Books, The Old Fashioned Way

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 While my dad is the other writer in our family, though mostly he is more into travel journaling than fiction, my mom and I have always bonded over our mutual affection for arts and crafts. Everything from drawing and painting, to crochet and knitting, and even culinary arts.  Lately, my mom has really gotten into printing, which I think appeals to her STEM sensibilities. I think she like the creative side of it plenty, but I think she likes the mechanics of it even more. 

Over the past year, I've joined her twice at the Sawtooth School of Visual Arts in Winston Salem, which is the approximate halfway point between her house and mine. The first time we met, we did a gel print class, which is a low-key printing method involving an inked gelatin block. Here's a pic of one of the prints I made in that class:

This printing method is fairly simple and straightforward, and we only spent a single Friday night on the class. But after having so much fun together, Mom signed us up for a "Letterpress and Simple Bindings" workshop, which took most of two days. We worked with expert letterpress and book-bindings artist, Mary Beth Boone of Purple Pumpkin Press to learn about carving linoleum blocks, and using them on a very old fashioned letterpress machine to print what would become book covers for some simple, hand-bound journals.

Step One: Designing an image and carving linoleum blocks:

Mary Beth asked us to create a block with a pattern on it

Step Two: Create the print block.

The other classmates and I combined our blocks together to make one large print-block

This is the actual form that will get inked. Then paper will get pressed over it. Placing these blocks took a tedious amount of fine-tuning and fussing, using a lot of specialized tools. You could also create trays filled with lines of words made from individual little letters, which is why this is called a letterpress. It made me so thankful we can just type on a computer and print on a laser-jet. Letterpresses make gorgeous results, but it would take hundreds of hours to print a whole book this way. It gave me great appreciation and understanding for why books were so rare and expensive, once upon a time.

Step 3 &4: Ink the rollers, register the paper, and start printing

We made multiple copies, first with blue ink and then blending in yellow ink to do a "rainbow" print, which I loved because the color shades were beautiful. Here are the results:

Making these prints took most of the day. We knocked off that afternoon and came back the next day to learn how to bind these covers, using hand-stitching techniques, into journals.

Step one was measuring, marking, creasing and folding the spines. Step two was punching holes in the thick paper using awls. With some of these, we had templates to help guide us in punching our holes so that we could create pretty and even patterns. Step three was do the actual sewing. Thankfully our instructor had cut the paper pages for us ahead of time because preparing paper for bookmaking is a "whole 'nother" skill that might have required a "whole 'nother" workshop. We used regular sewing needles and waxed linen thread to sew the bindings.

This is a simple "chain stitch" binding

From left to right: Bowtie stitch, laced dash, rope stitch, triple chain stitch, and chain stitch. The thicker bindings were "three section" journals, where papers were bound to the cover in three separate sections. 

These are some relatively simple bindings, but spend a few minutes searching "book bindings" on Pinterest and you can see how a person could get really obsessed, really quickly.

Realistically, I might use the skills I learned in this workshop to create hand-made journals to give to friends for Christmas. But, if I ever accidentally touch a circle of magic standing stones and get whisked 200 years into the past, I should be able to find gainful employment working in Jamie Fraser's print shop in New Bern, making seditious pamphlets to incite rebellion against the English Crown. Yes, that's an Outlander reference, in case you were wondering.