Another birthday, another excuse to do some bookbinding. Susie, the beautiful double-bassist from The Monroe Transfer has recently had a birthday and I, in my usual way, have made something a little too late: a notebook (slightly) adapted from classic four-hole binding. This has turned out pretty well, I’d say; I’m still getting used to a lot of the techniques and materials, so I’m sure this isn’t going to be my finest work (sorry, Susie). See what you think.
Washi!
Japanese paper, washi, is strange stuff. It’s made in a slightly different way to western paper, with longer fibres, which means that it’s often very think, and very strong. It also has one smooth side and one rough side; you’re supposed to write/print on the smooth side. I don’t speak, or read, a single word of Japanese, but I’m led to believe that this is genuine washi, albeit machine-made rather than the more traditional handmade stuff (where you’re talking at least £5 for an A3 sheet).
I’ve not taken photos of the first few steps, incidentally, including my boiling up my own paste to stick various parts of the notebook together, and folding all the sheets (which, for the record, are ‘pouches’: they’re folded into zigzags and bound along the ends of the sheets, meaning that the fore-edge of the sheets are folded edges, and that you’ll only write on one side of a piece of paper. This seems to hav e come about as a result of Japanese brushwork bleeding through the other side of a single sheet of paper).
Here are the folded sheets, and the twisted washi string for the inner binding (or 'monk's binding', as I think it's also called)
Japanese binding has two steps; well, obviously more than that, but the actual ‘tying pages together’ element has two steps. First up, there’s the inner binding (or monk’s binding) which is made by tying two twisted washi strings through two pairs of holes near the spine edge…
Here the washi strings are looped through the holes (note the hammer)...
And here the monk's binding is completed, with the knots having been pounded flat with my little hammer.
And here's the inner binding from a bit of a distance.
I know it’s hard to believe, but that monk’s binding is very strong; it’s certainly strong enough to hold everything together while you punch the holes in the rest of the paper block. It’d probably hold everything together through general use, I’d say.
This is the cover fabric, backed with washi.
I’ve left out a few steps here: the fabric was dampened and stretched out to smooth wrinkles, a sheet of washi was covered with paste and stuck to the back of the fabric, and then pasted to that sheet of glass to dry. In the photo above, it’s dry and ready to be turned into a cover.
The cover pasted onto the book, and the edges folded in.
So, imagine I’ve cut the fabric into 2 sections (with my pleasingly sharp scalpel); with the washi backing, the fabric becomes quite intriguing to work with- it can be creased and folded very crisply, and is obviously a little stiffer. The cover is pasted on in the middle, the edges are then turned in and the fore-edge is pasted to the front page.
And the sewing is finished.
I seem to have opted for a five-hole binding, rather than the more traditional four-hole. I have no idea why I did this; some sort of mental aberration, I assume.
So, there we go. At some point, I’m going to make a whole range of Japanese-bound notebooks, which may well find their way out into the world. Stay tuned…
