手取川製本 ~ Tedorigawa Bookmakers: Recent Episodes
Tedorigawa Bookmakers
Life
I have told you in the past that I had a relative who had a terminal disease and that I was taking care of her. That relative has died. That relative was my wife. We met when she was 23, and she passed away at 63. She passed away in May of this year.
We were married for 31 years, but had a lively and romantic life together for almost 40 years. Fortunately, we also had two wonderful children who took care of me for the last month.
I have a lot of memories (good and bad) to work through. And a lot of thinking to do about the future.
However, in the arena of bookbinding and fiction writing, I have done nothing for the last month. This podcast, Episode 312, is the first thing I’ve done in the last month related to either of this podcast's topics.
Bear with me. I will be back soon. Take care.
Bookbinding
This week or last, can’t remember, I made a sunny yellow book called Solaris Libri. The original name was the Sun Book, to go along with the Snowbank Book and the Earth Book, but decided to jazz I it up a little bit by throwing in Google’s Latin translation for Sun Book. The idea was I would make the book and then put it in the sun. Originally, I would just drop it in the garden and let nature take its course. But that meant it wouldn’t be the Sun book but the weather book.
So I taped Solaris Libri to a window. Also originally, Solaris Libri would spend, like the Earth Book, a month in the outdoors. Upon reflection, I decided six months would be better as one month is barely a blip in the life of the sun or the Earth’s rotation around it.
I put markers on the cover so if the sun causes the cover to fade, we can still see the original color when the markers are taken off. One marker is over the title on the front cover; another is horizontal over the top of the back cover; a third is perpendicular to the title. Hopefully, the non-faded parts will look stylish and artistic compared to the faded parts and will give it an added accent of unique-ness.
Solaris Libri is A6 in size (pocketbook size for you Americans), and 100 blank pages, like its partner, the Earth Book. It has a yellow cover (like the sun), and floral endpapers (unlike the sun). I printed the title on the front of the book and, miraculously, on the spine as well.
Also in Bookbinding, I have three projects in various stages of progress, mostly the first one.
The first project is Truckin’. I need to sew a coptic binding for Truckin’ which I wanted to send out this month but it will have to wait one more year (on my mother’s birthday. It’s been folded but no holes have been punched because I need to make a cover for it first as the cover is the first part of the sewing process in coptic binding. This project is in the preparation stage based primarily on my being busy do other things. Truckin’ is the book I will send to friends, artists, strangers to draw or write in, mail to a friend, until we have 100 pages filled.
The second project is the sewn board binding I learned about a month ago. I need to sew it, but life happened and time is being used up doing other things, like taking care of family members, paying taxes, and work. It sits on my desk next to my first project.
I plan (famous last words) to work on it during Golden Week, a series of holidays in Japan starting April 29 and going to May 6 when most companies close up shop; many smaller stores and restaurants are also closed.
My third project is probably dead on the ground. Pun intended. I wanted to make a book with coffee-ground colored paper, but I soaked the paper too long and they all fell apart. Is it salvageable? We shall see.
Fiction
In writing, I have discovered, along with millions of other writers, that research can bog you down. It can especially inhibit your writing if you have access to this new-fangled doohickey called The Internet. Several rabbit holes can be fallen into if you’re not careful. What I do, when writing The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver, is using the x key on my keyboard. If I’m in the groove and pounding out a chapter or two but get stuck on a particular fact that needs to be checked, I type a few capital xs to remind myself to check it out later, after I find myself greeting writer’s block with open arms.
This week I needed two things: A name of a lawyer-type Quaker person in New York in 1840 and the kind of jails they had at the same time. Rather than look up names or types of jails while writing about Polly’s story, I exed it and kept going. Later, I looked up Quaker names and holding cells. Pretty bleak, the cells. Especially since many were privately owned. Glad we got away from that situation, aren’t you? But what happened with the name is, I found one I liked and realized the character was good enough to have a recurring role, if minor.
Video
TDGB 47: Solaris Libri, the Making of the Sun Book, may well be up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure. This 2.22-minute video shows how most of the book was made. What isn’t shown is the casing in: putting the cover on. Time dictated that I didn’t have enough to make the book and film me making the book. A sacrifice was made and the filming to a deep back seat to the making portion of your show. Sorry, but please enjoy.
Subscribe! if you feel so inclined.
Bookbinding
I did something I should have done when I first started making books, but was too naive (dumb?) to do. I recommend new bookbinders do this activity.
I made three A6-sized blank notebooks with five signatures of five folios each for a total of 100 pages. They were made with two different hinge gaps and three different spine pieces. This was a mistake. They should have been made with three different hinge gaps instead of two. Why did I make three books like this? Again, just to see how they all turned out. Also, to learn more about hinge gaps — the space between the spine and the book board — and spine pieces.
The Liszt/McCartney Notebook’s hinge gap was 5 mm. The spine piece was the size of the text block (6 mm). This, I discovered, is too small for both the spine piece and the hinge gap. However, it has been my go-to-size for the hinge gap for far too long.
The Harrison/Handel Notebook’s hinge gap was 8.0 mm, and its spine piece was the size of the text block plus one book board. The book board was 2 mm. This was a good size; I liked it and will remember these dimensions on my next book. My next book might well be Truckin’ which I’ll tell you about in a future episode, but for now, let it be known it is yet another experiment and deals with art with a capital A. Stay tuned.
The Lennon/Mozart Notebook’s hinge gap was also 8.0 mm, but the spine piece was the size of the text block (6 mm) plus the size of two book boards (a total of 4 mm). This is the traditional measurement for the spine piece. However, I felt that it was too large. But the hinge gap was good.
For my next book, I will make the hinge gap 7 mm with the spine piece a text block and one book board to see if it is as good as the Harrison/Handel Notebook, or if 8.0 or larger is the way to go. I have seen binders using 9.5 mm hinge gaps (Sea Lemon). I think 9.5 mm might be good for larger books (B5 or more?). For an A6-sized pocketbook, I like 8.0 mm. Maybe 7.5 mm?
Who knows? That’s why bookbinding is such an Adventure, yes? Yes!
Stay tuned for the next adventure.
Fiction
Naturally, I’ve been working on Agnes Grout. In one segment involving Polly, the Ashanti slave from what is now known as Ghana, I needed to introduce a new character: Cadwallader Milhous, a Quaker. And this has led me into Developing a Character.
When first introduced, Cadwallader was simple. He was an info dump character. He was introduced to move the plot and nothing more. This didn’t sit well with me. I needed him to be more. I gave him the three requirements for a memorable character: language quirks and ticks, a body, and a motivation.
Taking the body first, he was originally described as a tall, thin, angry man. He morphed into a rotund Benjamin-Franklin-ish fellow. Having a body kind of dictates how the character moves and movement can show the reader what the character means and desires. This is the least important attribute, but the writer needs to see her characters before she can use them in her novels.
The language he uses has more tag questions than most people use: You’re Polly from Lowell, right? You want to be moving back to Africa, aren’t you? Plus, he interrupts himself a little bit: I’m from – we’re all from – Boston, you see?
His motivation, which he doesn’t express openly because that would make him an Info-Dump character, is to guide Polly through the labyrinth that is the US judicial system in the 1840s, which didn’t take too kindly to runaway slaves. Which Polly wasn’t, but she was the wrong skin tone to argue the point.
Visuals
A video of the Three Books I made for your listening and watching pleasure is up on YouTube.
Bookbinding
In the last week, I have made four or five books of varying skill levels. Mostly, I made three books to test out various hinge gap spacing. Some people recommend one size, others another size. I will talk about those books in a future Tedorigawa Bookmakers podcast, so be sure to subscribe to hear that one. Also on a future podcast will be Solaris Libri (The Sun Book) that will be left out in the sun, the moon, and the stars (plus weather) for a month (30 days). I’m currently making this book (again, A6, five signatures, 100 pages). Both a future podcast and video! Exciting, yes? Yes!
Today, I want to talk about my The Earth Book. The Earth Book was an A6-size book with, I think, five signatures of five folios each for about 100 blank pages. I buried this book in the back garden. Similar to the Snowbank Book that I buried in a snowbank when we had snow. You can see it get made, buried, and dug up on YouTube. Spoiler alert: it got wet.
The Earth Book was buried for 20 days (March 10 to March 30, 2025). And just before recording this podcast for you, I dug it up. Did I bury it? To see what happened. What happened?
As expected, it got wet. And dirty. What was expected was the 100 pages lumping together like a solid piece of paper. Plus, there was a gash in the front that might have been from me shoveling it out or from a vegan giant ancient worm intent on destroying the world. You guess is as good as mine.
Now the Earth Book is sitting in a sunny spot, enjoying a refreshing beverage and waiting to dry out to see if it will be a useful (i.e. profitable) member of society.
Fiction
I’ve been doing three things in fiction: 1. writing (good), 2. editing (also good), and 3. formatting for epub (time-consuming).
Writing is mostly The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Making it more concise, more dramatic, more character-driven, and more suspenseful (I hope). Because of family matters, it is not going as quickly as I hoped, but it is moving forward. We are almost into the US Civil War (the one started in 1860). This requires a lot of research (i.e., Googling) about language and customs in the US pre-1860.
Did you know, for example, that before the Civil War, most African-Americans/Black people identified themselves not by their skin color, but by their tribal affiliation. For example, one slave in Agnes says she’s Ashanti, not Ghanaian or African.
Editing is me reading the books I read and running the pages through the free Grammarly online site. While probably grammatically correct, Grammarly seems to insist on clarity and, in my opinion, a kind of boring way of writing.
Formatting the books I want to upload is time-consuming and irritating because I have to upload them to iBooks (or another ebook reader) to see if they look okay, and often, they don’t, so I have to tweak them again. Hopefully, to the benefit of you, my reader.
Visuals
TDGB 45 Earth Book Pt 2 is up on my YouTube channel just waiting for you to watch it. Speaking of which, if you subscribe, YouTube will do all the work of letting you know a new video – just for you! – is available for your view pleasure.
Bookbinding
In Episode 306, I showed you a French Link Stitch I made in January of this year. Well, this week I cased it in with book cloth I made last year and chiyogami Japanese endpapers. It’s still seven signatures of five folios each for about 140 pages, but now it’s enclosed in a nice cover.
After casing in that book, creatively called Notebook January 2025, I made a similar book with a different name: Earth Book. I’ll talk more about Earth Book in the video section. It is five signatures of five folios each for 100 blank pages.
After casing in Notebook January 2025, I made another book called Blank Earth Book. (I might change the name to Clean Earth Book – is that a command or a description?)
It will not be buried like its brother book, but will be displayed and available for use (and purchase). It is, like Earth Book, A6 in size, with five signatures of five folios each for 100 pages, and blank except for a title page and the Tedorigawa Bookmakers logo on the penultimate page. It was also sewn on cords (well, two cords), but I don’t know why. Maybe just to practice sewing on cords?
It has not been cased in as of this podcast but is prepared for it as I’ve been looking for an appropriate endpaper. It might be mentioned in four weeks, as our next podcast is reserved for Earth Book.
Fiction
I continue to work on The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. This week, I saved her daughter’s life. My original plan was to have her die young in an accident. I wrote the scene of her death, but it didn’t feel right. I stepped away from the book to think about it. Both of her brothers get to live to be about 100 years old, so why does she have to die young? Because, as is mentioned in the novel, she’s touched? (Meaning, she has a mental problem that is never diagnosed in the book but is probably some form of autism.) So I rewrote the premonition Agnes has about her daughter’s death and substituted someone else. I believe it works out better, and we can expect to see some changes in the daughter.
I’ve also tinkered with chapter titles. I’m leaning toward including the year. For example, now it has a chapter title like The Youngest Ever. I might change the chapter title to: The Youngest Ever 1820. I think this might make it easier for the reader to understand what’s going on and where in Agnes’ life she and her family are. What do you think?
Video
Earth Book (mentioned earlier) was created following Snowbank Book, where I made a small, cheap, disposable book out of scrap paper and tossed it in a snow bank for 48 hours to see what would happen to small, cheap, disposable books. Earth Book is more substantial. Five signatures of five folios, cased in with proper bookboards and plain white endpapers. Its destiny? To be buried in the earth for 20 days (March 10 to March 30).
Earth Book is the subject of TDGB 45: Earth Book Pt One. Basically, it is me making the book and then burying it in the garden. Part Two will appear when I ressurect it, pull it from the earth, expose it to the elements on March 30th. You want to stay tuned for that, I’m sure.
Bookbinding
Two things happened last week. First, a family member fell sick. Second, I fell under the spell of norovirus, the stomach bug. Third, the family member physically fell and needed to be taken to the hospital; in the middle of the night. All of us are resting well.
Needless to say, making a book was not my top priority.
But, having said that, to relax, I made a small B7 not-blank notebook with five signatures of four folios each. Not-blank because the paper was leftover school handouts with writing on one side. It was coptic-bound with a paper mailer that is used to send documents through the Japan Postal System: thick enough. More about this book in the Video section.
Other than being ill (no fever but also no appetite), I was in no mood to get out of bed or deal with the joys and intricacies of bookbinding. I am now, though. Feeling much better.
Fiction
One thing a writer can do when they’re not feeling up to par is think. So I thought. About The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. I thought of ways to make it better. Ways to make it clearer to the reader what is going on. Ways to make it snappier not in a bon mot Frasier-Nyles repartee way, but snappier in a plot-and-dialog way.
Having thought of all those things, now I have to start writing, re-writing, and rearranging the novel. One person who read the first 50-some pages encouraged me to continue as they want to learn more about Agnes, her family, and what happens to them.
This is quite the encouragement; getting a reader to be so involved in an unfinished, unfamiliar story is a talent I’d like to have for all my books.
Video
I uploaded a two-minute (ish) video of me putting mull on a book. On, of all places, YouTube. Amazing, eh? With charming (?) music.
It’s called TDGB 43: Mulling the Signatures. All for your viewing pleasure.
Coming in soon! to a Youtube channel near you! is a video of the B7 not-so-blank notebook. It’s called Snowbank Book because after I made it (five signatures, coptic binding, cardboard cover — all caught on video), I put it in a snowbank to, uh, I guess, season it? Dampen its spirit? It’ll be in the snowbank for two days. When it comes out, I’ll figure out what the next step will be. Any suggestions?
Bookbinding
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been binding quite a bit; not crazily, but more than usual.
I made three A6 (pocketbook)-sized blank notebooks with between 140 and 160 pages. I’ve used kettle stitches and French link stitches; mostly to practice the French link stitch which I think looks nice on an open spine (similar to the Coptic stitch) but is more inspiring? creative inducing? artistic? Maybe all three at the same time. Let me know which you prefer when sewing a few signatures together.
The other reason I’m throwing myself into more bookbinding is to create covers. In the past, I have made covers with the titles on the front and the spine. I have made covers out of recycled paper. Now, I want to experiment with an Islamic cover. A few years ago, I made some Islamic covers but that was in the past. I need to renew my Islamic cover skills. Plus, I think they look good, especially on smaller books where people can shove receipts, memorabilia, and other memos they write on scraps of paper and insert them in their notebooks.
Fiction
The Post-humous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver (the title alone is a short story in itself) progresses as we speak (or as you read). Agnes is meeting a few political and business leaders. She is also having visions of people dying violent deaths which she can’t understand.
Her children are growing up and making their marks in the world, kind of. Ishmael, her elder son, will be a shipmaker/carpenter/nice guy who helps people in trouble.
Marlowe, her second son, is destined to be an artist working primarily in Vienna in the early 1900s (aka when Klimt and Schiele worked, lived, and died — 1918, the both of them).
Rebecca, her daughter, will succeed as a weaver, like her mother, but without the visions of the future but with the talent of making complex patterns seem easy.
Plus, the Oregon Duo of Feeding Vicki’s Corpse and The City of Cocks will be available soon, I hope. I haven’t uploaded anything anywhere but I wonder if the title of the second book is going to cause the gatekeepers problems, even though the final word is in some versions of the Bible and is the technical term for those in the chicken-breeding business.
