Sunday, March 11, 2007

The Traditional Japanese Book


My partner & I made these yesterday at an all-day bookbinding workshop on The Traditional Japanese Book. Fun! Click on the photo to get a closer look.

2 comments:

Pris said...

Brian...these colorful designs are amazing! How did you bind them?

Brian Campbell said...

The covers are actually of Japanese decorative paper, available at the Japanese paper store from which the courses are run for about $25 a sheet (about 1 yard by 2 feet). I love that paper: it's absolutely exquisite. Since we shared paper with others to make 3 different books with different covers, that made the course ($85 for the day) quite cost-effective. The inner paper, fine rice paper without grain, is folded with a bone folder and cut with an exactor knife, pierced with an awl near the spine and tied together with a hand-twisted strip of rice paper. The covers are hand-cut to specifications and glued on, pierced with an awl and hand sewn together using silk thread, or here, a tough, wax-covered string available in an assortment of colours. The first books took about three or four hours to make, but the last one (the middle one, about 25 pages) only took about an hour.