Fancifying Salinger

I so enjoyed my three little pocket book Salinger books, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. While extravagant in their own right they physically lacked a certain Oomph. Everybody has these tiny books, shredded old copies, new shiny ones from the South Station book store in Boston, hard copies, rare copies. Many copies. I wanted mine to be unique. Fancy and unique.

From tiny fanned glue mass produced books, they were reshaped and reformed to feature round spines, false bands made with laminated strips of leather and vellum, navy leather, gold tooled lines and titling, and marbled paper, which I made myself.

I won't go into the gory details of this structure because the transformation process can vary from book to book. Just know that it is possible to give a simple book a fancy make-over. The only flaw is that I forgot to take before pictures so I had to borrow images from Google to show the pre and post surgery photos.

Please email if you'd like a makeover for any of your beloved books.

BEFORE

AFTER

I know.

Don't Look Now - The 2011 Set Book - My Second Fine Binding

Don't Look Now and Other Stories - A group of short stories by Daphne du Maurier. One might recognize her story The Birds. Scary stuff.

Set book - A group of binders receive the same text and are required to create their own design for the piece.

My Second Fine Binding - I back-pared brown leather on top of the yellow and then backed-pared the entire brown and yellow piece once pasted to the black background leather. I smoked tooled the DON'T portion of the title and gold tooled the rest.

Can you spot the bird in the woman's hair on the back cover? Spooooky.

My Brother's Birthday Present - Don't Worry, He Knows

My brother's birthday was last month and I decided to make him a leather spine book, but not just a blank leather book, a blank leather book with meaning. My big bro is a writer and I wanted him to see what his novel might look like when complete. I used gorgeous black goat skin leather, stoned marbled paper I made myself, and made a maroon leather label with gold stamping.

Feisty Shmeisty Leather Books

As I finally had all of my tools in order I was very excited to use my leather for quarter bindings. A quarter of the book is covered in leather. These are blank journals. The first one features my own marbled paper and the second is decorated with one of my favorite papers, which you can find at Talas.

"I DIdn't Lose My Marbles After All..." - The Glory of Marbled Papers

Last month a pair of professional paper marblers, Regina and Dan, gave a workshop at my school. It was a fantastic day of paint, newsprint, bright colors, unexpected colors, clashing colors, and beautiful final sheets. The following are samples of some of the paper I produced. For a few words on different processes, please browse through previous posts. Hope you enjoy my marbled paper in sweet action.

If you'd like a book with any of these papers please indicate column and row.

My Very Own Paper Galaxy Attempt - Serial Binding

As I hope you have seen, perhaps on the Classy Protection Case post, I have made a Green Galaxy cloth. Because I love the galaxy and universe so dearly I decided to make my own galaxy paper.

Approximately 3 x 4 inches.

Items sold separately.

$10 each

Galaxy Paper!

3 x 4 inches

Stoned Marble

I loved the Stone technique! A few paints were selected and treated with photo-flow I believe. Or some sort of mixture that causes the paint to separate from other paint. I chose a base color which would be the "vein" of the entire sheet. In this case -- navy blue. I then proceeded to use the treated paints as follows: Dip brush into treated paint. Tap brush into garbage a few times to get rid of huge drops. Hit brush on top of stick allowing paint to spray off of the bristles onto the base color which lays across the vat patiently awaiting friendly color companions.

It was too cool for school!

3.25 x 4.5 inches

Serial Snake Skin Pattern

This style of marbling was different than the usual spreading of paint around the vat. After spreading a little bit of watered down acrylic, I sprinkled this treated water over it -- I'm sorry to say I can't remember what was in it -- and the paint separated into tiny strips, stripes, curves, spaces and all sorts of other craziness.

Hand not included. Just for Scale.

3.25 x 4.5 inches

My Marbly Wish-Wash Serial Binding

I improved on the Spanish technique as the day moved on. See a few posts below for further details about this process.

3.25 x 4.5 inches

My Marbled paper in Serial action

I attempted the Spanish marbling technique. I liked to call it the dancing pattern because I'd stand around my vat rocking myself back and forth, dancing and bouncing around to prepare for the movement it takes to create a wave-like pattern on the final product. It was a fantastic time.

3.25 x 4.5 inches