I’ve proofread The City of Cocks and am formatting it this week. I proofread Feeding Vicki’s Corpse. As I proofread, I’m also making dramatic or clarifying changes. Feeding Vicki’s Corpse requires a bit of big changes. Major backstory has to be addressed.
Both novels take place in a small town in Oregon about twenty years apart. The protagonist in Feeding Vicki’s Corpse helps the local police solve a murder and a rape. The crime in The City of Cocks is a random murder.
Video (killed the radio star)
TDGB 41 is me attempting to sew a case-in book without skipping too much. A ten-minute video of me fumbling through sewing a kettle stitch requires a bit of dialog and I have included more. Not dialogs, but a monolog as I’m the only one talking.
If you’re interested in bookbinding, please check out Tedorigawa Bookmakers Video.
Bookbinding
In January 2025, I made my second attempt at a French link stitch on a 160-page, A6-size blank notebook called, appropriately enough, The 2025 Blank 160-page French Link Stitch Notebook.
It has eight signatures of five folios each for a total of 160 pages; the title page and the Tedorigawa logo use two of the pages. The other 158 pages are blank.
I used an interesting scrap of paper I found in my To Be Used Later pile. I glued this scrap to a thin upcycled envelope to make the front and back covers.
I found a chiyogami endpaper, also in the To Be Used Later pile for the endpapers. I think the cover paper and the endpapers work well together; one is mostly abstract while the other is more realistic (but not overly realistic as are most chiyogami papers.)
Finally, I sewed it all together using a French link stitch with blue thread. For the end stations of the signatures I used a kettle stitch.
The end sections use a simple kettle stitch but on future French link stitch notebooks, I’m going with the more traditional style which I believe looks a tad better.
Other than the end sections completed with the traditional style, what else am I going to change? Possibly to make the sewing tighter and the book less loose. But then I say that about everything I sew from Coptic-bound books to jeans.
Fiction
I continue to work on and confuse myself with The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Two plot arches are shaping up. One, Agnes sees visions of people who are about to die or be injured or people who kill someone. Two, her children grow, become independent, and make their mark on society (or societies, in one case). She observes their growth but also “sees” in her trances their deaths, which she can’t prevent or warn.
A complication, at least for me as I’m writing this novel, is coordinating Agnes and her children’s lives with real life in a sort of Forrest Gumpy kind of way. Unlike Forrest, Agnes is not the center of attention for most of the historic action that takes place.
For example, she knows the grandmother of the person who assassinates a US president but not the actual assassin. She has a very tenuous connection with another killer who happens to be a greatx3 or 4 child of a person she used to work with.
A grand scope of a couple of centuries of change surrounds this novel; quite unusual for me. Most of my novels deal with one or two people and truncated time frames. Heart of November, for example, takes place in one month and concentrates on three or four people (with lots of minor characters, of course),
Video
My updated Tedorigawa Bookmakers YouTube channel.
Today’s video is me punching holes in paper for your tactile enjoyment. This time, I don’t shove the awl through my thumb. Success! TDGB Video 40 Punching Holes.
Bookbinding
Playing around with DaVinci and Gemini I requested a nun with a smirk on her face in an abandoned village. And got this lady with an uncharacteristic moon hovering above her head, a detail a living artist would not have included.
I turned her into a 50-page, A5-ish notebook. The recto page is 10x10mm graph paper. Verso is lined. I used Coptic binding with green thread.
The cover has three or four papers from my To Use bin under my workbench. As you can see the cover includes:
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A very thin towel (called tenugui in Japan) turned into book cloth with the help of fusuma paper and glue with what could be called clouds or waves or fans. They are predominantly blue with shades of white;
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A red vaguely Indian-designed thicker paper with a delightful design in gold;
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A light blue slab of book cloth that has been hanging around in my workspace for at least a decade;
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A dark green book cloth that has accompanied the blue book cloth for its entire life;
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A rabbit offering a monkey a sip of water or about to scrub the monkey’s back (as they’re in water and the monkey has his or her back to the rabbit.)
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And a red strap with a dandelion-style brush at the end.
The back has a similar motif. The blue fan-shell-cloud cloth is larger; the blue book cloth is thinner; the red & gold cloth is smaller and vertical rather than horizontal; the green book cloth is much bigger; and the monkey is sans rabbit and smaller.
All in all, a nice activity that is useful as well. The only change I would make if I were to labor over Grandma again would be to add pages. Fifty is too few. One hundred feels about right.
Fiction
I continue to be puzzled as I work through The Posthumous Autobiography of the WidowAgnes Grout, Death Weaver. First, this book juggles six major characters (so far) and progresses through about 200 years of life. Agnes, herself, lives to be about 215, mas o menos. I’ve done quite a bit of online research into such topics as women’s underwear and public transportation in the early 1800s.
Video
The first video is my gluing up the cover of a French link stitch book. French Link Stitch.
The second is a video of me writing Agnes Grout. If you’re a writer, you’ll understand the sentiment in George Stenson: Writing.
Coming soon, I hope, a video of me sewing the French Link Stitch blank notebook. Stay tuned!
Bookbinding
I delved into prefect binding – the binding that uses glue instead of thread to keep the signatures together; the style of binding most common in ordinary store-bought, factory-produced books that sometimes results in pages falling to the floor on the 787 flying to London, if you were so lucky as to be heading to Europe while re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow. Or your classroom floor.
I made three blank notebooks using the perfect binding. They are all in the landscape orientation to make it easier to use more of the pages as I envisioned them as notepads for artists.
Book One is A5 with brown endpapers and green tactile covers. It has maybe 50 pages. I grabbed a bunch of a massive amount of paper I got years and years ago from a printing company that was going to throw them all away. The spine edge is tinted blue and there are printer’s cut marks, also on the spine edge. The title is 303. It is pasted on the front using the same paper as the brown craft endpapers.
Why 303? I read about Lennon and McCartney talking about their song One After 909 and the journalist wondered why 909? I assumed it was either a train designation or a departure time. In the article, Lennon mentioned that he had an affinity and connection to the number 9 (Number 9 Dream, Revolution Number 9, One After 909) being born on October 9, and the Beatles first performing in the Cavern Club on Feb 9, 1961, and on Ed Sullivan three years later, also on February 9th. Well, if he had a connection to 9, I wondered, like the journalist, what number do I have a connection with (Other than my birthday and Mick Jagger’s being the same day (different year))? 303 was my draft number back in 1969 when the Nixon administration was handing out draft numbers so that 18-year-old men could know when to move to Canada to avoid the draft. Or plan their lives around being drafted. As it turned out, some draft boards began drafting men in reverse order. I switched my 2S student draft deferment to 1A available but was not called up. Whew, a long and winding road to explain a three-digit title.
Book Two is smaller. Rather than A5 it is A6 (about the same as an American pocket book). I used part of my supply of Chiyogami paper for the title (again, 303). The endpapers are the same brown craft paper as the first book.
This book is completely blank, so it’s useful for doodling or planning trips to Liverpool with your significant other to check out the Mona Lisa Twins (or on YouTube) covering Beatle songs in the Cavern Club. It is small enough to fit in your pocket for easy access to sketch fellow travelers or musicians. It has about 60 plus pages.
Book Three is also A5 with the endpapers pulled from a local newspaper’s stock page. The front title is also pulled from the newspaper but the final 3 is a colorized advertisement for osechi-ryori which is a traditional meal prepared for the New Year’s holidays. Enough food, technically, to feed a person for three days. The colorized final 3 is echoed on the back cover where the 303 is duplicated but in a smaller size with the final 3 upside down. Book Three also has a title page: 303 Tedorigawa Sunrise and the Tedorigawa logo and QR code on the final page.
I’m not sure if I will be making more of these perfect-bound blank notebooks. I’m not sure if I will be using them or selling them. If you’d like one, let me know. I’m also not sure how long they will last as perfect binding is not known for holding the pages in for long periods, as I mentioned above about pages spilling out all over your classroom floor or the floor of your flight to Barcelona, among other European destinations.
I once bought a book that the entire cover came off about an hour after I bought it. The store clerk sympathized and offered to give me a replacement which, of course, I accepted with gratitude. The cover of that perfect-bounded book has stayed on for about 40 years.
Fiction
In fiction, we have two stories to tell. First, the Proust–Mann Connection. No, I’m not writing a novel called the Proust–Mann Connection (although that might be a nifty title for a time-warping adventure story). I’m reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (I’m in book three: The Guermantes Way) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I have noticed some similarities.
First, they were published within two years of each other which means they were probably written simultaneously (in different countries and languages). Second, they both deal with memory or mis-memory or daydreams. One scene, in particular, is when the unnamed narrator in Proust daydreams about an activity he hopes to have with Mme Guermantes. There is a very similar scene in Mann when Hans Castorp similarly fantasizes about Madame Chauchat. Third, minorly, the unnamed narrator in Proust talks about a memory of his when he was in the Alps at a spa recovering from an unnamed ailment which, of course, is where The Magic Mountain takes place, in a spa in the Alps where the rich recover from lung diseases (probably tuberculosis).
In my fiction, I’ve worked a bit on The Posthumous Autobiography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Now, for a long time, I was stuck on it. I moved neither forward nor backward. Then, while looking at a very partial and incomplete outline, thoughts appeared in my head about the structure of the life of Agnes. And a flood of revisions and changes swept across my keyboard (normally, liquid on a keyboard is a bad thing.).
Changes include a new opening chapter, a strengthening of three characters to bring them forward in the plot, and a very large narrative arc for one incident. This last one, the long narrative arc, starts early, includes hints along the way, and concludes near the end of the book. It is a vision that frustrates Agnes because her visions confuse or and most of her visions conclude several chapters after their introduction.
Videos
A blank notebook using a recycled bathtub lid (cleaned, by me), and suitable for spilling drinks on at your favorite coffee shop is available at Ofuro no Futa (Bathtub lid in the lingua franca of Japan).
Bookbinding
This week, we have a notebook called Blank Proust. I made it because I wanted to make a blank notebook with an interesting cover. Simultaneously, I’m reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. (I’m at the beginning of book three: The Guermantes Way). Combining the two, I landed on Blank Proust, if memory serves.
This A6-sized Coptic-bound notebook has nine signatures of five folios for a total of 180 pages. All but two are blank. One has the title: Blank Proust with a snapshot of Marcel. The other has Tedorigawa Bookmakers and tedorigawabookmakers.podbean.com. It’s not exactly A6 because the papers are off-cuts from a larger production that were given to me about 10-12 years ago.
The front cover is brownish with an Edwardian-esque (?) subtle design. The front has four photos of Proust (one a caricature in color; one other is in color, but two are sepia-ish). The back cover has, of course, and as expected, a picture of a few madeleine cakes. If you’ve read or heard about In Search of Lost Time, you’ll understand the significance of that particular dessert.
The endpaper on the front cover is the first paragraph of the first book (Swann’s Way) where the unnamed narrator complains about not getting to sleep.
The endpaper on the back cover is the last paragraph of the seventh and last book (Time Regained) where the same narrator contemplates the passage of time. Or, as Proust wrote it 102 years ago: Time (capitalized).
Fiction
Life, making Blank Proust, and reading The Guermantes Way plus another novel from the same period: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, have put a crimp in my writing time. I have edited one book (Feeding Vicki’s Corpse) and dabbled in another (The Saigawa Strangler, a mystery). But mostly the fiction side of my brain has sat idle these past few weeks.
Not entirely idle. I have been editing Feeding Vicki’s Corpse. I’ve been both line editing it, developmental editing it, and proofreading it. In the overall story part of the editing, (developmental) I moved a chapter from about Chapter 10 to Chapter 1 because I thought it made for a more dramatic opening.
In line editing it, I, of course, found many typos and misspellings but I have also made it more unique and not so cliche-ish or stereotypical. For example, instead of someone ‘glancing’ at someone else, they ‘take a peek’ or ‘glimpse’ or ‘study surreptitiously’ look at someone. As if surreptitiously looking at some is possible, which I doubt, but I go with the flow.
Videos
Coming soon to a YouTube near you: something. Maybe. If I have the time and inclination.
Bookbinding
Today we have two blank red notebooks. Both are A5 (pocketbook) in size, about 100 pages each, and with stylish endpapers. Useful for sketching, scheduling, taking notes, or practicing ransom notes or whatever you wish to do with it.
Book one is entirely blank. Not even a Tedorigawa Bookmakers logo on the penultimate page. No page numbers, no title page. Freedom! It does have a bookmark to assist you in finding a page you find important. The bookmark is brown-purple (mostly brown) to match the endpapers. Yes, the endpaper is brown with a British empire-era-esque semi-floral design. I hope that makes it clear enough.
Book two is blank but for the title page, the Tedorigawa logo on the last page, and the page numbers. Similar to the Dibujo Sketch Book of an earlier post (296), this one has a train, rain, cloud, and umbrella on the page numbers. There are 105 numbered pages. The endpapers are a floral design with what look like pomegranates or peaches or kiwis (formerly known as Chinese gooseberries) or all three.
Fiction
I continue editing Feeding Vicki’s Corpse and formatting City of Cocks. This means other novels on my stove have been reduced to the back burner of such. Novels like The Posthumous Autobiography of Agnes Grout and Ferrell on Ferrell: An Autobiography Based on a True Story.
In editing, the most common change I’m making – but, by far, not the only change (other changes deal with timing, clarity, and suspense) – is deleting conversation markers. Those ‘he said’ phrases such as:
“You can’t pay me enough to steal his Munch-themed underpants,” he said as he hoisted a bale of cocaine into the airplane’s cargo hold. “Know what I mean?”
I change it to:
“You can’t pay me enough to steal his Munch-themed underpants.” He hoisted a bale of cocaine into the airplane’s cargo hold. “Know what I mean?”
A small change, but I think it reads faster and more naturally. Naturally, I put the ‘she said’ or ‘Roberta said’ in if it makes understanding who is speaking clearer. If I want to make the conversation clearer; sometimes I don’t for suspense, timing, or to make the reader feel as confused as the characters. If I want to make it clear he is speaking while moving product, I divide the spoken words with some action. Like this:
“You can’t pay me enough…” He hefted a bale of cocaine onto his shoulder. “…to steal his Munch-themed underpants.” He tossed the bale into the airplane’s cargo hold and caught his breath before turning to her. “Know what I mean?”
More difficult but maybe more important is putting in the characters’ emotional thoughts into the story via actions and language.
Ya’ll’sTube
Not yet. Coming. Soon. Maybe. Don’t hold your breath.
Bookbinding
I took a plane flight the other month. As soon as I saw the vomit bag (waterproof disposal bag, according to the airline) I thought: Book Cover! As one does when one makes books. On the same flight, I was given three pieces of paper to prove my existence on the flight: a yellow flimsy paper with my flight gate, seat, destination, etc; a formal boarding pass with the same info; and a pink paper with, yet again, the same information. And I, of course, again, immediately, thought: Book Cover!
So, I made a Barf Bag Book.
This barf bag is technically called, judging by the inside front title pages: Airplane “Bag” Art Sketchbook and Waterproof Disposable Bag Art. It is a 100-page A6 blank notebook Coptically bound so the artist/user can access all the pages.
The cover is made of the barf bag but bits and pieces of the paper are glued to both the front and back; more are pasted on the front than the back so users can tell which is which.
One difficulty with the barf bag book is that the interior of a waterproof disposable bag is waterproof; i.e. resistant to liquid substances, including glue. It took a bit of maneuvering to glue the bag to the book board but eventually, I succeeded.
By the way, the book board for the particular book was a thick envelope used by the Japanese post office to transport documents worldwide. Not quite so thick but thick enough to support this book. And a reasonable repurposing of a source that would otherwise end up in my city's incinerator.
Fiction
Aside from galavanting across the nation in relatively cramped quarters, I wrote a bunch on a few novels. None, of course, finished to my satisfaction. None, in fact, finished at all.
• The Posthumous Autobiography of Agnes Grout: Death Weaver. A young woman ‘sees’ deaths and accidents of loved ones as she weaves in 19th century New England.
• Ferrell on Ferrell: An Autobiography Based on a True Story. The fictional author of a series of tragic novels writes his autobiography which greatly parallels that of his fiction.
• KZMG #1. A mystery by Doro Ferrell about a thief in Kanazawa, Japan who continually taunts her victim.
