discovered that the binder had guillotined the top edge skew whiff. Luckily, the binding was falling off anyway so it is a good candidate for the bookbinding equivalent of picture-straightening. At the same time, the great gobs of hothtinflexibleglue can be removed from the spine, so it will be a conservation mission of mercy too.
The book was published by my uncle Charles Rosner, founder of the Sylvan Press. It was among my father's books, so clearly Uncle Charles had not sold it, probably because of the binding defect, which must have taken a chunk out of his profit margin on an edition of just 1,000. The guilty party was the Alcuin Press.
It is a rather lovely book otherwise, printed on handmade paper with deckle edges. A superior production for the austerity Britain of 1948, though one suspects that handmade paper was easier to come by from pre-war stocks than new machine-made paper.
Snipping an eighth of an inch off will make the top margin perilously small, so a good deal of care will be needed.

A worry about rebinding books like this is that I might be destroying their value. Fortunately, there is a copy on Abe Books at the princely sum of £6.75 so I think I can swallow the loss. On the other hand, an American bookseller has a copy on sale at nearly fifty bucks - it is a complete mystery why antiquarian books are so much more valuable the other side of the pond.

Ode to the West Wind

I got this charming paper with dried flowers in a flimsy tissue from Kate's Paperie in New York, a treasure trove of amazing papers.
Then I discovered that a big pattern like this requires a big book, so it and several other sheets that I got with it remained unused for years until I discovered that four flowers just fitted on this slim volume from the Simon King Press of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind.
The single section book was sewn into a simple fold of Khadi card and the tissue drummed on it. Totally basic but quite effective, I think.
The box is a deliberate contrast, highly precise and covered in a very artificial buckram, lined with green baize.

New Kit

One piece of equipment that is sadly lacking in the Invisible Bindery is a laying press, so when I spotted this going cheap in our local branch of the hardware store that has its name on it, I snapped it up. It is a workmate with surfaces that fold into the vertical position.

It is not as robust or as attractive as a proper wooden laying press but it will do the job on the smaller volumes I bind. And it folds away when not in use, and it cost just less than twenty sovs. 

Engraved by Robert Gibbings

This is possibly the loveliest vellum I have ever worked on. It is veined and characterful, soft and furry, almost like suede.
The book is Engraved by Robert Gibbings, printed by Libanus Press in 1987. The engravings were woodblocks commissioned by the old Kynoch Press for a diary, with the further prospect of using them in an edition of Kinglake's Eothen. It never happened, but years later Libanus got the chance to put them through the press again, as illustrations of Kinglake's vivid description of the extraordinary Lady Hester Stanhope.
The sections are sewn through mother-of-pearl buttons to add a touch of the exotic. Otherwise, the vellum is left to speak for itself.
The box covered with a nice wiggly net stuff that I found in the Guildford College bindery, another rather odd material that makes a great surface for the box.

Another Hairy Box

Talking of thick hairy card from Khadi, I made this box a while back for a book my family commissioned for our father's 80th birthday. Printed by the Libanus Press, it had some essays from Dad's favourite authors and a cut by Chris Wormell of a covey of partridges.
I bound the presentation book in brown morocco with a really nice hand-marbled paper. My brothers and I spent a frantic evening in a basement in the Gray's Inn Road sewing up and trimming the rest of the copies in a simple fold of blue Hahnemuhle paper.
When I got the book back after Mum's death I found they had kept all the thank-you notes for the big birthday bash in the box.