Absence

 

On March 5 2007 a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street, the street of booksellers in Baghdad and the cultural centre for the literary and intellectual community.  Thirty people were killed and one hundred wounded.  This attack on writers and booksellers compelled San Francisco bookseller, Beau Beausoleil to show an expression of solidarity with the formation of art and writing project Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. 

 

 I joined the project at the beginning of this year after seeing a call for 15 book artists on Sarah Bodman's Book Arts site.  The number of artists books in the project was to be 260, double the number of casualties and the 15 new artists were called to replace others who had dropped out.  Three books had to be sent to Sarah Bodman by April 30, as the worldwide exhibitions have already commenced.  It is planned to have an exhibition in the National Library of Baghdad and a full set of the books will be donated to the National Library's collection. On both the above mentioned sites you can find more details about the project and see the books. 

 

It was not an easy task to look at all the books already submitted and to create something original within the guidelines.  My first idea had already been used by a couple of other people in different ways, and I was not happy with using it yet again.

 

I came up with another idea to reflect on absence and loss using a mathematical infinity tiling pattern as a metaphor for the intellectual community and Islamic culture, and to act as a map of the district, and was pleased that this idea did not appear to have been used. 

 

 

 These tiling patterns have been used since medieval times on architectural surfaces and in book illumination. So I started work on Absence and made an edition of 6 books.

 

 

The book contains inkjet prints of drawings on Fabriano Artistico paper with gouache painting added later.  The French simplified binding is of Lamali paper/fabric with a soft leather spine and a collaged fragment of calfskin vellum. 

 

I intended the book to express hope for the future with the return of the normal patterns of cultural and intellectual life.

  

The Simplified Binding

This fine binding style was developed by Sun Evrard in France in 1984.  Despite its name, it can be quite complex and demanding.  It differs from a traditional case binding in that the bookblock is rounded but not backed, the hollow book spine is affixed to the bookblock before the boards which are bevelled to zero at the spine side and finished before they are attached.  It is a versatile binding and can be made with clean cut edges, thus suiting a variety of cover materials.

I first learned the binding from John Tonkin of Canberra in a four day workshop in 1996.  John had studied bookbinding in Europe and had learned the binding from Sun Evrard. This is the book we made with a leather spine and leather foredge and it  contains John's instructions on how to make the binding - mine has been well used!

A few years ago I did another 2 day workshop with John and Joy Tonkin in Brisbane and we made a Simplified binding with clean cut edges and exposed leather tapes.

 
Now to continue with the binding of the four books containing my father in law's story.  In my last post on bookbinding, I had sewn the signatures of four books onto ramieband tapes.  The next step was to glue the spine with PVA, trim the tapes and then fray them out and glue them down.  The back was gently rounded and readymade headbands were glued into place.

 The spine is then filled in between the tapes with tarlatan or muslin, and a layer of paper can be added too to get the spine smooth.

I cut the leather for the spine and pared the edges as thin as I could 

The spine pieces were glued at the sides to the bookblock and then the books were placed between working boards and clamped

The boards were then cut to measure and the spine edges sanded and bevelled to zero forming a curve to fit the book block.  The cover materials were prepared and glued onto the boards.  The leather spine edges on the bookblock were pared back and sanded to remove any glossy surface in the area to be glued.  The boards were glued along the spine edge to the bookblock and the partial first sheet of paper which had been torn back to approx 5 cm.  They were then put between boards and put in the press overnight.

As I had prepared the covers to have clean cut edges rather than turned in covers, the exposed edges were painted with black acrylic paint.  The inside of the boards were infilled with the torn off piece of the first sheet to create a smooth surface and the endpapers were tipped in and glued into place.  Finally the title was prepared and glued to the cover.



More Bookbinding

I've spent the morning sewing up a small edition of four books ready to be bound in a French Simplified binding.  The book is a story about the life of my father-in-law who is celebrating his 95th birthday.

In 2009 I bound a similar type of book written by my mother about her life.  The binding was a clean cut French simplified binding in pink and dark blue leather.

Revisiting 'The River City'

I've been working on a more traditional bookbinding version of The River City. 

I've been participating in The Australian Bookbinders Exhibitions since 2008 and my skills at producing a designer binding are slowly improving.

The first time I entered a book in 2007, I sent a very creative book which I thought I had bound extremely well, but it was rejected because it didn't have a 'proper' spine.

Since then I've managed to make the cut, and have been working hard on French Simplified bindings.  The binding I have used here is a Simplified binding with cover of Japanese paper and onlaid leather with a leather spine, leather headbands and onlaid leather title. 

I can't seem to get enthusiastic about rebinding a ready-made published book so every year I remake the content of one of my books into a binding suitable for this exhibition. 

I do enjoy trying to be more disciplined and skilled with making these traditionally bound books and trying to master the skills of working with leather.

The 2012 Australian Bookbinders Exhibition will be held in the Research Library of the Art Gallery of NSW from 31st October to 14th December 2012.