YouTubeski
A short (about 5 minutes) Youtuberesque video of me unsuccessfully making City of Cocks into a book about six years ago. The Kanazawa Art College is no longer there; it moved several blocks away.
Bookbinding
Not much in the way of bookbinding this week, but I have an excuse: heat and laziness on my part. I did, however, purchase several tenugui that I will eventually turn into book covers. The latest (and second overall) book cloth I made came out very wrinkled. I attempted to iron it flat but I should've ironed it flat Before I added copious amounts of glue and backing (shoji paper, in my case.)
Fiction
Fiction‽ What can I say about fiction? I’ll tell you what I can say about Fiction! Creation and Forgetfulness.
First, the Creation part.
I started writing two novels simultaneously. One is progressing nicely while the other is kind of in the doldrums. The first is called Ferrell Baits Ferrell: The Autobiography of Doro Ferrell; Based on a True Story. It’s about the author who wrote The Fear Trilogy. This author is fictitious so it’s appropriate he has his own autobiography complete with AI-produced portraits (younger and older).
The second, doldrum-bound novel is called The Autobiography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. I’ve written about her before (Ep. 297). The reason it’s fallen off the charts is because I need to do more research into 1800s Lowell, Massachusetts factory workers, history, and environs. Not that it takes place in Lowell, MA but because Lowell is easier to research because people post a lot about it on web pages.
Now, the Forgetfulness Part
I’ve written before that I thought I finished a novel (Heart of September, about a high school kid’s tragic adventures in the Congo), but had not. I wrote the last chapter, but not several chapters before the last one. Having written the last chapter, my pen moved on. Going back to print and bound Heart of September, I discovered the missing chapters. And I finished them. (See Ep. 290.)
Well, I did it again. I was editing a novel called Growing Slurry. I got to the Twelfth Chapter and it was going smoothly and as I was about to check the Thirteenth Chapter I made a discovery: it didn’t exist. Nor any subsequent chapters. Again! I hadn’t finished a book I thought I finished!
It gets worse. It gets worse in two ways.
First worse way, I remember writing a section about the main character of Growing Slurry doing some sleuthing in either Costa Rica or Guatemala. I can’t find it. I searched using the title and the main character and fraud and sleuth but I can’t find it on this or my other computer.
Second worse way, while looking for a chapter I remember writing for Growing Slurry, I found another novel I don’t remember writing. At all. Nada. Zip. And it’s 250 pages! How can I not remember writing a 250-page novel‽
First on my agenda, write the missing chapter and finish Growing Slurry. Second on my agenda, edit this new novel I don’t remember writing. Third, continue with Ferrell Baits Ferrell. Fourth, read more about the weaving industry in 18th-19th-century New England.
I’ll keep you posted.
Substack
In this month’s issue of Substack by Tedorigawa, ie me, we have Chapter 19 of Heart of September, in which a pygmy woman who is bought and raped wreaks vengeance upon the sinner, Tip Tipu, the slave trader. There is violence.
Bookbinding
We (meaning I, i.e. the royal We), made an A6-sized (pocket book) Coptic-bound, blank notebook with seven signatures of four folios for about 112 pages. Pages are numbered for easy reference. Unremarkable really as I’ve made a few of these bunkobon (文庫本) books in the past. So, what makes this edition warrant special mention?
First, 文庫本 is an A6 size book equivalent to what Americans refer to as a pocket book (but not a pocketbook which is an accessory for holding cash and credit cards). A pocket book measures about 4.25" x 6.87" whereas a 文庫本 measures 4.1"×5.8"
The remarkable part? I used tenugui (手拭い) as a book cloth. What’s tenugui? It’s a towel. A traditional Japanese hand towel (35 by 90 cm; 13" x 35") that dates back about a 1,000 years (to the Heian Era, if you’re interested in Japanese history – back when Lady Murasaki was writing The Tale of Genji).
It’s the towel that often gets wrapped around the heads of people who wrap towels around their heads to inspire themselves and others. And used to dry hands or sweat from brows.
I got the towel wet, applied a healthy chunk of glue, patted down some shoji (障) paper to back it, allowed it to dry for 24 hours, and cut it to size. Using the tenugui was an experiment on my part that worked out quite well, I think.
So, I hear you asking, What is shoji paper? It’s the paper used in those paper walls Japan is famous for but increasingly doesn’t use much anymore unless decoratively for a ‘Japanese’ accent in homes with tatami mats which are also not used as much anymore.
One advantage of using 手拭い for a 文庫本 book cover is that I can get two book covers out of one 手拭い. Plus, many 手拭い have quite stylish designs. (And you thought you couldn’t read Japanese, you silly goose (gachou – 鵞鳥)).
Fiction
Whilst waiting for somebody to get her act together, I started fooling around with my computer and wrote a title then started writing a story to fit the title. Over the last fortnight I finished it. Called The Gangsters of Love, it sporadically includes lyrics from Steve Miller’s The Joker while maintaining a plot about a missing woman, her daughter, and an attempted murder all seen through a first person narrator with synesthesia. It is a short story topping out at about 25 pages.
Plus, after a few hours of research into Lowell looms in the 1800s, the novel The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver continues unabated. But with a few changes.
One big change is pushing the birth of Agnes back a decade or so as I have her being born at about the same time the Lowell factory was fading out which was in the 1830s. Caused by, among other things, economic depressions esp the 1837 one; immigrants allowing factory owners to pay them less for their labor (owners already employed females because they could pay females less that males, a tradition that continues to this day); an oversupply of cloth driving prices down; unionization, which both the government and factory owners ignored; and the elevating of profit over people even more so by the factory owners.
Another change was learning that Lowell factory workers worked 80 hours a week plus had to attend church services on their only day off plus were encouraged to attend lectures to educate themselves.
Research is fun! Writing is work. Having written is Fun!
Substack
Check out Chapter 18 of Heart of September in which Hairball squeals on a fellow antique book buyer who is smuggling several valuable volumes out of England.
Bookbinding
We finished the renovation of a client’s well-used travel book. It got a new map, a new cover, and new endpapers. The client also requested a blank notebook so I sent two blank notebooks. Knowing that one book was going to an artist, I sent a coptic-bound book because coptic-bound books open flat and are much more useful for drawing and sketching than case-bound books. Case-bound books are your usual hardcover books.
Secondly, I finished a creative outlet book that had two purposes. One, to see if I could make a book in one day. Two, to see if I could use up some scraps of paper and other supplies I had laying around. The result: A Cat Balloon Blank Notebook.
Purpose #1 ended in semi-failure. I didn’t finish it in one day; it took two. Purpose #2 ended in success. Cat Balloon Blank Notebook has seven signatures of four folios. It is B6 in size. It has no page numbers because I don’t like my printer so I’m snubbing it. Plus, it’s running out of one color ink which means I can’t use it to print a completely different ink.
Fiction
In fiction, we have failed to write a detective novel in thirty days. It has been about 15 days and we only have the first three or four chapters. We have a dead body, though, so that’s a plus. My problem is research.
For example, the dead body is found in a lake. My questions: what animals that live in the lake would help devour the dead body and what is the timeline for decomposition due to those animals, bacteria, and the water. And it’s not just any lake because lakes in different parts of the planet have different creatures living in it. This is Lake Washington in the Seattle area which is sometimes colder than expected. It’s also deeper than people think. But the body was found in a small cove which is not so deep. How does the temperature and depth affect deterioration of a full-clothed (minus shoes) female? These are the questions that hold progress back but fill my brain with useful (?) information.
So I resurrected a different novel. One that deals with a character who can read the future deaths of people around her. And 18th century New England loom factories. Which lead me to a zillion other questions that required more research. (18th century loom factories, for one.) Titled:
The Post-Humous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout: Death Weaver.
And she lives to be 170 years old so that hit me with a lot of research into American history.
Substack
Ever wonder why news stands in court rooms were often managed by blind people? Thomas Gore (Albert Gore’s relative and Gore Vidal’s grandfather) can answer that. In this episode of Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly I write on the history of the white cane and seeing-eye dogs.
Bookbinding
We found ourselves finishing up two blank notebooks this week. One yellow and one mostly red with a slightly floral motif.
The Yellow One has a title on the front cover: Dibujo & Kaku (the Kaku being, in Japanese, 描く. Both carrying the meaning of Draw or Drawing. On the inside title page of the yellow one is a sketch of the front of a steam train, an umbrella, a cloud, and rain. The word Train is over the umbrella. T/Rain was the idea.
There are 105 numbered pages in Dibujo/描く. Each page has one part of the sketch on the inside title page: the train, rain drops, the umbrella, or the word train hovering over the page number.
Both the Dibujo/描く book and the red one have the same William Morris-esque end papers that give the books a bit of elegance to them.
The red one has a inside title page: Sketch 描く Dibujo and sketchbook in Japanese which is スケッチブック.
It also has 105 pages but it is not numbered so the artist/scribbler must remember approximately where in the book they scribbled or arted (?). It does, however, have a yellow band around the lower portion both as a way to discover the front and to use up a band of yellow book cloth.
Fiction
While I finished Molly Bright, I started yet another novel but this one a slight twist for me. There seems to be two (or more) ways of writing. One is outlining everything and being label a planner. The other way is to wing it, let the story meander about until the author discovers both a plot and character; this called winging it or a pantser (seat of the pants type of thinking). I wing it. Usually.
I outlined a previous novel. And lost interest because I knew where it was going so I never finished it. The one I just started I have outlined but I also set a goal of finishing it in 30 days (not unlike NaNoWriMo but not in November).
It’s a murder mystery set in Seattle with the main character (Max McKenzie) and his female assistant (JT Proust) being Seattle Police Department detectives. Titled: The Abandoned Corpse. But it isn’t just abandoned because the woman is dead, but also abandoned by a lover (jilted), and she in turn abandons several friends, ambitions, dreams).
The first Max McKenzie Murder Mystery explores the dark lives of rich people who abandon people and things to make, they think, their lives better.
Substack
Chapter 16 of Heart of September (formerly Heart of November and Eating November).
Amelia, Hairball, and Sakombí battle it out with some of Tipu’s henchmen. A very large snake attacks one henchman. He spills the beans about Tipu’s location. Our heroes march off to do battle with the Congo’s biggest sex & drug trafficker
Bookbinding
A client sent me a book that needed to be rebuilt, repaired, and improved. I need to fix the covers, the spine, and a map is glued to the back cover. Because I have to fix the covers I was thinking of updating the map, too. This is an exciting proposition because I have to investigate maps! Also, the client wants a soft cover so he can cram it in his book bag without fear.
Fiction
I finished Molly Bright!
I have included sub-plots concerning Molly (trouble with her boss), Merengue & Early (who want to help homeless orphans) and the marital problems of Keiko of Kyosuke. I have also, always, strengthened characters.
I wrote the ending where all the main characters are happy do what they dream of doing. Of the two bad guys, one begs for Frank to send for the police rather than have Frank take care of him. The other bad guy escapes in a shoot out and disappears into the Osaka night.
Other than Molly Bright I have been improving my four-book Fear Trilogy. More action, of course. More excitement, naturally. And fewer spelling mistakes, perhaps.
The Fear Trilogy (in four books) follows the life of Max McKenzie from his incarceration at age eleven for the murder of his mother to his status as a war hero in a dystopian society. In this society three things have happened: the Conglomeration owns and runs everything; beings from a moon from Jupiter have landed; the beings, called Jeeters, are severely discriminated against. The Conglomeration gives them third or fourth-class rankings in society; menial jobs, substandard housing, discrimination on a daily basis.
This results in a civil war between the Jeeters and the Conglomerate and the governments of Io send troops to aide the Earth-bound Jeeters. In the course of the war Max is made a foot soldier, then a manufactured war hero, an advisor to a Senator who becomes President, then a liaison between Jeeters and the Conglomerate.
Substack
The Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly focuses its paws on the canals of our body, our planet, and our nearest planet (Mars).
Bookbinding
In the last few days or weeks, I’ve created an A5 Blank Notebook with page numbers on slightly yellow paper with a bright yellow cover (red threads, though), and red headbands with a dark red (maroon?) bookmark for your viewing and using pleasure.
This monstrosity has nine (9) signatures of four folios each for a grand total of 144 pages. It also has a William Morris-influenced pair of endpapers that set off the yellow of the covers quite nicely, I believe. You are more than allowed to decorate the front cover as you see fit. You bought it, you name it (as Joe Walsh wants titled an album.) It opens nicely, too, so it can be used for sketching or doodling to your heart’s content.
In this project I believe I might have improved slightly on the spine. I've experimented with the space size between the cover and the spine quite a bit. I think I've managed to find the sweet spot for this book. You professionals might (or not) disagree but I feel like it's better than most covers.
The more I experiment with design and dimensions, the more confused I make myself. I have taken to writing down information for the Next book and sticking it on my cork board To Do panel that hovers over my workbench.
Fiction
This probably happens more often than not among writers. Taking a character from one novel and placing them in another novel. I’m not talking about a series like Harry Potter. I’m talking about a minor character in one book showing up as the major character in another book. Like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (consisting of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea.)
Or, more recently, David Mitchell’s novels that contain many of the same characters with different emphasis in different novels (Ghost Written, Number Nine Dream, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.)
I’ve done that with Molly Bright. One character in Molly Bright is a Japanese dancer who changed his name from the very common Suzuki (which is why Ichiro is called Ichiro and not Suzuki, too common) to Merengue (the dance, not the sugary pastry). When he worked in a medical supply company he called himself Suzuki but when he began meditating in an ashram in Bari, Italy and learned to dance, he switched to Merengue.
He is a free-spirited dancer who learned dance in Italy and the Dominican Republic. He continues to dance when he returns to Japan and is often rousted by the police for his unusual life style: no permanent job or home, sleeping outdoors, walking everywhere, holding no great quantities of cash.
I have put him in another novel in which he is the main character. He relates and learns from a variety of people in Italy and the Dominican Republic. He helps Molly and Early in Molly Bright with the police following Sawako’s kidnapping. This episode shows up at the end of his novel. The tentative title is Merengue or The Dancer Merengue or Merengue the Dancer but I’m not pleased with any of those titles.
Meanwhile, Molly Bright is staying the course and rapidly coming to an end. I need to develop all the characters a bit more, clean up the chronology a tad, fix typos, spelling errors, check my grammar, and make sure the plot is relatively hole free.
Hopefully, it will be wrapped up by the next episode of Tedorigawa Bookmakers. Don’t hold your breath; I’m also reading Infinite Jest.
Substack
On Substack you can read Chapter 15 of Heart of September / November. While you’re there, read about Tarzan’s connection to Electric Cars in the previous post.
Bookbinding
In my New Year’s Resolution (NYsR©) to podcast more frequently, I require more content. This is good for you the listener/readers. Thank you.
For this episode, I made two A6 blank notebooks which you can use for sketching or doodling during Zoom meetings or, and more importantly, taking notes during real face-to-face meetings with other real flesh-and-blood humans.
The first notebook is 112 pages in 7 signatures. It also has page numbers for ease of referencing and finding your masterpieces. The name of this book is Sketchbook in both Japanese – スケッチブック–, and Spanish – Cuaderno de Dibujo. And has a stylish yellow vertical sash. This indicates both the front cover and the fore edge.
The other one is 128 pages in 8 signatures. It is completely blank, no page numbers or bookmarks to differentiate pages. But it sports three titles: Japanese – スケッチブック–, Spanish – Cuaderno de Dibujo –, and English – Sketchbook. It also displays a chiyogami sash near the fore edge to give the artist/writer/user a front cover design.
Fiction
Molly Bright continues. Last podcast I told you about Sawako being related to water in all its forms including waterboarding and stale, scummy rain water in the corner of her cell where she’s being held captive. Today, you’ll learn about Molly herself.
She’s a businesswoman out of Phoenix, Arizona. She’s a buyer of home decoration furnishings. She is often worried about money: prices, costs, profits, and has no qualms about ripping off creators to make a bigger profit for her company. She assumes by making money for the company that the company will be loyal to her; this is a mistake she learns in the course of Molly Bright.
