The making of my book

A few snaps from the book making process

First off the cover is made from a thick Japanese card stock and Chris brought the trimmed covers to our friend Paul's house so that they could letterpress the covers together. It was an intensive and full day process to get the 25 covers done and Chris took the photos below of the process.


I had the pages printed by a commerical printer who calibrated their machine for me so that the colour and density would be what I was looking for. This left me with a huge box of almost 1000 sheets of thick paper. They were trimmed but then they needed to be folded. Here is my folding station at Concordia:

After folding the sequenced and grouped pages would come home with me so that I could sew them while watching (more like listening to) movies or crappy TV:

Pencil marks added to where I will make my holes in the pages:

In the middle of sewing a group (the groups are also called signatures):

One book where the sewing is finished:

A cover that is scored and ready to glue to the body of the book:
So there you go. It has been an interesting process, and one that I have really enjoyed so far (still have some sewing and glueing to do!). Many people have asked me: Why a hand made book? Why not a blurb book? Why not a digital book? I guess I thought it would be interesting to try and do it myself, to see what it takes to put a book together. This way Chris designed it to my specifications, and I got the exact cover that I wanted, and the size that I wanted, and the paper quality that I wanted, and the printer calibrated the way I wanted it. And then doing all the work myself also makes it a bit cheaper in the long run. And I am so happy with how it turned out, much better that I ever could have hoped. There are still a few left to sell so let me know if you are interested in owning your very own copy!