After designing the book layout in InDesign, here are the printed pages this project will use to make an edition of eight small two signature, hard cover book. When finished, the book will have 32 pages. My poem, "The Drenched: A Creation Myth for the Pacific Northwest" is a small poem in seven parts—a nice size for a book like this. I drew spot illustrations for use throughout the book, and on the cover and title page is a copy of the wood engraving I made titled "Rain Man." If I do another edition of this book, it might include the original prints made from the engraving.

The book was laid out with eight pages per side on the paper, so each book has two 12 by 19 sheets printed double-sided. Then, they are folded to make to 16-page signatures. Not so easy, when you first begin, but it doesn't take long to figure out how to fold these map-like signatures. (A signature is a set of pages folded together. They can have four or more pages on each sheet of paper. When combined, they make up the book. Order is extremely important.)

The photo above shows the pencil marks on the signatures where holes will be made with an awl. I marked these all at once, so each book would be sewn together the same way.

This sewing stand is useful for sewing signatures together onto tapes, because it holds the tapes steady. I used pins to hold the tapes at the top, and masking tape to hold them at the bottom. This may not be "normal," but it works just fine for this project.

I threaded eight needles, tied a knot at the end of each with a two inch tail. 

 

Ready for sewing.

The first hole. Nervous? Just a little.

The needle goes in the hole at the foot of the signatures (the bottom of the book). Then it goes out through the next hole and then into the hole on the other side of the tape.

Keep going. 

Here, above, the second signature has been added, and the needle is coming out the final hole. The sewing really doesn't take too long at all.

Here are eight books worth of sewn signatures with tapes.

The tapes look rather festive.

Next, the mull should be cut to fit. Two inches on either side of the book, plus the spine, and about an inch shorter than the book.

The two signatures get a little paste between signatures, or they'd flop open kind of rudely. But then the mull is pasted to the spine and to the tapes where they were sewn onto the text block. All of that is clamped together overnight. I think this is about the halfway point. Anyway, it feels good to get this far without a huge mishap.

This is a stack of the pasted-at-the-spine text blocks. LIght and fluffy.

Here is a stack of davey board. Hard and dry. I have no idea why it's called "davey," but I'll look it up one day. I think most davey board is harder than the product I purchased. I don't remember seeing such rough edges on it before.

The davey board is cut all at once, so each of the books will be very close to the same size. The pieces at the right will be cut as spines—double thickness of board plus the text block width.

Each edge and corner needs to be smoothed down with a file. Otherwise, the edges could damage the covers after a while.

Here are the spines with the sanded, or rather, filed davey board covers.

I trimmed the cover papers on a papercutter.

I put the papercutter on my light table. It's very easy to see where the edges of the cover should be trimmed that way.

This is a pile of covers, spine info, and davey boards that will soon become the covers on a limited edition book. For the wet and blotchy green cover, I printed a solid green out on my ink jet printer, and put water drops on it, and smeared it around a bit. I was looking for something textured and damp looking. Then I scanned it in, and used in in the cover layout. The covers and interiors are printed on a laser printer, so the covers are pretty much as waterproof as other books. 

This is the stage where the text blocks are finally attached to the davey board—just the front and the back, not the spine, and not the tapes either. Only the mull (that was earlier attached to the spine) is attached to the boards.

After the mull has dried fairly well, the next step is to paste the tapes, still protecting the text block with two sheets of waxed paper.

 Lay them as perpendicular to the board as possible. Remove the pasty waxed paper, and leave the clean one.

Shut the covers, and weight the books down overnight.

The glue and brush are made especially for bookmaking. The glue is archival, and will be fairly flexible when dry. 

The covers can be added the next day, after the mull and tapes have dried nicely.

Lots of glue goes onto the covers. First, the spine is positioned in the center. Then the tricky part of glueing and attaching the davey board blocks to the covers. I smoothed most of the covers out with a soft cloth, and inserted the bone folder into the cloth to help with the hinged areas.

Because the signatures are folded into sixteen pages, some of them need to be cut open. That is done using a bone folder. The two end papers were cut earlier that the others, but since I didn't take a photo of that part, I'm showing it here when I'm cutting open the pages in the center. 

More glue. The end pages are trimmed to fit into the cover edges, because I wanted to add some of my handmade papers over the top.

Here are the trimmed and glued down end paper. Wax paper protecting the book.

The end papers are rubbed down, so the glue adheres nicely and there are no bubbles. 

In the photo above, you can see the lines I made with my thumbnail on the inside of the cover paper. I used a ruler and an exacto knife to trim.

Here are some samples of my handmade paper. I used matching papers in each of the eight books, but didn't necessarily use the same color from one to the next.

More glue. Pasting the handmade paper is a little tricky because some of it is very soft. But it worked out fine.

Here is a stack of the new books.

And here it is again with the spine information. It took me almost a week to finish these eight books. Lots of starting, working, and then waiting for glue to dry. I'll have at least some of these at the AWP Conference in Seattle tomorrow through Saturday.