Substack
Chapter 14 of Heart of November (changed to Heart of September) is up and waiting for you to read it. Amelia meets her rapist. Violence ensues.
A new series called Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly is on its first issue. The first issue is about Soup. What is the relationship between a children’s game-show host and David Bowie? And what is the relationship between the children’s host and soup? What is the origin of Soup? All these questions are answered in
Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly: Soup
The next issue will be on Tarzan and Electric Cars. Only on Substack.
Bookbinding
In mid-December a client made a request for a 2024 schedule to be ready soon. By soon, I think they meant before January 2024, which, as you know, zoomed by quite quickly. I told them that was impossible because I was taking a short break for New Year’s and subsequent joys and regrets about failed New Year’s Resolutions.
However, I finished it and shipped it off. The client was disappointed that it came so late but not with the final product itself. I warned them it would be late. I guess the lesson here is I shouldn’t take orders for schedules so late in the year.
Each schedule I make is personalized for the client. I ask them to send 12 to 14 photos that they’d like in the book and in what order if they have a preference. I also ask what style of schedule they’d like. For example, if the week starts on Monday or Sunday, if holidays are named or just red. Plus other desires the client can think of. This all takes time, of course, but if I weren’t so lazy, I could probably do it quicker.
Fiction
Molly Bright is being edited nicely. I’m tightening up action, dialog, characters. Making supporting characters more in tune with the major themes of friendship, honesty, loyalty etc. Plus, the end is in sight! I mean, action and reaction, tying up loose ends, facing a lot of editing is in sight.
Themes for the major characters are occurring naturally. For example, the kidnap victim, Sawako, is linked to water: surfing, swimming, bathing, and waterboarding.
The first paragraph of Molly Bright. Any comments are appreciated.
Sawako loved the freedom of the sea, of swimming in it, of floating on it, of sailing over it, especially of surfing in, over, and on it. Sweeping down a wave; curling left or right. Dangling her toes over the front of the board or to the side. Crouching down to slide under the lip. Leaning back to flip away. Skimming over the water, her face inches from the wave hurtling down on her ready to crush her bones; the sea was liquid as solid as concrete. For a few exhilarating seconds her fear concentrated on the Here. The Now. The Wave. Not on them. In surfing, she was free. They disappeared.
Substack
I’ve posted here about why I haven’t posted on Substack which I’m renewing posting on. Sort of like many people promising to post more on all their various social media sites but then they fade away …
Actually, remember a novel I wrote about last podcast (listen here) called Heart of September? This post on Substack is a recap of what I have posted on Substack up until February 14 of last year, so a year ago.
Bookbinding
The second book of 2024 (maybe I’ll stop numbering them. Maybe.) is a 2024 Schedule delivered to the client halfway through January of 2024; a bit late. But not as late as the next one.
It’s an A4-sized schedule perfectly bound (a style that uses a lot of glue, not that I bound it perfectly) of 16 pages (two for each month and some endpapers).
The cover is of a textured paper I acquired years ago plus two parallel red lines of the same type of paper indicating the front. The client then attached their favorite stamps on the front. The back is decoration-free.
The client complained the numbers for the days was too big taking up valuable writing space. But, fortunately, not so big the client requested a re-do. However, as the client orders schedules from me regularly, I’ve adjusted the letter size.
Fiction
I continue working on Molly Bright. In order to familiarize myself with the inner workings of the characters, I’ve started reading it from the beginning and editing as I go. I believe I’m making it clearer to understand, more dramatic, and further develop the characters. While it is basically an action novel, it is overall character-driven.
Here’s the basic plot:
Woman gets kidnapped; strangers try to find & help her.
Here are the characters:
Sawako, a Japanese computer whiz/chemist, spends five months avoiding a religious group who want her to make a dirty bomb.To relax she surfs on a beach in Miyazaki on her way to Kagoshima. The religious group finds her and snatches her off the beach.
Molly, a buyer for a housewares company, is in Japan buying housewares. She surfs on the same beach in Miyazaki on her way to Kagoshima. She sees Sawako get kidnapped. She also gets a good look at the kidnapper; the only eye witness.
Early, a recent vagabond, surfs the same beach (Ibii, Miyazaki). He sees the kidnapping but not the kidnapper. Together Molly and Early run to the police. At the police station they meet Merengue, a Japanese vagabond, who speaks English. They discover the kidnappers are in Osaka.
In Osaka, they meet Frank, an former gangster turned ramen shop owner, and Arisa, a craft maker with health issues, who help Molly, Early, & Merengue discover the kidnapper’s hideout. Violence ensues.
And there are a few important supporting characters:
- Bald Headed Guy the man in charge of Sawako’s kidnapping and a religious leader;
- Henchman, his second in charge who is not so enamored with the religion;
- Keiko and Kyosuke, Sawako’s parents who are university professors (she in chemistry, he in English);
- Tachibana, a former gang member turned university professor who teaches with Kyosuke.
Substack
I have revived a dormant Substack. Please check it out and subscribe if it pleases you. The current post is Diary of a Dead Cat Quarterly: Soup. All about soup (not a recipe post; a history post.)
Bookmaking
The first book of the year 2024 is a B6-sized coptic-bound 100-page blank notebook with a nice endpaper, red paper cover, and a cup of cocoa which I thought was coffee, but it came off of a bag of cookies from Miyazaki (Miyazac).
I can’t believe I started it last year. It’s been sitting on my workbench for at least two months. I finally finished it as part of my New Year’s Resolution(s)tm
Speaking of NYR(s)tm, one of them is to read more real books. I’m currently plowing through Joyce’s Ulysses (again; I read it in college, too.) and Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove (Book two of his seven book In Search of Lost Time). I finished the first book, Swann’s Way, last year.
Another NYR(s)tm is to give you a podcast more regularly; that is to say, more frequently. Realistically, I’m hoping that means every two weeks. Now, in order to have something for you to listen to on this podcast every two weeks about books I make and fiction I write I’ll need to make books and write fiction.
See what I did there? If I make more books and write more fiction, I’ll have something for you every two weeks.
Fiction
I finished Heart of September! Oh, perhaps you remember last year when I posted that I was still working on it? Last November? Well, I finished it. This year. In January. It is complete.
With our heroes going there separate ways tremendously changed by their experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo:
• Our hero (who, by the way, is never named) is back in Madison, WI in high school;
• Sakombi is off to France to live with his sister and avoid being murdered by a warlord;
• Amelia is also heading to France to recuperate and recover her former self in a monastery.
However, in looking through my folder of novels cleverly named Novels on my computer, I opened Molly Bright a novel about a kidnapping in Miyazaki (see above about cookies) and redemption in Osaka.
To my utter horror a novel I thought I finished Two Years Ago was – you can see this coming – Unfinished! Another one! Now, yes, I’m working on it.
You can expect to see more of Molly in future episodes. I hope you’re looking forward to it.
An Observation on Real Life, if You would indulge me.
January 1, 2024 at 4:10 pm the Noto Peninsula here in Japan (near Kanazawa) had a terrific earthquake. The Noto Peninsula is about two hours by car north of here. Yes, we felt the quake. And it was one of the scariest earthquakes I’ve ever been in.
It lasted longer than most, it shook harder than most. Cars rocked back and forth; buildings swayed dangerously. It devastated a couple of towns in the Noto area. It killed about 200 people.
Survivors are dealing with lack of water, heat, and the destruction of their homes. As roads are blocked, helicopters are constantly in the sky carrying personnel and supplies in and injured out. One woman was helicoptered out and gave birth the next day. One 90-year-old woman was found alive after being buried in her house for four days.
It was a bad time, but things are looking up. Lives are recovering, but it will take a long time, maybe years, for people to get their homes back. We’re doing what we can (donating food and money).
Please, the world needs people helping each other.
Bookbinding
I discovered cardboard. Not originally, but in my stack of leftovers and the myriad boxes that my local grocery store piles up after receiving shipments of everything from drinks to bananas. More importantly, I’ve started to use them in my bookbinding. Yea! Free supplies!
Last month I made two French link stitch blank notebooks wherein I used cardboard strips to strength the covers. The covers are usually paper folded over to match the size of the book. Flexible but not suitable for what I want to do with the books: write on them while sitting with them on my lap.
This month I made the cover completely cardboard. An A6-size blank notebook with 140 pages.With two colors of thread: green and blue. The front has symbols for the box it came in: no water, no sharp objects, and be careful? hold it in your hands?
This might be used in a foreign language study milieu rather than the red brocade one I made last month. (Visible below)
Ficition
Still! Still working on Heart of September. Will this cauldron of confusion never end? However, it is progressing. Slowly but moving forward. Maybe toward the end. Unfortunately, I have already thought of a companion piece, a novel whose main character is Amelia, one of the main characters in Heart of September. Whether this novel comes to fruition or not is questionable. I should concentrate on finishing my current work in progress.
Speaking of coming up with stories, I am attracted to the story of a novel in several ways. The most common, for me, is to envision a character and try to find a situation that fits the character. For example: once I saw in my imagination a Japanese artist wandering around Spain looking at art. I put him in 17th century Spain, where he meets Cervantes and has an adventure with two body guards and a disgraced nun. The novel, Giapan, uses Don Quixote in several ways: plot, characters, Cervantes, and Cervantes’ style of tangents.
Another way a story slaps me across the face is by using dialog. I hear, again in my imagination, a conversation between two or three people and have to find a place where they could be. I had an entire dialog between a man and a robot once. I decided the man would be a blimp pilot and he was spying on his girlfriend but the blimp was controlled by a robot; a robot with an attitude. The novel, A Year Without Days, evolved into a conspiracy of religious scammers and how the man and his girlfriend had to stop them from bombing places in Tokyo.
Bookbinding
My first year in Japan I was surprised at how fast the seasons changed. One day it’s summer and Boom! the next day it’s fall with a drastic fall (pun?) in temperature. Over the decades I’ve gotten used to it. But this year of record high temperatures? September 30 it was about 33˚ (96˚) with humidity in the high 50s. October 2? About 20˚ (68˚) with the humidity in the mid-50s.
Which meant working in my work space was tolerable. And I got two books cased in.
The first book, an A6 100-page blank notebook, found me practicing the French Link Stitch after a long time of not using it. Five signatures of five folios each were stitched onto a brocade-like thick paper that was folded over. I added a chopped up ticket to a music performance here in town, keeping the location, time, and seat assignment. I don’t remember the exact concert but feel like it was probably a chorus group or two.
I stitched this book twice. The first time it was too loose. I also made a couple of mistakes inserting the thread into its proper place. I took it apart, glued in some cardboard to make the covers stiffer (so I can hold it in my lap), and re-sewed it. Much better, I think.
It is destined to be my notebook for learning a foreign language; foreign to me, native to native speakers.
The second book is a B6 100-page blank notebook but with the thread doubled up for a thicker and tighter stitch. Again with five signatures of five folios each. I used a link stitch on four stations and the French Link Stitch on one, near the bottom, for an artistic flair.
I covered it with a used envelope from a local university and added cardboard to make the cover stronger and stiffer. This book is destined to be a art/doodle/sketch notebook as it opens quite flat and is of a reasonable size.
I have a third book on my workbench. It will be 140 pages, A6, blank notebook using a French Link Stitch (which for some reason I insist on capitalizing), with an experimental cardboard cover. Hopefully.
Fiction
Still working on Heart of September, which I hoped to finish in September, but it had other plans. Re-reading sections I find not just typos and confusion but instances, sentences, and dialogs that hinder or slow down the plot, the action, or the emotion. I need to fix these before sliding on to the next chapter, paragraph, or sentence.
For instance, one of the main characters (A French drug smuggler who calls himself different names depending on who he’s talking to – Tristram, Joseph – but his main nom de pseudonym is Kurtz. Kurt Kurtz), is driving a car.
An innocent act anywhere, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Except to get to the city (Goma) where the main action takes place, he flew. Where’d he get the car? I had to devise a scene or dialog about him getting a car. One that fits five people and their luggage. And that he doesn’t mind abandoning when the going gets tough.
Bookbinding
Nado. Nothing. Zip. Why? A perfectly good reason why.
My bookbinding studio doesn’t have air conditioning and like most of the planet, Kanazawa is hot. Hotter than some other places but cooler than a few (like Texas, which is on fire).
Rather than sit and sweat a bucket load in the first five or six minutes – which would dampen the paper and make it ew ugly with sweat stains — I’ve turned to reading and writing more. In an air conditioned room in my house or the local library.
Fiction
First, I’ve been editing one-fifth of my Calvado Pentalogy, Calvado, in hopes of making it available on Apple Books soon. Within this year. Just in time for Christmas shopping! I hope. I’m also going to edit the other four-fifths to make the entire pentalogy available for your reading pleasure within this, maybe, decade.
In Calvado, Calvado, the female protagonist, has a lucrative job as a fashion model but is also a second-year medical student.
Mack is a delinquent and singer who believes he is followed by Death. All who care for him seem to die. Therefore, he avoids any attachment to anyone. But he meets Calvado.
The Calvado Pentalogy follows Calvado as she moves through time and space. She’s in Venice (twice) in the present (in The Venetian Slime Woman) and in the 1400s (in The Idiot Runs). She’s in Istanbul both in the present and the past (in The Priests of Hiroshima). And she’s in Gutenberg Iowa in the present when a typesetter falls in love with her even though she’s several decades younger than him (in Tristram’s Printer).
Second, I’ve been writing and rewriting Heart of September in hopes of finishing it soon. Like this year. Although the end is fast approaching. Not the novel, the year. The end of the year is fast approaching. I’ve juggled, added, deleted, and severely edited chapters to make the whole thing fit together much better.
I’ve added atmosphere and details, caused more of the Congo to appear, and raised the importance of certain characters (the snake lady, for example).
Plus I’ve renamed it again back to Heart of September as there are so many references to Heart of Darkness I had to make sure you all understood I know there are references to Heart of Darkness.
I’ve also been writing the final few chapters of a novel I finished some time ago but needs to be improved called Molly Bright. This novel is about a woman who is kidnapped. Three unlikely people decided to save her. The unlikely people are:
- a buyer for a major housewares company; her name is Molly Bright.
- a Ivy League drop out who has spent the last year begging for food in India
- a dancer.
Also involved are a university couple whose daughter was kidnapped, a former hitman for the Mafia who moved to Japan to run a cheap ramen shop, and, of course, the two (formerly six, but four were killed) kidnappers.
Bookbinding
Having finished My Year of Drinking Kanazawa I cased it in. Without a few mistakes and some successes. First, the spine is too large by a half a millimeter. Second, the space between the spine and the front and back covers is too small. It is 3mm when it should be about 5mm. While the book opens adequately it is not sincere like a book of short stories should be; it is mocking us.
I like the black cover and the white band toward the bottom that announces, on the front, the title. There’s nothing on the back. I considered putting my name on it but decided to be humble. Besides, it didn’t look good.
At the same time as I cased it My Year of Drinking Kanazawa I also cased in its companion piece: Sakate. This is much smaller (in page count) than MYDK. The book boards are necessarily thinner and cover itself nearly monotone. I experimented with a vertical band with the title in both Japanese (さかて) and English (Sakate, of course) while forgetting to include, possibly in a larger form the other Japanese ( 酒手). I slapped my name on a horizontal band on the back which is where I got the idea that it didn’t look good. Maybe a small horizontal band on the front?
Fiction
Both MYDK and Sakate feature Ishikawa saké and cityscapes. However, the reader, you, hopefully, doesn’t need to know about either to enjoy the story/plot/characters.
Whereas Sakate takes place in one bar with one bartender who encounters a variety of customers, MYDK takes place in 13 different bars, 14 different bartenders, and one customer (the unnamed narrator).
While Sakate was realistic, MYDK is sprinkled with magic and spookiness. Not all the stories have ghosts or strange coincidences; just enough to spice up the reading experience. I hope.
Secondly, while working on Soul of September (which was formerly called Heart of November) I had what you might call an epiphany. Parts of the novel were completely unnecessary: they didn’t move the plot along, they didn’t develop the main character in any unique way, they didn’t illustrate much at all for the reader. So I jettisoned them.
Then, I realized a couple of chapters could be reduced into one chapter while simultaneously reducing the wordiness, verbiage, and ploddiness of the story as a whole. So I combined them, reworded them, and enjoyed myself.
