Australian Bookbinders Exhibition

As you will all have noticed by the few blog posts, this year has been a bit of a write-off for me as far as my artists books are concerned.  I have been almost totally occupied with other unrelated things that needed priority.

I did however make a book about WWI called Si Vis Pacem which went to the exhibition "Pieces for Peace 14-18" which is due to open in a few weeks time in Ypres in Belgium and will be on exhibition from 21 November until 14 December at the Cultuurcentum Het Perron te Ieper.

I decided to make a small edition of 4, but one didn't quite meet the standard and got tossed, so it is now an edition of 3.  

Another one of these will be exhibited in the 2014 Australian Bookbinders Exhibition which will be held in the Art Gallery of NSW Research Library from the 19 November to 13 December, coincidentally almost the same dates as the exhibition in Ypres!

Pieces for Peace 14 - 18

Pieces for Peace 14 - 18 is an exhibition which will be held in Ypres, Belgium later in the year to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I.  Calligraphy and Books, both traditional and contemporary will be shown, and the measurements for all work has been set symbolically at 14 x 18 cm.

There will be a little group of books from Queensland, as Susan, Fiona and Barry have made books which you can see on their blogs.  The sections offered to binders contained war poems in different languages.  I wanted to make my book uniquely Australian and decided to make a standard codex containing quotes from war diaries and excerpts of poetry written by the men who were there serving in the AIF in France and Belgium, and who were writing about the horrible and shocking realities of what they were seeing and experiencing.  I will probably make a different version with the material as a more visual artists book at a later date.  

I've already made two other books in the past specifically about the first World War - Was it Needless Death (1993) and Red Lips are not so Red (2007).  Like the other two this one addresses the horrors of that war, and I used the Latin saying - Si vis pacem, para bellum  (Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De Re Militari) which means If you seek peace, prepare for war as  my starting point and the theme for the book.  It is a very painful thing to accept that so many of our men died whilst fighting there, far from their homeland, so peace could be achieved.

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The text appears on a full page with preceding smaller page which shows an illustration and allows the viewer to read a few key words of the text that follows.

I have visited the battlefields of France and Belgium a few times to see the sites of the battles that members of my family fought in - Mouquet Farm, Messines Ridge, Villers Bretonneux, Menin Road and Passchendaele, so I was able to use my photos in the book. The colour and light of the photos were manipulated to a dark, brown, unreal and deathly landscape to which I have added drawings of white crosses as symbols of those killed - the beautiful European landscape I photographed is once again transformed into a battlefield/graveyard. The khaki/brown colour of the pages gives the book the muddy look of the battlefields and trenches.

The book is about the price that had to be paid for peace.

I used some words of Edward (Vance) Palmer, 14th Battalion AIF, to address the effects on the returned soldiers who were expected to get over it and return to normal life in days long before there was any understanding about post-traumatic stress.

The pages are bound in a French Simplified Binding with a leather spine and onlaid leather on the cover.  I have tooled white foil crosses onto the leather 'landscape' turning it into a graveyard.

A Bit of Bookbinding

 



It's the time of year when I usually do some bookbinding for the Australian Bookbinders exhibition. This book is called Pressed and contains rubbed pencil etchings of pressed flowers.  I have used a French simplified binding with leather spine and rolled leather headbands.  The cover is of Cork veneer and leather with an onlaid cut-out of vellum and rubbed pencil etchings with attached linen thread and vellum.

 

 

I have also made a bookbinding version of my Al-Mutanabbi Street Project book Absence.

It is a French simplified binding with a soft leather spine and rolled leather headbands.  Lamali paper/fabric has been used on the cover with the paper side up and the collaged strips are of Lamali with the fabric side up and with some overlaid leather strips.

 

I have just packaged both books up to send down to Sydney for the Australian Bookbinders Exhibition to be held in the Research Library at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 6th November to 13th December.

 

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.

Making 'That Unbearable Lightness'

These books were posted out three weeks ago, so it seems timely to post now about the making of my first book for BookArtObject.

The book structure and the cover are intended to represent the physical symptoms of vertigo and the illustrations address the ambiguous psychological vertigo described by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Once I'd decided upon the circular structure, representing something like a spinning top, I hoped for the best that I'd somehow be able to put it into book covers.  I envisaged that the two sides of the structure would show the ambiguity and oppositions of light/dark and lightness/heaviness of existence in Kundera's book.  It was obvious to make the upper side 'light' and the lower side 'dark'.  The upper pen and ink drawing represents the vertigo of looking skywards surrounded by tall buildings, and the lower 'dark' ink sgrafitto drawing, the vertigo of looking down from tall buildings to the street below.  The two were put together on an A4 page and copies were printed onto Fabriano 160 gsm paper on my inkjet printer.

The pages were folded into a concertina structure and the ends were guillotined and glued up in the manner of a perfect binding.

The next step was to glue a soft flexible leather spine (lined with paper) to the glued ends.

The covers were made with very thin board as they needed to close together when the book was displayed. The printing on the cover was designed to be 'falling over' (helped also by the closed book's structure).

The soft leather of the spine allowed it to become completely concave and turn tightly so the book could form a circular structure.

This allows the book sculpture to be displayed fallen to one side, as if it has spun and fallen like a spinning top.

A bespoke box was made to fit the unusual shape of the book with its slanted spine and wedge shape.

I enjoyed the experience so much that I'm looking forward to tackling a second book for BAO, #56 Unchartered Democracy, in Group 10.