catching up on the catch up train

This is what I have been doing with a lot of the scrap paper I've got laying around or the edges that get cut off text blocks when you're making them all perfectly even.  I take home the little bits and sew them into tiny books whilst watching fun shows in bed or something.  I did these last week, when it was also a way of blowing off conservation steam.  The thing about conservation is that like everything you do feels like the end of the world--like, oh shoot, if I cut this wrong or glue this wrong or look at this wrong I will have RUINED SOMETHING OLD UGGGHHHHH so it's kind of nice to unwind by just absolutely messing around and not having to care about how wonky and silly things turn out. 

 Remember how I said the board shear is like a paper cutter on steroids?  Yes well I don't even KNOW about the drugs hardcore enough to make a paper cutter into a GUILLOTINE--probably like some eighteenth century laudanum or something, since it is called a freaking GUILLOTINE. But oh man it is amazing. It is a machine of beauty and delight, and one that makes me feel for my fingers just LOOKING at it, because this machine could mess me up like DANG without even thinking about it.  This picture is when Brenda was showing me how you work it--you slide your paper down there and then turn that wheel her hand is on to lower a crazy heavy weight down on it, and then when it's all set up you pull down on that second lever behind the one she's holding (you have to release the SAFETY first, which is totally hard core and also really reassuring because if it weren't for that i really would be too scared to touch this thing) and then down comes this sharper-than-sharp guillotine blade that cuts clean through ANYTHING you put down there.  Like, it cuts through a whole book in a single bound.  IT IS AMAZING.

OKAY so here is what you've all been waiting for:  The History of the Scandinavian Mission!! Now, I felt like maybe it was a bit of a cop out binding it this way, but both Renate and Brenda said that this is what they would do, and you don't get much more legit than that.  So, what I did was an Adhesive Binding!  It is where you basically just glue all the sheets together, no sewing involved.  It's basically how they make just about all modern books these days--look at  the spine of the book closest to you right now and I can 85% guarantee that it was adhesive bound.  So, it's really quite simple to do--you put the book in a finishing press like this (after straightening all the pages obsessively so that they are lined up perfectly[also after going through the individual pages of the book to make sure they are all in order and facing the right way, which is good that I checked cuz there were two or three out of order!]) and then you basically just cover the spine in glue.  I used the 'double fan' method, which means that when putting on the glue I first pushed all the pages in one direction, and then in the other, so that some glue got into the tiniest margin of the paper along the spine so that it's all really glued together, instead of being like a notepad where pages tear off easily because they're just glued on at their very edge.  Make sense?  Sort of?  Cool.

This is Scandinavia after I glued it out.  It had to sit and dry for a long time.  The next step is going to be rounding the spine so it looks like a nice proper book and then casing it back into a cover.  Since my new class started and there's lots of new things going on I think I'm going to wait to finish this guy off for a bit.

Here's British Synonymy with the fancy gold lines at the head and tail--which I HAND TOOLED, which is not really a big deal I guess and also I did a really crappy job of, which luckily you can't see in this picture.  It's remarkably hard to make a straight line and apply even pressure to a little hand tooling tool.  I think we're going to do some more tooling in my class now, so I'll try to explain it more and get pictures of the process as the opportunity arises.

I spent time Friday prepping some books for future resewing--This is the Deseret Sunday School Songbook from the St Johns Ward that Gramma Joyce lent me. It was falling apart pretty majorly so I pulled all the pages and then went through ironing out all the folds and wrinkles, of which there were many!  I think the resewing is going to have to wait til I get back home--with the conservation part of my classes concluded, I am having to clear the decks for new things!  I'm glad though to have things already in the pipeline to do at home so I don't have too much culture shock when I leave the land of constant book binding.

On Sunday I drove up to Montrose to go to Sacrament Meeting so I would stop feeling like such a heathen, :)  The weather was gorgeous and I had a really lovely drive.  People at church were nice too!  I was really glad I went.

Here's a really bad picture of what I did today--what you're supposed to notice is the shape of the spine, that it is all roundy with bent out places on the ends.  That's what it's supposed to look like when you 'rond' and 'back' a book, which thing I have never before done because I've just stuck to coptics and flatbacks when I've made books on my own.  But as I am sure you will now notice in your everyday life, most hard backed books have rounded spines and where the cover and spine meet and there is that joint, the pages splay out all weird.  You accomplish that by a lot of manipulation with your fingers and your bonefolder and with a HAMMER.  No joke, you put this in a finishing press and just pound the heck out of the sides of the spine to get then to bend that way.  You call that bent part the shoulder of the book.  I actually took this picture before I was all the way done; I showed it to Don (new teacher, super awesome) and he said my shoulders needed more definition so I took it back to the press and pounded away some more until the angle was more intense.  Having never made books like this before I still think it looks kind of weird and artificial, but it is quite The Thing in Fine Binding so I'm going to have to get used to it for a while at least.