I dare not announce that Soul of September will be finished soon, but the major obstacles (as listed above) have been corrected. I’m hoping no major hiccups will appear in the next few chapters. But there probably will be. Fingers crossed, wood knocked on, and all that. I might change the name back to Heart of September.
Help!
Support your local podcaster and bookbinder/writer!
Go to Apple Books and look at what George Stenson has available for your reading pleasure.
This week: Two related mystery novels: City of Cocks and Feeding Vicki’s Corpse.
A small coastal Oregon town has a murder on its hands. They turn to a retired Boston policeman to help them solve it. But he has a ghost following him; or so he thinks.
In City of Cocks, in the same coastal Oregon town, a disgraced businessman must rely on his wife and her drunk poet friend to save him from a life in prison.
The poet sees things that aren’t there, making him an unreliable witness.
Bookbinding
I made a small book as practice in making small books. It’s about 75 pages and measures 100 mm x 75 mm which, for our Imperial users, is about 3.9 inches x 2.9 (3 15/16 by 2 61/64) inches. The cover is wrapped in red paper but there’s a chiyogami stripe down the front cover that doesn’t spread itself to the back cover. It has a bookmark so if you’ve lost your page, you can find it.
It’s blank so you can use it for whatever purposes you choose. It’s also smaller than the palm of my hand and I have small hands; or, according to everyone I know, small fingers.
Fiction
I’ve been writing on three or two things. First, Heart of November which I’ve decided to call Soul of September. I’m making the story clearer. For me, at least. Hopefully for the reader as well. Second, My Year of Drinking Kanazawa is finished except for a small bit. Next I will print it out, case it in, and make it available to those who wish to read it. Third, a detective novel that stemmed from one of the stories in My Year of Drinking Kanazawa. Detective/mystery novels are a technique of writing that I am not so confident in; I’m learning, though. I hope.
In this episode I will outline how I write. It will be quite simple. There are five basic steps I take in my writing practice.
- Dialog
- Action
- Emotion
- Dialog Tags
- Drama
I write the dialog first. After the dialog I bless the characters with some action. Meaning, if two people are talking, the reader can see them doing something. Pouring a drink, looking out a window, frowning.
After the action, I sprinkle some emotion on the characters. Sometimes the action and dialog match the emotion, sometimes it’s the opposite; whatever makes the story strong and the characters more believable.
After the emotional support is slapped in, I read it for the dialog tags. Those “...,” she said lines. If I set the story up properly, you won’t need the dialog tags. Also, if the characters have a distinct enough speaking voice, you won’t need the tags.“Y’all come uppa my house, now, hear?” vs “You’re welcome to come visit me at my place, if you want. All of you.”
Once the dialog is set, the action is proper, the emotion guaranteed, then I read the fiction for pacing, for dramatic affect, for speed of story. Once those are all set, I’m pretty much done. For the time being. Until I have other thoughts about plot, character, location, emotion, and everything else. I am no longer a One-Draft-I’m-Done kind of writer.
Sometimes I do all five things at the same time. Sometimes I space it out over the days, weeks, months, or, in the case of Soul September, years.
I hope this helps you with whatever you’re writing. What works for me might not necessarily help you, but I hope it does.
Bookbinding
This week you have an A6 pocketbook blank journal, similar to the other A6 pocketbook blank journals I have been making but with the addition of two pages With Print!
The first page has the title of the book: Tedorigawa Bookmakers and the date: June 2023. The final page has the Tedorigawa Bookmakers logo. That’s it. The other pages, as you can probably guess from the title are blank.
The front is mostly green book cloth with two chiyogami-esque strips plus a red stripe that surrounds the entire book made of red book cloth. Yes, we are trying to use up as many leftovers, scraps, and bits that we can while still practicing the art of making books.
This book I like. It fits in your pocket (if you have any) and is very handy for drawing, doodles, notes, or any other activity you have in mind.
A previous book you can listen to about in Episode 281: How many mistakes can I make, I have made into a longish to-do list, interspersed with language tips I’ve picked up in Spanish and Japanese.
Included in that To-Do list is WIP Long Term Goals which includes finishing novels. Like The Dancer, The Sound of Fear, Heart of November, and, now, The Corpse at Oyama Shrine.
Fiction
Yes, I have started yet another novel The Corpse at Oyama Shrine but in my Work-in-Progress Long-Term Goals (soon to be shortened to WIPLTG, I suspect) we have Edit, Write, and Finish Heart of November. But also on that growing list is Edit, Print, and Case in Sakate and My Year of Drinking Kanazawa.
But what have I really been working on in the last week? Heart of November. And why have I been working on it?
Because several months ago I thought it was finished. I thought I wrote the final scene of the main character asking another high school student what Heart of Darkness was about since he lived much of it.
And I did. I did write the final chapter. But I sort of missed writing about five or eight chapters before the final chapter. In re-reading what I wrote, I discovered a lot of confusion; on my part, of course. So I rewrote what comes before the final chapter; expanded parts, made parts a separate chapter, deleted some parts. And rearranged parts in order to make the plot move faster.
Almost finally, I changed the title. Originally it was Eating November. Then it was Heart of November as a homage to the novel it resembles: Heart of Darkness. Now, I’m contemplating using Soul of September or Heart of September primarily because the action takes place in September after school starts in the US.
Finally, I started a Substack of Heart of November until I realized the book was not finished, so, once I finish it, I can restart the Substack.
Bookbinding
First, the new music for our intros and outros. It’s called Who’s Using Who by the Mini-Vandals and downloaded from YouTube Music. Last week I wrote it was probably downloaded from Pixabay. I was wrong; it’s from YouTube.
Here we have two blank notebooks who are the same only in size. A6 and 100 pages. the covers vary dramatically with one multi-colored and the other veering toward the monotone side of the color wheel.
The first, on the Front: the Matsushima (松島) one is coptic-bound with three different colors on the front and one basic color (green) on the back. Also on the front is part of a ticket from the Viennese tram system, a cut out from a takeaway menu showing the website of a Kanazawa bakery (Hug Mittens), and, of course, a large Matsushima rescued from a box or pamphlet extolling the virtues of a locally brewed saké. At least it’s brewed in Japan.
ver, On the Back: the back is not the same as the front. There is a thick hemp string (currently invisible) which was added for variety and spunk that was added after this photo was taken. It was added in the small holes you can see between the coptic binding threads which are blue (to match the blue of the front).
While the front of the book has three major colors (red, blue, green) the back has a green book cloth with two stripes of chiyogami-esque paper running down the left side of the back and a strip of green book cloth separating the chiyo-gami paper (gami being paper, I just said chiyo paper paper.)
This one, the Here! book, fits quite nicely into my hands and is superbly done, if I do say so myself.
The second A6 blank notebook is more subtle and subdued. It is cased in with a book cloth that was given to me by a store owner over 20 years ago. I wandered into his stationery shop and asked him if he had any book cloth. He didn’t know what book cloth was but decided this whitish-brown paper would fit the bill and shoved five or six sheets into my hands. He was right. They make excellent book cloths. This is the last of the sheets he gave me.
On the front cover are three details liberated from a business card for a local coffee shop. I have forgotten the name of the shop as I don’t drink coffee, but there’s a tiny map if you’re interested. The shop is in Kanazawa, if that helps.
The top shows a train station, the middle a highway, and the bottom, with the exuberant “Here!” plastered to it, the location of the coffee shop. With those three hints it’s practically impossible to find it, however.
The back is blank of decals or other adornments.
Fiction
Last podcast I allowed as how I was finished with My Year of Drinking Kanazawa. It is waiting for me to look at it again and put it up on Indesign to make it into a real book. Among those 13 short stories the narrator mentions, twice, reading a book by a friend of his called The Corpse At Oyama Shrine, a murder mystery solved by a private investigator and his henchmen and woman. He mentions it twice for when he started reading it and when he finished reading it three months later. So, I started to write it.
I got three or four chapters into it and thought, hmmm. How can this be improved and not a copy of Columbo or Sherlock Holmes? I started over, adding more intensity. Yes, before finishing either Heart of November, The Dancer, or The Sound of Fear, I’m embarking on another Journey.
In one short story, the narrator begins to tell the plot but the bartender asks a good question, why is the PI investigating and not letting the police do their work? This is a question I have asked myself as I begin re-thinking and rewriting those first few chapters.
Thus I have written another short story collection and ignored the other works in progress while starting a fourth work-in-progress. I need more hours in the day or less coffee or fewer ideas. Naaah. I’ll just plug along.
Thank you for reading this. Hope to see you again on
the next blog/podcast.
NewMusic: Who’s Using Who by the Mini Vandals
(probably found on Pixabay Music)
Bookbinding
In the last weeks or so four A5-sized blank notebooks were created. They were created using scraps I had left over from other projects in a failed attempt at reducing leftovers and scraps. Making books and covers creates more leftovers for future use. Sometimes.
They are all 100 pages and Coptic bound for two reasons. First, Coptic binding requires a lot less glue and I was, for some odd reason, trying to conserve on glue. Second, my printer isn’t working up to snuff so I’m not worrying about typography or printing anything which frees me up to experiment with different books. In the coming weeks (hopefully) I’ll tell you about a Small Book.
They didn’t take me too long to make. Maybe I made one every two or three days, time and real life permitting. And I only made one major mistake on one of the books.
One the last signature, of course, I sewed the Coptic bindings incorrectly and tried to save it; I failed. But the book is still useful as a blank notebook. It's just that the inside back cover is pitifully ugly.
The Green one at top is a paper I’ve had forever. And by forever I mean FOREVER. Well, at least 20 years. It’s a thickish paper with a great feel to it. It was also, if memory serves and I doubt that it does, fairly cheap. Why I kept it for 20+ years, I have no idea.
The Octopus one – purplish-blue-grey – with 88 (in Spanish) and the Red one with Save plus 97% UPF are the same book. The 88 is a Kanazawa restaurant serving, naturally, Spanish food. I stole the Save from the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which is pushing for citizens to make donations (taxes) online to Save paper. The UPF 50+ is from a hat.
Except for that one with the ugly inside back cover, the notebooks are good. I shipped them off to my wholesaler and she received them with, uh, trepidation and a touch of annoyance. But confident she can place them. Somewhere. Maybe.
Fiction
I had a thought. Bear with me now, it will take a bit to explain. My collection of short stories (My Year of Drinking Kanazawa) has 13 stories. While doing something completely different, I discovered that there were 15 Japanese emperors during the Edo era (1603 ~ 1868). I thought it would be interesting, and a second layer of intrigue, if the characters (all bar owners or tenders of said bars) were named after those emperors. I had to read about them to see if I could had a third layer of value to the stories; if the bartenders or the narrator was involved in something a emperor was involved in. That didn’t happen. Plus someone said some conservative people might be upset that I had usurped an emperor’s name for a mere bartender. Fortunate. Changing the names, even with a Find Replace function would be tiring.
Despite all that, I changed three characters to three of the emperors’ during the Edo era not because there is any relationship between character and emperor but because I liked the names.
Also, I finished all the stories and the complete set is a mere 50+ pages with 13 short stories all taking place in a bar. With alcohol. But,
Finished! Yeah!
Want to read it? Let me know.
Bookbinding
How many mistakes can I make on one blank A6 notebook with 200 pages bound with perfect binding and still get a book I’m relatively pleased with? The short answer is: Lots!
• First and minor mistake: I counted 200 pages. I mistakenly assumed the book would have 200 pages. But I only counted sheets, not sides so it actually has 400! pages. Gads.
• Second visible mistake: The front book board and the back book board are not the same size. Off by a millimeter or two or half. But I can see it and the book doesn’t stand upright by itself.
• Third Really Big Mistake: The endpapers are Both! the wrong size and incorrectly attached. I attached the endpapers to the entire inside cover rather than leave a border. That made the part of the endpaper that attaches to the text block too big. Ugly even after I attempted to repair them.
But generally speaking I like the book. It has three different book covers on the front plus four attachments (Enjoy, a diagram, and kanji), and the spine is a book cloth from a previous book so it has part of the previous book’s title and part of my name on the front & back. And it’s a handy size, fits in the palm of my miniature hands.
Fiction
Exciting times in the writing factory! Working on My Year of Drinking Kanazawa I had a revelation and jumped on it. I completely rewrote the first story as it didn’t fit the structure of the other short stories. While working on it, I had an additional epiphany about two other stories and revised them. I believe I’m 90% through with the collection.
Two nexts on my agenda: ① I’ll finish off the last story which is longer and more convoluted than the others. ② I’ll let it fester for a while before looking at it again and try to improve it by eliminating Tell scenes with Show scenes and action verbs versus passive or boring verbs. And more descriptions of the weather in Kanazawa during the year.
Exciting times ahead!
Every three months is a schedule, isn’t it?
Bookbinding
This week in Bookbinding we have two A6 (pocketbook) blank notebooks with colorful covers. Mostly. Why? Because my printer broke. This saves you all the time and effort of reading what is inside but gives you the opportunity to write whatever you wish! A win-win situation for all.
The First Book is A6 blank notebook with a Japanese protruding rectangle on the front covered in a Chiyogami paper. 100 pages (five signatures of five folios each). Suitable for drawing, notes, and scheduling podcasts.
On the back we have a small protruding item; a hanger from a local internationally known shop. These two notebooks are coptic bound which means the front and back covers can touch each other and the book can lay flat, making it suitable for drawing and using the entire page rather than up to the spine edge.
The spine is covered with sticky black book cloth; the kind you don’t need glue for. I figured the black cloth coupled with the pale greenish cover would make the Chiyogami stick out more.
This book was two or three things to me. One: an experiment using doubled up thread. A bit tricky at first but useful. I think I’ll loop the thread over itself in future bookbinding adventures.
Two: an attempt to match stations of the thread with the book; painstaking measurements were required but for the most part faithfully carried out. Three: make the pages tighter. This, too, was a success.
The Second Book was fun. It is also A6 (pocketbook size), coptic bound, 100 pages, blank notebook but with dramatically different covers. The front is predominantly red with the same Chiyogami-esque paper on the spine edge with another design on the fore edge. Plus a bit of an envelop with International Priority Airmail printed on it.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I was using whatever materials I could muster up. Scraps of Chiyogami paper, book cloth, random items garnered from whatever caught my fancy. This is evident when we examine the back of the second book. It has a larger portion of the design that is on the front of the book in a smaller size.
It also has the Chiyogami design on the fore edge with a cut out of a bell with animal shapes closer to the spine edge. Where I got that from, I don’t know or remember.
This was also double-threaded but I pulled the thread through itself to make it a bit more secure. I liked it and will try it again the next time I’m make a double-threaded coptic-bound book.
Which might be soon. It is tourist season and I have ideas for a book tourists might like. And a couple of stores that might stock my books. Fingers crossed.
Fiction
Yes, I have written fiction. In fact, I’ve worked on a couple of the novels I talked about earlier, but not oddly Heart of November. I have mostly worked on My Year of Drinking Kanazawa; research is invaluable. More importantly, I only need to finish three of the thirteen stories. Of the three, one is nearing completion (and is the longest and last). It is also the thirteenth store, a bonus story. Like the thirteenth donut in a baker’s dozen.
This collection of short stories has a bit of a Twilight Zone vibe to it. Ghosts. Strange occurrences. Unsolved mysteries.
The other books are coming along. Slowly, slowly, like a thirsty turtle in the middle of a expressway.
Thanks for reading. Catch the podcast. Read a book.
Bookbinding
This month we’ve struggled through a couple of books, one of which is practice for next year’s daily schedule. Why is it practice? Because today is Valentine’s Day 2023, a little late for this year’s schedule. The other one is a finished blank notebook.
It’s about 100 pages, has a chiyogami-esque cover with blue spine and fore-edges. It is A5 (pocketbook) with, I believe, 7 signatures. I’ve sent it off to the customer so I can’t check the precise number of signatures. Each page is numbered with the number surrounded by a snarly Rabbit because 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit. And I didn’t want a cutesy bunny.
The recto (right) side is blank but the verso (left) side is graph paper thus designed so the owner can freehand draw on one side and be more precise on the left; or write descriptive narrative on one side or the other.
