Honestly, I think you can pretty much make a hardcover book with success after watching Larry Withers's Bookbinding: A Traditional Technique. This is almost as good as an interactive workshop that you'll get — except this will cost you less than $20! And you can even pause and rewind to repeat a step! Larry won’t get annoyed with you if you keep “asking” him to repeat the last step.

The instructional video covers the required materials, folding, sewing, creating the cover, and casing-in for creating a flat-back hardcover book. Each step is shot with clarity (with close-ups) and repetition that you can really see how he maneuvers the threads and paper. Withers has a very soothing voice, he explains and guides you through steps with patience. I find that his style very much keeps me focus on each and every step of the instructions.

But this is probably why the video appears to be really dry, which I think is indeed a good thing. Its focus is the instructions, not entertainment, so if you’re not interested in the subject matter you’ll probably find the video very boring, but then again, you probably wouldn’t watch it in the first place.

E-books are nothing new, however, a wireless reading device is something that we should look at. Amazon.com released Kindle last November and it was sold out in less than 6 hours. Now, Kindle is back and is available to everyone in the States.

As a technologist, I was excited by the device's capabilities: uses low power e-ink/e-paper technology that allows you to read in all lighting conditions (Sony's portable reader uses that as well); purchases and downloads new books wirelessly, not via Wi-Fi but via an included re-branded Sprint cellular network; the ability to receive magazine, newspaper and blog subscriptions; access to an embedded dictionary, and Wikipedia (online) while you're reading.

I was tempted to get the Kindle, but as a designer, I was appalled by its design. It's just plain ugly. I wouldn't want it to be in my hand at all times. I don't like the look of the slanty edges, the design of the keypads, it looks clunky.

I always believe the physicality of books makes them unique. For me, the holding of a book, flipping of the pages, and touching of the bindings are as important as the content of the pages. E-books may not have the physicality in themselves, but the digital readers are the physical form that holds them all, and the physicality of an e-book is somehow manifested through the reading device. And therefore the design of the digital reader does matter.

After upgrading the blog software, I have been experience some major problems. I am still trying to figure out how I might be able to fix them. I'd love to upgrade the blog to WordPress once and for all only if I can import the entries and comments easily. In the meantime, please excuse for the errors and thanks to those who have informed me of the problem.

Update 5/3/08 11:19pm: I have shut down all the commenting. Hopefully I can have it back at some point so that I can hear from you again...

Update 5/5/08 2:58pm: Everything is back to normal! Please continue to leave comments on the posts!

After watching Larry Wither’s DVD title Bookbinding for a review which will be posted here later, I was motivated to make a hardcover book by following some of his instructions.


The DVD offers alternative techniques to my usual bookbinding methodologies (which I will be pointing out in the coming post) and I was determined to test them out. Some worked for me, that I will most likely adopt, but some didn’t. Like many other things, bookbinders have certain quirks or techniques that they use, and they certainly don’t apply to everyone. The exciting thing about seeing how other bookbinders work is that you can always pick up new techniques to augment your learnt and existing ones.

The Spring 2008 issue of the free e-journal Bonefolder has just been published online.

This issue provides detailed instructions for a twined binding book, split board binding, and the board book adhesive binding. It also explores women bookbinders and their work, as well as decades of bookbinding.

The ideas in the The Book Book evolved from the bookmaking workshops that the author, Sophie Benini Pietromarchi, held for children. It is an activity book that adults, teachers and children can use to generate ideas and techniques to create their unique story-telling books.

The Book Book is probably not a book that you would learn serious bookmaking techniques from, but it does offer a lot of simple and quick ideas on how to choose and use materials, how to generate and implement ideas, and the book form itself. It begins with a brief prep-talk on one-of-a-kind books in general, before giving ideas on how materials, writing, drawing, and 11 forms of books that can be developed combined to form a one-of-a-kind story book. (It even talks about typography and storyboarding!)

We mostly cover the case of a book (usually book boards) with leather or book cloth, and there are a few ways to describe different kinds of coverings. When the cover is completely covered by the material, it's called full bound; quarter bound is when only the spine is covered; and when the spine and corners are covered, it's called half bound.

A trip to Greenjeans last week yielded this picture which shows my Golden Leaf books are on display in the jewlery case.