The practice schedule is a work in progress as I practice fore-edge corner placement because of the corners. It has the same chiyogami-esque cover with black book cloth to protect the edges. Also with a black spine for the same reason. This schedule has nine signatures, is A5 (pocketbook) in size, with a bookmark, and rounded corners. And that’s why I’m practicing. Putting the book cloth on rounded corners is new to me; I, too, am a work in progress.
Fiction
I have a dozen works in progress in fiction. No. Maybe less than a dozen. I’ve got:
• a short story collection called My Year of Drinking Kanazawa which will have 13 short stories (currently it has seven) based on characters the narrator encounters in bars (This is similar to my Sakate which takes place in one bar and how the female bartender deals with customers of various degrees of stress while reading various novels). The entire background should be black, not with grey stripes top and bottom.
• The Dancer about a Japanese merengue dancer (a supporting character in the Molly Bright kidnapping novel). He is about to win enough money to get back to Japan in order to swindle elderly women of a few yen, a place to eat and sleep, and teach dance to enliven their lives before running into a kidnapping.
• a mystery novel, my first: The Corpse at Oyama Shrine. A bit of trouble figuring out how to structure it so that the reader won’t be able to figure out the criminal before the big denouement.
• an action novel about intergalactic war that is part four of a three part series that I’ve been working on for decades. Or less.
Okay, maybe four works in progress instead of dozens; it just feels like dozens.
Substack
After a bit of a problem uploading anything to Substack, I have chosen to use a different browser as Substack claims they have no problem using the browser I’m using which means maybe my browser is too old?
Chapter 13 of Heart of November in which our hero discovers a deadly dealer and talking cat is up and running. Please read and enjoy it. You can also read the previous 12 chapters, of course.
Bookbinding
I have completed two A6 (文庫本 / pocketbooks) books. The first colorful one is a practice coptic binding with colorful covers as practice for the second. Both are, as I mentioned before, A6 (4 by 6 inches for our north American brethren who life south of the Canadian border). The colorful one is 100 blank pages. Suitable for scribbling, drawing, or note-taking. I practiced not only the sewing (with a thread that was new to me) but also cover design (?). Not really design, but variety. On the front with the yellow streak, there are four different ingredients: red, red & snowflake ribbon, washi, the yellow streak, and blue. The back is equipped with only three ingredients: blue, a red square, and a yellow ribbon under the square. The green is part of the book board.
The second book, the one I practiced on the colorful one with, is for a client. It is an A6 (4 x 6) schedule with a yearly calendar, thirteen monthly calendars, and a weekly calendar. A total of 9 signatures with 5 folios each for 180 pages total. Blue book cloth with yellow (can barely see the yellow in the photo) thread. I neglected to include a photo of the end papers which, as this is Japan, a chiyogami style paper; very colorful in greens and florals.
Unfortunately, I finished it January 3, three days after the beginning of the new year. Fortunately, in Japan, nobody is busy doing anything until the fourth or fifth except eating (Osechi ryori ~ food traditionally eaten over the New Year holiday), watching TV (Kohaku ~ a popular singing show with competing red vs white teams), and visiting a local and popular shrine so the client wasn’t upset at all. In fact, I just got a postcard from her saying how she loved it. Before finishing it, though, I changed the yellow thread for a blue one that matches the cover.
As you can see, I got my colorful variety of ingredients passion out of my system before I made the schedule.
Fiction
In Fiction! Amazingly I finished what I thought was going to be a novel but turned out to be a novella? or shorter. Called Satan Râins. It is the inner dialogs of the band members, their engineer, and the floor. It’s called Satan Râins because the lead singer/guitarist misspelled reigns. And it is only 18 pages long. Where was my head when I thought it was going to be a novel; it’s not; it’s an anti-novel. Or a short story.
I continue with The Dancer about Merengue from Molly Bright. He is in the Dominican Republic and about to enter a merengue contest where he hopes to win enough money to get back to Japan after a year or more in Italy.
I have started and am currently stuck on two mystery/detective novels centered on Kanazawa. A group of five samaritans investigate crimes in Kanazawa. In the first two mysteries they’re looking into the murders of two females. Not being an avid reader of mysteries, I am having a slow time of it. I’ve begun to read a little bit more mysteries to wet my writing skills. Wish me luck.
Bookbinding
I’ve completed a few books. First up is my novel The New Crucifixion. Political intrigue made more complex by religious dogma. For a client for Christmas so it’s been sent out hopefully on time but if not, they can read it during the New Year’s holiday season.
It is A5, 148 pages with extra pages advertising other novels Ive written about here (the first chapters of Growing Slurry, Abacus Longing, and Heart of November). As requested by the client, I hasten to add lest people complain about my using clients as advertising. I’m hoping they will order another book, of course. By the way, you can, too.
Check out my Fiction For Sale and Handmade Books for Sale on the left of this site. I should probably have advertised this long before Christmas, eh?
Next up is a 2023 schedule for a client. It’s B6 in size with nine signatures. I’ll post pictures in the next podcast, if the client agrees. Finally, if I finish it in time, a graph paper notebook; one of a series of 50 that I am slowly working my way through. I think this is number three. Wish me luck.
Fiction
With fiction I have two thoughts: one, I’m writing a lot. Two mysteries/detective stories set in Kanazawa, plus a novel that I’ve mentioned before: The Dancer. Each gets a little bit everyday. Maybe a sentence, maybe a paragraph, maybe a whole chapter. But work on them I do and they are slowly moving forward.
My second thought is, Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie ventures into magical realism but also creates words, phrases, and runs words together (runswordstogether) for dramatic effect, picking up the pace, and urging the reader to hurry. But this is not a book review site so I will leave it to you to discover Satanic Verses on your own.
Substack
Speaking of Heart of November, my Substack stack has, as of this podcast, Chapter Ten up and running. You can read Chapters 1 ~ 9 as well, plus musings about writing techniques (dialog, fight scenes). If you wish to make a comment on either the writing techniques or the fiction (Earlier short stories of love and ghosts precede Heart of November) please feel free.
Bookbinding
This month, you have three items.
First: An A6 coptic schedule for 2023 complete with a 2023 and a 1938 calendar (the birth year of the client), and monthly and weekly calendars. Nine signatures.
Second: an A5 novel of 12 signatures (182+ pages) titled The New Crucifixions for a client whose father is featured on the cover.
Third: a graph paper blank journal (also A5) for your budding graphic artist friend / master doodler.
Fiction
In fiction, you have a plethora of novels in the throes of being written (or, at least, thought about).
First up: The Dancer, the story of a character (Merengue) from Molly Bright; his origin, why he’s called Merengue, and his life in Italy, the Dominican Republic, and scamming elderly women in Japan up until he falls in with Molly and her crew out to save a kidnapped bomb-building surfer.
Second up: The Sound of Fear, the fourth book in The Fear trilogy; a dystopian future of war and rebels. Matt fights for peace and finds deception and lies.
Third up: (an as-of-yet unnamed and not-thoroughly-thought-out) three detective/murder mysteries set in my current peaceful town of Kanazawa (The Other Kyoto).
Substack
I have started a Substack that will include works-in-progress; thoughts about writing, and a possible podcast (one episode is already up; I’m conflicted about inflicting more listening to the viewers.)
The Lit Fic (literary fiction) section is already up to nine postings, readings, rather. Seven are short stories collectively titled This Giant Frothy Thing: Lust & Terror in Tokyo.
The other postings (8 & 9) are from Heart of November: A Congolese Tale of Love & Murder. From here on out until it is complete, expect more of Heart of November (an homage to Heart of Darkness) in which the hero encounters drug dealers, rapists, and dancers in the Congo. Afterwards, he is assigned Heart of Darkness in his high school English class.
Please have a read of my Substack postings; hope you enjoy them.
Bookbinding
In the past week or so two things have happened: First, the sun has stopped torturing the northern hemisphere so my studio/house/city/country is not sweltering under 100 degree temperatures any more; this is good, in case you were wondering.
Second, I completed two blank notebooks. Both are pocketbook size (for the American viewer) or A6 (for the rest of the world) with approximately 100 pages. Both have straps to keep them closed. One has a bluish purple-ish cover while the other sports a green cover. The endpapers match the covers in color if not in style. Both are coptic bound so the author/artist who purchases them can use the entire page.
The blue one has protrudences (outdents?) on the cover for a more tactile experience; three vertical columns and a modified ampersand (&) toward the bottom.
In addition, I’m sewing up a B6 graphic paper notebook. I’m leaning toward making the cover a centipede cover. Hope I do. I want to see how it turns out.
Fiction
The Dancer, for which I have no cover, the novel about Merengue from Molly Bright, continues unabated! He is learning to dance both the tango and merengue and a variety of Italian-based dances; he excels, according to his dance teacher, in the merengue. He is paired with an Italian high school student who embodies the passion, joy, and spirit of dance; Lucinda by name. First, he dances in Bari, Italy; next he finds a missing CD player while learning bachata in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.
Also, in a rare bit of perspiration, four books I have already written are being edited (by myself) for speed, flavor, and action. The three are a series with the overriding title of The Fear (Fear Zero, Fear Itself, Fear the Dead, and Sound of Fear.) Yes, a trilogy with four books; not a problem, is it?
Plots:
The Fear tetralogy is sci-fi. Earth is run by a Conglomerate that controls Everything. They are battling the Jeeters from Jupiter’s moon Io. The main character, Matt, was imprisoned at the age of ten for murdering his mother, but now, he’s a master sergeant in the Conglomerate army vs the Jeeters and is charged with finding The Spy! He’s also searching for his friend from prison, Doro Ferrell, who was severely wounded in battle.
Bookbinding
I have had a productive day, yes! Earlier in my life I folded six signatures of A5 paper into A6 size paper, made some covers, and waited. Yesterday, I put the covers and the paper together to form a blank notebook. Two of them.
Both have straps to keep the notebook closed. Both have Japanese-style endpapers that coordinate with the covers. One book is yellow with green/yellow/light blue endpapers while the other notebook is red and blue with reddish-blue endpapers.
Meanwhile, earlier I printed out an unusual schedule: it starts in August and ends in March or April. There are only 18 pages (including yearly calendars for 2022 and 2023) and graph papers.
For both the red blank notebook and the yellow one, I used coptic binding because, since they are blank, the user will be able to use the entire page. Unlike Japanese binding which doesn't allow the page to open fully.
Speaking of Japanese binding. I used it for the August-March schedule since it is single sheets of B5. I added a bit of paper on the spine edge to allow the book to open more fully than with traditional Japanese binding.
Fiction
In Molly Bright there is a character named Merengue. He is a Japanese businessman who abandons the Japanese way of life and learns to dance. He walks everywhere and runs into Molly in Miyazaki. I have started a novel about him called The Dancer. He quits his job, moves to Italy and learns to dance. He has adventures as he travels to Cuba and the Dominican Republic and back to Japan where he takes up life as a vagabond/scammer who entices rich women to give him enough money to live on for a few months.
In The Dancer is an Italian high school student, Lucinda, who learns dancing with Merengue. She becomes a successful dancer and dance teacher. At the end of Molly Bright, she and Merengue meet again.
Fiction
Yes! I have finished the umpteenth draft of Molly Bright! During my Birthday Month! Yeah, me! I wrote the final four chapters first. Then I filled in the blanks from the previous final chapter to the New final chapter. And matched them up to complete Molly!
However, I discovered a new quirk I wanted to add. Molly and a Japanese person named Arisa have the same interests but they don’t like each other when they first meet. A sort of meet cute scenario but in this case it works out. Now, giving myself extra work, I need to find where Molly & Arisa meet and deepen their connection.
What does this mean for you? If means, if you read this, Molly will be available in the next month, which is August, for your perusal. At least a few chapters will be uploaded.
You may have noticed a lack of Bookbinding on this episode. That’s because nothing is happening because of a certain birthday boy’s laziness.
Bookbinding
In the past few days I’ve made four blank notebooks. Small blank notebooks. For those us who have mastered the art of metrics, they are 150mm tall and 100 (approximately) mm wide (A5 in the vernacular). Pocketbook size for the Americans. They are also my first and fourth or more forays into Perfect Binding i.e. glued books instead of sewn. There are six signatures of five folios each for 120 unmarked pages.
All four have bookmarks and straps to close them with. The bookmarks are because there are no pages (as mentioned above), and the closures are in case doodlers want to put scraps of paper or a pencil in the notebook and not have everything fall out.
They have really nice Japanese-y endpapers, too. Which is pictured upside down here! Fun!
Fiction
Wow! Molly Bright is zooming! It’s zooming upward and onward in Two Ways!
First way: As I’ve said Many many times before, it is getting closer to the end. The Climatic scenes are approaching! Yes, this is good.
The Second way: I get thoughts about the characters to make them deeper, more real, more interesting, more exciting, and more moving. Subsequently, I have to go back and rewrite chapters, scenes, dialog. This is also Good. It makes, I believe, for a better book.
Bonus Third way: A New Cover! More red! More Osaka-esque! More, dare I say it, Mystery? However, the new cover badly needs a tagline. And fewer exclamation points.
Agnes Grout, not moving so much.
Bookbinding
I worked on two perfect binding blank notebooks. Perfect being a relative term; they are glued on the spine edge with nothing else holding the pages together. Both are fifty pages complete with bookmarks, but no page numbers. They are 150 x 100 mm (for our metric-challenged American brethren and sisters, that’s about 2 x 4 inches; i.e. small, fit-in-your-pocket small). Both also have a printer’s mark on the upper left corner that are semi-hidden by the cover.
Fiction
These two novels are coming along slowly but regularly. Agnes Grout is pushing 25 pages and is getting into the meat of the story slash the second act. While weaving Agnes ‘sees’ (or better: foresees) the death of her husband and employer’s son, who she tries to save. Molly Bright is reaching the climatic end when all the characters smash together to save Sawako and her father and each confronts a life-changing decision.
Perhaps a sample of one or the other would be of interest to readers?
Bookbinding
This is my third tunnel book. The first one was years ago and the second was just before I made this one. The second was a prototype for this one
I chose random photos for the content on the first one; this time I chose random photos of an old favorite band.
The outside is decorated with sheet music for “A Day in the Life.” The back page on the inside has the sheet music for “Something,” at least the first few notes. On the front are artist/bassist Klaus Voorman (designer of the Revolver album; he also appears on the Sgt Pepper cover), Buddy Holly, Billy Preston, and original Beatles drummer Pete Best.
Also included are photographer Astrid Kirchherr (influential for the Meet the Beatles cover although she didn’t take that photo) and artist/bassist Stu Sutcliffe (next to John and in front of elder Paul).
Next up is an A5 graph paper notebook. It has five signatures of four sheets each (100 pages), a bookmark, page numbers, and bumpy covers.
It is one of three blank (or nearly blank) notebooks I will make in the next day or two. Blank, graph paper on the verso, and graph paper on both verso and recto.
These are being made for both practice at improving my bookbinding speed and to make both quick and artistic/error-free books people might like. I want to be fast but perfect with making better books is more important than making them quickly.
Fiction
In the fiction section of this blog, we have the perennial runners up of The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver and Molly Bright.
Both are progressing nicely although Molly Bright changed back to its original name because Kidnapping Osaka sounds like someone is kidnapping a champion tennis player and Surfing Osaka isn’t much better. It’s back to the original for me, then.
Bookbinding
This month or so I was lazy, I procrastinated, I was lethargic, and sick but in the end I worked harder for four days and cased in three books. Two are notebooks, one with graph paper and the other with nothing.
The notebooks are pocketbook size (A6) with 100 pages in five five-page signatures. One is called The Banana Book of Thoughts and one is called Face. For no apparent reason other than I wanted to name them something.
The third book I cased in is a 272-page 2022-2023 schedule. There are 17 (17!) signatures of four pages each (20 real pages when imposed), and it has about 60 pictures. Every Sunday has a picture and every birthday has a picture. It also has two different colors of thread. Because, well, why not?
This schedule was an experiment in putting on the spine piece. I usually measure the text block and make the spine piece equal to that. This time I measured twice (29mm) and subtracted two millimeters (for 27mm). This was the width of the book boards. The book opened very nicely, so I was pleased. I also expanded the width of the hinge between the spine piece and the book board from 5mm to 7mm. Next week: 10mm!
All-in-all, I was pleased with how all three books came out and learned a bit on each one.
Fiction
Two novels are spinning wheels this winter. The first, The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver is struggling to find its center.
It is about a woman in the 1860s onward who can tell when people will die and how. She learns this while weaving, which is her specialty; it's what keeps her family afloat after her husband died.
Most people don't believe her. Even when she predicts the death of a crude weaving mill boss.
I think I'll have to do more research in later 19th century lifestyles in the Lowell, Mass are before it gets uncorked and flows like Spanish festival wine during harvest time.
The other book, Surfing Osaka, (Formerly Molly Bright) is progressing slowly but it is progressing. It is obviously coming close to the end where the good guys find the kidnapped victims and reunites them with what family they have left. But discovering the kidnapped victims is not the point of the novel. The point of the novel is each character discovering something inside them that they want to change. And change they do.
For example, Molly stops being a corporate employee who buys cheap handmade furniture in poor areas and turns to making the furniture herself.
This is an old cover. The new title, which I'm to thrilled about is Surfing Osaka, but it needs something more kidnappish-conspiratorial-character-driven. I'm working on it.
Bookbinding
I've been working on my computer in an attempt to finish four 2022/2023 schedules and all four schedules are different. Different in:
- Size: A6 (pocket book) to A4 (computer paper);
- Language: Japanese, English, and Japanese & English;
- Layout: from one day for one page, to seven days on one page;
- Photos: from generic touristy to personal
Fiction
Two novels in the making:
• Surfing Osaka (formerly Molly Bright). A chemist is kidnapped by a religious cult to make bombs. A band of strangers set out to save her.
• The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver.
Agnes can see the future when it comes to people she knows dying. She tries to warn them. Some listen to her. Some die anyway. Agnes tries to grow rich with her visions of the future, but she always fails. She is a weaver and makes her living weaving, teaching weaving, and being a fabric/weaving artist.
Sadness
In college and beyond there were three of us. We were, in our minds, witty and creative. One was a poet, one worked on Broadway, and one was me. The poet got a government job which paid the bills but didn't damper his spirit or creativity. I got a job in Japan. The one who worked on Broadway enjoyed life; he traveled, took tours and sailed on cruises to many countries, he enjoyed wine purchased in far-flung places, he collected comic books, he played John-Bonhameseque drums, he knew the best meals in the best restaurants with the best views, and the best desserts. And walked everywhere.
I Zoomed him five days ago. He died this morning. Stage Four Melanoma that spread to his brain, robbing him of his wit and his life. But not our memories of him.
Bookbinding
This is a paperback-size ( 文庫本 in Japanese, pronounced bunko-bon) junk notebook with an Islamic cover (the flap over the edge protects the textblock) but German (and English) writing on the front. Filled with eight signatures of leftover scrap paper from other projects.
First I cut out ordinary paper as a template for the cover. Next, I put the template on very thin card stock paper to use as a cover. Then, for some inexplicable reason, I glued the template to the card stock. And finally used craft paper as the cover knowing I was going to slap on some left-over papers I had stored up over the decades (the Austrian tram ticket is from, maybe, ten or more years ago).
I made this primarily to practice Islamic binding. Especially gluing in the endpapers on the flap the lies over the front cover. Most corners for covers are cut at a 90˚ angle to the paper. The corners for the flap are not quite so straight forward and I had a bit of hit-and-miss experimenting before I got cut properly.
Fiction
In fiction, as I said last time, I finished a novel (The New Crucifixions) in the first week of December. After that I looked through my messed-up files to see what other fiction I could find lurking about in the computer like digital vampires. I found a novel with great premise that I started about two years ago. I mentioned it here before. It’s called The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout: Death Weaver. Agnes was a weaver in Lowell, Massachusetts starting in about 1850 until her death in 2020 at 170 years old. Besides longevity, her main super power is the ability to predict the deaths of people around her and warn them to avoid certain activities or places to avoid death. Not all of the people believe her.
Aside from Agnes, I am working on another novel which was called Molly Bright but I changed it to Surfing Osaka because Molly, while a main character, is not the only character who changes. However, since most of the novel – a kidnapping – takes place in Osaka, I felt it only reasonable to use a different title.
The next installment of Calvado: A Deathly Love Story is up.
Bookbinding
This week…This Week? Yes, I have been a bit lax in my updating your podcast. My excuses range for personal and private to laziness with laziness taking the cake.
However, We’re Back! And hopeful.
In the last four or five or six months I have made and sold a few yearly schedules, a music book, and repaired a music book. I also gave away a yearly schedule that starts in September and ends in March. Strange, but true.
Fiction
In Fiction I’ve written several short stories that are actually flash fiction plus a bunch of one-sentence stories; very different from novels.
Just before November I began a novel. I finished it shortly after November but I don’t consider it a NaNoWriMo novel. It’s called The New Crucifixions. The leaders of different groups are assassinated by members of those groups because the groups want martyrs.
One thing I knew would happen when I read Molly Bright to you in the last podcast all those months ago (May?) is that I would discover misspelled words, mistaken words, less-than-ideal sections, and phrases, and sentences that didn’t play well with others. And, of course, I did.
Some I corrected before I recorded, some I edited out, and some I let stand during the recording but let stand in the final product but edited in the written record.
Does that mean I’m going to inflict the entire novel on you in aural form? No.
However…
An Audio Book
You do have the opportunity to listen to my novel Calvado: A Deadly Love Story. It’s about Calvado and Mack, two people in New York City whose lives interconnect in a strangely time-bending way; one ends up dead. Meanwhile, a crow chases a pimp from Brazil to New York. The pimp believes the crow is the reincarnation of a sex worker he beat to death. The pimp befriends Mack.
You can find the first chapter up now by clicking here or by going to iTunes (or whatever Apple is calling their podcast/music service these days.) Or by clicking on the Audio Book of Calvado: A Deadly Love Story on your left-hand column.
https://calvadoaudio.podbean.com.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Asao Shimura is a papermaker who studied industrial chemistry in university, but then went on to become a papermaker while studying in the US, Korea, China, Japan, and a host of other countries. He lives in the Philippines and teaches papermaking all over the world, including the US. Active on Facebook, his posts are in English.
Bookbinding
This week I completed four books; two experimental and two for sale. Except one has already been sold.
It’s a 2021 Schedule (April to April) that was requested last year but only completed this week because of family concerns. It has a two yearly calendars (2021 and 2022), 13 monthly calendars, and a bunch of weekly calendars. The total is 100 pages including five graph pages for planning and doodling.
The other one for sale but not yet sold is a red blank notebook of 100 pages, 105mm x 145mm, and a soft cover (i.e. no book board). Suitable for planning novels, parties, films or doodling.
The two experimental ones were various page lengths of leftover papers (about 120 pages), leftover decorative pieces (a subway token and a car tax certificate for last year), and scraps of paper for the cover. This one is A5 in size.
One cover was a true experiment in that I pasted together half a dozen small papers then cut them in a decorative way hoping the ridges and valleys would create an amusing cover. I failed. Or, rather, I succeeded in discovering one method that didn’t work. This one is 85 mm x 135 mm, and fits nicely in my hand.
The purpose of these two experimental books was to push my comfort zone further into the void that is my lack of knowledge about bookbinding, books, and glue.
Fiction
I continued working on Molly Bright the novel and Molly Bright the character (Chapter Two doing the in-depth introduction) in 10 pages; the same as the Introductory Chapter that introduces The Plot! I’ve succeeded in making her deeper while at the same time making the character she’s talking to (a Japanese-English interpreter/guide) deeper as well. I even included some foreshadowing.
I worked a bit on the third character who is introduced in the third chapter, Early Mather, who is still penniless and homeless in India but wishing to get to Japan. Being optimistic about his situation he is sure some day he will surf in Japan. But being realistic he is saving as much as he can from his begging income, which is meager.
Molly and Early will, as shown in the first chapter, meet in a surfing site along with Sawako Kado, who gets kidnapped – also in the first chapter – by a cult that wishes to use her computer expertise and chemical talent to fashion a dirty bomb or computer virus.
Bookbinder of the Week: Nao Inoue
Inoue Nao is a bookbinder and teacher in Tokyo. She won a prize in an Italian bookbinding competition, has displayed her books in a variety of galleries, and has some innovative book covers.
She teaches all aspects of bookbinding from making your own book cloth to working with leather and making miniature books. She teaches in both English and Japanese and her website is in English, Chinese, and Japanese. I have taken her classes and learned quite a bit.
Ms Inoue’s website with classes and store: Marumizu.net
Bookbinding
This week I made six A6-sized (pocketbook) books using scraps, recycling bits and pieces of endpapers, text blocks, and covers. Why? To become more comfortable with the groove between the spine and the covers, something I have always struggled with. Success! I am now more comfortable with the groove. And to see how long it takes me to make a book. Three and a half hours is my average speed for an A6-sized book with between five and nine signatures.
Yes, there are only five books in the picture. I finished the sixth one just before I made this blog post and its accompanying podcast.
I also made a small book 90 mm x 90 mm with, maybe 9 signatures, and a very ’Japanese-y’ cover. For those born and educated in the US, 90 mm is about 3 and a half inches (3.5, if you understand decimals) or about palm-width.
This one took about 3.5 hours as well, but it included that stripe on the front to indicate that that is the front. The other books have no such marker. Again, the text block is recycled from class handouts.
Fiction
I wrote a bit more on Molly Bright this time on Molly Bright. Chapter One is mainly about the second main character and the character who gets the story rolling: Sawako Kado, a genius computer wiz being sought after by a murderous religious cult. This chapter’s up to eleven pages and is mostly complete.
Chapter Three is about the third main character: Early Mathers, a easy-going, lazy, travel-addicted 30-something who gets caught up in Sawako’s dilemma. This one’s only got two pages and is far from complete.
But Chapter Two is about the main character: Molly. Molly is on a business trip in Fukuoka and Kagoshima in Japan when she runs into Sawako and Early. The people she meets and the trials and terrors she must go through change her from a career-minded, fast-track executive of the import business she works for into a more relaxed artisan with a talent for marketing.
Bookbinder of the Week
Akai Miyako is a miniature bookbinder in that she makes miniature books not that she’s a tiny bookbinder. Her miniatures have won awards in Japan and deservedly so as they are exquisite. She is also a writer who has won prizes in Japan. She also produced her own small magazine in 2002. One of her prizes is for writing a 1000 character novel – This doesn’t mean there are 1000 characters in her novel (surpassing even Tolstoy for speaking parts in novels) but the characters are the equivalent of words. She wrote a 1000-word flash fiction and won a prize for it. She is on Facebook and has a web presence in English & Japanese at Kototsubo.com
Bookbinding
I’ve been asked to make a schedule for 2021. The customer wants the schedule to start and end in April (I have to hurry), and have no yearly calendar, but 13 monthly calendars, and a weekly calendar. I am also waiting for the client to tell me what color paper I should use for the weekly calendar.
Also, the client asked for an orange cover. I sent jpegs of five different book cloths that could be considered orange. I included a sixth jpeg of one I thought was too yellow but it had a touch of orange. The client took that one.
Fiction
Two things. First, in the last few months I finished reading Melville’s Moby Dick and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. I am now several chapters into Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In comparison to the story-within a-story structure and ramblings of Don Quixote and the minutia and dry biological/humanistism of Moby Dick, Anna Karenina is a relaxing pleasure to read. I think in part this is because you can read ten pages of Tolstoy, stop, and pick it up and know where you are and who is in the scene. With both Melville and Cervantes you might find yourself in a completely different world.
But this is about reading and not writing.
Second, in writing (and influenced by my reading of Anna Karenina) I have written a few pages of my so-called long novel, Molly Bright, but no, Molly Bright is nothing — Absolutely Nothing — like Tolstoy’s masterpiece. But reading Tolstoy has given me the permission to include character insights, my own observations about people, and interior monologs that I most often keep to a minimum or avoid all together.
Plus, while technically Molly is a thriller, it can be read in smaller chunks. Chapter One, for example, is ten pages. It looks like Chapter Two is going to fall within that landscape as well. I’m also writing Chapter Three and in my head that seems to clock in a bit longer. The three chapters introduce the three main characters and the intrigue and action.
I’m also looking for a better cover.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Don Etherington is a British bookbinder and conservator who did an apprenticeship and journeyman work in England, waded through the floods of Venice in 1966 to rescue old manuscripts and books, has created conservation programs in Texas and North Carolina, influenced both Bookbinders and Conservators on at least two continents, and has influenced the fields of bookbinding and conservation. Here is his website: Etherington
Bookbinding
Busy week.
• The 1/2 Accordion. And the Video I started (and badly) an accordion book. I made a video of it and plastered it on YouTube for your viewing pleasure here. I started two more for the practice.
• I have four A6-sized blank notebooks to give away. Last last week I made two softcover A6-size blank notebooks with page numbers using thick orange paper as covers. Previously I made two softcover A6-size blank notebooks without page numbers using purple book cloth as covers. For those who reside in the inch bubble A6 is about 4" x 6".
Yours for free!
Send me an email!
Put “Blank Notebook” in the subject line.
Request color (Orange or Purple).
One Notebook per customer; but First Come, First Serve.
If the Notebook you requested is already gone, sorry.
My only request is If you get a notebook and use it, tell me how it holds up.
Fiction
I finished Growing Slurry. Yeah! The last three chapters were written Simultaneously! Why? When I got stuck in one chapter, I slipped into another chapter. When I ran into a road block there, I escaped into another chapter. Eventually, by sitting and typing until I was finished, I finished! Yeah!
Now, the editing and rearranging begins.
The ending is less than conventional on the one hand but is sort of conventional on the other. It ends. With a question. And it is neither happy nor sad. On the other hand, it leads nicely into a sequel, except this isn’t a movie; it’s a book.
Next week, perhaps I shall give you more information — A Plot Summary‽ Perhaps? — about this novel including Including! The current title.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Adela Yustas Romo is a Spanish paper artist/marbler available on Facebook and, perhaps Pinterst. She is creative, has an interest in Japanese design such as suminagashi, Turkish/Cnetral Asian erbu and creates a wide variety of paper suitable for either covers, endpapers, or decorative designs.
Bookbinding
This week I made another small sketch book. A6 (105x150 mm or 4" x 6" for our American brethren) in size with 64 pages or four signatures of four folios each.
The cover is made of thick paper which matches the fake headbands in color. I placed a bit of scrap construction paper to indicate the front and trimmed everything off nicely.
I also made a video of me making it here: Compendium Sketch Book.
Fiction
Last week I worked – again – on Growing Slurry but I did not finish it as I had hoped. Primarily because I didn’t put my butt on the chair and do it; I got distracted by ill relatives. Yes, plural. Another one was rushed to the hospital with a serious non-coved 19 problem. They may be out of the woods, but no one is certain.
But I worked on both the final chapter and what looks to be working out to be the penultimate chapter. I will not promise to finish it these week but I will allow as how when I do finish it, my faithful audience will be given a chance to read it.
Coming Soon! (I hope): Growing Slurry!
Plot & Characters
Two people meet in a coffee shop but neither of them are as they appear. Sliven, dressed as a homeless creature, helps people in trouble. Gina, for all outward appearances seems to be a company employee has a hidden past frought with violence and survival.
During the course of an afternoon, they talk. They remember. They let us know more about their past.
Video of the Making of Compendium of Outlines & Art, a sketch book.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Buzz Spector
Former Washington University (St Louis MO in the US) professor Señor Spector is less a bookbinder and more of a book sculptor/manipulator/artist who uses books as his medium much like painters use paint and potters use clay. He’s had exhibitions world-wide and has two books you can check out if you find his art alluring: Buzzwords and The Book Maker’s Desire.
Bookbinding
This week I finished my cellphone-size schedule (finally) and shipped it off to the customer. It looks good, I think, and is definitely capable of being put in a suit pocket (the one requirement).
Secondly, I made a sketch book for an artist who wanted a small book he could carry around. This one has a soft cover that is easily folded so he can fold it back and draw (mostly portraits of people he sees in the street). It is 64 pages, A6 (4" x 6") in size, with a portion of a map of the artist’s city as endpapers, and a nifty title:
Book of Thoughts & Memorabilia.
(with a pay phone booth in the background for the memorabilia)
Fiction
I wrote the final chapter of Growing Slurry. However, the book is not finished. I must get from where I am now, stranded in Chapter 13, to Chapter 15 which is the final chapter. The subtitle has been changed from the very generic ‘A Love Story’ to the more accurate ‘An Accountable Love Story’ as the male main character (Sliven) is a forensic accountant and the female main character brings people to account for their transgressions.
When I eventually finish this novel I promise to make a special edition available to my listeners.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Sol Rébora
Ms Rébora is a bookbinder out of Buenos Aires, Argentina where bookbinders are few. She has some excellent work – French style, multi-leather, and fascinating designs – that can be seen on her website: Estudio Rebora.
Here’s an interview with her at Herringbone Bindery which has two more interviews with her.
There’s an interview with Ms Rébora in the Pamela Train Leutz tome The Threads That Bind. She is also on Facebook here.
Bookbinding
I worked on a cellphone-sized schedule that took me way too long; days and days of arranging, rearranging, and manipulating days, dates, and weeks to fit in the smaller size. I didn’t want to make the numbers so small they were invisible, but I didn’t have all that much room to work with either.
It was a challenge that came at a time when I either didn’t need a challenge or it was exactly what I needed. Last week I said a family member was taken to the hospital; they are still in the hospital so my area of concentration is not on bookbinding (or fiction). However, a distraction away from the medical might just be the medicine I require.
In any case, it worked. I fudged yearly, monthly, and weekly calendars around until everything fit nicely. I eliminated some decorations and reduced the number of fonts to make it smoother and more elegant (?). I printed out five copies until I finally got a copy that was good. I cut them out of the B5 page they were printed on. I folded them up to make sure everything matched (they did). I checked them and, of course, found four copies had mistakes and had to be discarded.
Fiction
I didn't so much as write much as read and consider. I tweaked. I added to the outline. I thought about it some more. This has already been designated as My Long Novel but how slow should it develop?
One thing I considered was the sun. I had an entire section where the three main characters are facing the sunrise. One minor problem: They were facing the wrong way. They are on surfboards and facing land. The sun comes up in the east in Japan and they were facing west. Oops. Decided to have them watch the sun’s rays hit the land instead of watch the sun rise.
By the way, this happened to me in real life, too. I sat at a train station to wait for the sun to rise up over the city I was facing only to have the sun rise up behind the station.
Bookbinder of the Week
Emily Martin
Emily Martin is a bookbinder, artist, printer, and teacher. Her works are spread across the globe in museums and universities. She teaches at Bookbinding and Book Arts at the University of Iowa and runs Naughty Dog Press. She has a wide variety of techniques and styles from pop-up to sculptural books, artist books, and types of printing.
Naughty Dog Press
Bookbinding
I changed the size of a schedule and totally messed up everything. I’m starting over and working fast. Kind of. Other than that? Nothing.
Fiction
Nothing. Well, not nothing. Simple thinking mostly. As always, nearly finishing Growing Slurry.
Bookbinder of the Week
Dennis Yuen
Dennis Yuen is a bookbinder/artist, photographer, and videographer. I ran across him while looking for information about Cai Lun, the inventor of paper back in 105 CE. Mr Yuen ran a blog called Cai Lun until 2012 and it was through that blog that I learned Mr Yuen is from Hong Kong, has an MFA from Parsons, and makes magnificent books:
• Duotone (two books of two opposite colors), and
• Sculpture Books (more sculpture than book).
Aside from being on a variety of social media places, his website is DennisYuen.com
Bookbinding
I’ve spent the last week trying to create a schedule that fits in a jacket pocket but also isn’t a ‘normal’ size aka A5 (5.8 x 8.3 in), B7 (5 x 3.5 in) or one of the many other sizes.
I finally made one 85 x 155 mm (3.34 x 6.1 in) and it only took me way too long to figure out how to print the calendars — this calendar will have a yearly calendar, 13 monthly calendars, and a weekly calendar (one week per page). Printing requires me to waste too much A4 paper.
I print everything in the middle and trim off the edges before folding them over. Fortunately, I have access to a semi-automatic electronic paper cutting machine; one that slices through reams of paper in well fell swoop. I just have to be quick and surreptitious about using it.
Fiction
Bookbinder of the Week:
Hedi Kyle
A giant among bookbinders, Ms Kyle has, among many other things, a wikipedia page: here. She co-founded the Paper and Book Intensive (with Timothy Barrett and Gary Frost) way back in 1983, she has influenced hundreds if not thousands of bookbinders, and she has taught at a number of schools and book centers.
Bookbinding
Continuing learning by attaching the endpapers completely onto the page rather than just an edge for the text block side and completely on the cover side. This time A5 in size (8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches for the one country that doesn’t understand the metric system) sewed on cords (just to see what happens).
In the last three weeks I made four books. One graphic notebook (A5), two small blank notebooks using this new (for me) technique, and, just yesterday, an A5 blank notebook using this new technique.
All leading up to me making an A5 2021 schedule for a client who requested a soft cover. I’ve been looking for material for a soft book board but this new (for me) technique is perfect for it; that’s why I practiced making it.
Fiction
In the works and hopefully coming soon are Growing Slurry and Molly Bright (well, maybe not so soon).
Growing Slurry is about Gina and Sliven. Gina is a hardworking woman who dragged herself up from an abusive childhood, homelessness, and murder. Sliven is a forensic accountant who pulls out of the consumer economy to enjoy life.
Both enjoy reading Moby Dick and meet in a Starbucks (of course) when Gina notices Sliven reading the novel. As they converse, we learn about their lives through flashbacks. Yes, flashbacks.
Molly Bright is about Early Mather, Sawako Kado, and Molly who meet by chance while surfing off the coast of Japan. Sawako is kidnapped by a murderous religious cult. Molly and Early find out the police don’t care, so they work to save her.
In the process they run into illegal immigrants, homeless workers, and bartenders who both help and hinder them.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Karen Hanmer
A most famous bookbinder and educator who even the most beginning binders probably know about, have taken classes from, or at least heard about as she was prominent in the periodical Bonefolder. Her website is KarenHanmer.com. She has amazingly artistic covers and a wide variety of classes.
Bookbinding
I made three books this week. The first one is a repeat of the notebook from last week: a A6-size, 100-page blank notebook with 25 doodles of animals with their Japanese and English equivalents. But with a different cover, of course, and, I think at least, better.
Second two are different in two different ways. First, they’re blank. Nothing fancy on the inside. Plus, they are small. They’re A6 (4 x 6 inches for our American brethren) and four signatures of four folios each (64 pages).
Second, they were inspired by Sage Reynolds’ video A Book In Less than An Hour. For me, a new way to adhere endpapers and the cover. The video also taught me a better way to glue on the spine paper without pain: glue the paper on the spine, fold it over, glue it again, and fold it over again.
Fiction
Continuing to work on a whole bunch of lies i.e. fiction.
First, Growing Slurry. The main character is a forensic accountant who makes a life-changing discovery and abandons the consumer lifestyle for one of acceptance and positivity. He cute-meets a woman who has lived a hard life; on her own in the big city by age 10, killed two men who tried to rape her, surrounded by alcoholics and drug addicts, abandoned by her mother. Both are lovers of Moby Dick.
Second, Molly Bright. The three main characters get trapped in a kidnapping. The kidnappers are after one of the three because she can McGyver bombs out nearly anything. The kidnappers are also working for a religious doomsday cult that is planning to wreak havoc on Tokyo. As planned, this is going to be a long novel. Most of mine are about 250 ~280 pages but this looks like it could be closer to 400.
Third, The Posthumous Biography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. (which I think I will re-title: The Agonizing Biography of Agnes Grout, Death Weaver). Agnes is a widowed mother of three in 18th century New England struggling to raise her family by working as a weaver in a textile mill; a job usually done by young, single women in need of a husband.
One of her children has autism and epilepsy (obvious signs of being a witch), one has what the neighbors call “the evil eye,” and one is sensitive to the needs of others.
Agnes sees the when, how, and where people die one year before they shuffle off.
And fourth, but not really, is Caraculiambro. Started a long time ago, it is a detective investigating the murders of two seemingly innocent people caught in a land developers squabble. The detective is a giant and named after a giant in Don Quixote.
Hopes? To finish Growing Slurry soon.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Robert Wu
A Toronto-based bookbinder, marbler, and architecture graduate. His specialty is French-style design fine art leather bookbinding but he marbles, makes miniature books, boxes, and plays the cello. He has studied design for decades and bookbinding since the 1990s. His works are in a lot of different collections. His covers are intricate, delicate, colorful, and amazing to look at. He can be stalked at his website (studiorobertwu.com), Facebook, and Instagram.
(Webiste)
https://www.facebook.com/StudioRobertWu/
https://www.instagram.com/studio_robert_wu/
Bookbinding
I finished casing in three books in the last three days.
Book 1: the purplish A6-size, 100-page blank notebook with 25 doodles of animals with their Japanese and English equivalents.
Book 2: the bluish 2021 schedule for the Japan islands with two yearly calendars (2021 & 2022), thirteen monthly calendars, and a weekly calendar with photos of the Tokyo area.
Book 3: the brick-colored 2021 schedule for Belgium with the same details as the Japan schedule but with different pictures gleaned from free sites on the web.
I learned a bit about calculating the width of the book cover while taking into account the spine and space between the spine and the cover. What I learned was what I think is too big, isn’t.
Fiction
This has a little to do with my fiction. I finished reading for the first time Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It has a little to do with me because the two main characters in Growing Slurry meet when one notices that the other is reading Moby Dick. And a couple of chapters of my book mimic and/or copy Melville’s style or construction in his book.
A bit sad to say I read it on my iPad rather than purchase a Real Book as I hope others do with my books (buy a real book And an ebook). Now I am nearly finished reading Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Book 2, by the way, is much better than Book 1 when it comes to writing (or at least translating).
Also in fiction I am writing what I have planned to be about a 500-page novel. This will necessarily include a lot of observations about life and living plus have a strong plot and characters. If I pull it off.
I’m continuing to write Growing Slurry and am sneaking up on the end where the two main characters decide to have a relationship (based on their mutual love of Moby Dick).
I am also re-reading one of my unfinished novels that I really want to finish: Caraculiambro, a detective novel about land speculators and murder. The main character slash detective is a giant and yes, since you ask, his name did come from Don Quixote; he is the giant Don Quixote imagines he will defeat if he ever runs across him, which he doesn’t (spoiler alert).
Bookbinder of the Week: (今週の製本者 )
Bookbinding
This week I cased in a book of my fiction (Tristram’s Printer) in A-5 size, 260 pages. I used two different papers for the cover for two reasons: first, I’m cheap and didn’t want to run out and buy more and two, I’m trying to use up the papers I’ve got so I can run out and buy more.
The backboards themselves are thick paper; not as thick as cardboard, more like card stock. I’m experimenting with them because a client wants a thin, flexible cover for their project and I want to make sure this is up to the test and that I am up to the task of using it properly.
Last week, hahahahahaha, I made a B6-sized book of Tristram’s Printer, like I said. This morning I checked how many pages it had and discovered the final page has No Page Number written on it. Odd, methinks. I check a few pages back and the recto page claims to be 263 but Mr Verso says 260. Yes, the final signature was miss-printed. But at least the book looks mostly pretty.
I also discarded my template for book covers idea. Since each book, for me at least, is different, a template didn’t make much sense. I was making two covers instead of one. I did, however, make a spacer. I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn’t find a good spacer for the hinge gap space bit between the spine and the covers. Then it dawned on me, thank’s to the coronavirus pandemic, that I could make my own out of book board. So I did.
Fiction
Writing more on Growing Slurry and The Posthumous Biography of Agnes Grout.
Both seem to be episodic meaning the main characters have adventures that illuminate their characters, histories, and philosophies (except without the philosophical asides – I hope I’m showing and not telling).
In Growing Slurry, Sliven is investigating some wholesale fraud in his past while Gina is starting to – beginning to – trust him. I’m wrapping this novel up within the next 30, 50 pages, I hope.
In The Posthumous Biography of Agnes Grout: Death Weaver, Agnes is forcing one of her adversaries to accept one of her children so she (Agnes) can work in one of the weaving mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. Agnes suspects she may have some scary ability to slip back in time to warn people of their impending demise. She’s not sure she had it or is just losing her mind; time will tell.
As always, if anyone knows of a good (and cheap) cover designer, let me know.
Bookbinder of the Week: （今週の製本者)
Yo Yamazaki (山崎曜)
Mr Yamazaki is a Tokyo bookbinder who has traveled the world teaching book-making and has won prizes, had many exhibitions of his work, displayed in galleries, and worked for a time in advertising. There’s a Vimeo video available to watch his unique work style but, on top of all that, he’s an excellent teacher. Check out his website at yoyamazaki.jp
Bookbinding ( 手作り製本)
This is an A5-size schedule with 100 pages. It contains two yearly calendars for 2021 and 2022; it has 13 monthly calendars from April to April; it has a weekly calendar for the same period.
If requested by the customer, I can insert 13 photos of the customer’s choosing or leave them blank. The endpapers for the one on the right is a map of the city where the customer lives; the endpapers on the right are Colorful! Like this one:
This was the first book I used my template cover builder on. I made a paper replica of an A5 cover for a book with 100 pages. Just like this book. I worked on it until it fit the book nicely. I prayed and then built the real book cover and yes! The cover fit it! I used the same template on the second book and it fit well as well. It relieved me of much stress (and diminished my skill in book cover making, some might say; and probably be right, but I’m all for reducing stress levels in my workshop.)
Fiction (作り話 • フィクション)
I wrote this tale many moons ago but only recently discovered that I don't have what is currently called a Hard Copy, i.e. a Real Book. So I made one. Two. I made two.
It is, depending on the size of the book, about 250 pages of knowledge, sex, drugs, marriage, divorce, and art. Rie the protagonist gets fired from her waitressing job, marries a guy on the rebound, meets one of his artsy-friends, and starts working for him. Her husband objects, she meets a printer. And falls in love... Oh, ain’t that sweet? Yes, yes, it is.
It’s a typographical love story because the other protagonist, Harvey, is the printer – a fine letterpress printer – who creates one-off books, including one of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
Bookbinder of the Week: （今週の製本者)
Kaija Rantakari, at Paperiaarre, lives in Helsinki, Finland where she is a bookbinder, poet, and mixed media artist. I know nothing about her personally, but her books and art are elegant, unique, and fill one with creative thoughts. Casually exploring her blog might inspire all who do to be more creative! More often!
Bookbinding (手作り製本)
Before I cased in two books (at left; left is Heart of November, right is The Priests of Hiroshima) this last week, I did something I’ve never done before. Last week my envelope-pushing event was learning to use a sewing machine.
This week it was making methyl-cellulose glue using powder I picked up in San Francisco about three years ago. The first bit was way too watery and barely kept two pieces of scrap paper together. Eventually I made it thick enough and used it on the two books I cased in.
A5 in size, 184 (Priests) and 230 (Heart) pages, soft cover, with Japanese-y book cloth. The spine on one is the cover on the other.
I just wish I had printed the titles on the front cover and spine (probably difficult on the spine with the black.) as they seem fairly anonymous as they stand now. I’ve made books with titles on the spine before – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – but from now on novels require a front cover that identifies it.
Fiction (作り話 • フィクション)
(Just as an aside, fiction in Japanese is フィクション - pronounced fikushon - but is also related to lies, fabrication, and falsehoods. Look at the kanji: 作り話. It literally means Making a Story. As a fiction author I am a liar, yes? Of course.)
I wrote a bunch on Growing Slurry, Sister Amelia: Assassin, and another book I haven’t titled yet. It might be called Kanazawa Monogatari which means Kanazawa Story but that’s a pretty presumptuous name so I’m looking for something Better. And, of course, I have to finish The Sound of Fear (Book three in the Fear Trilogy); a trilogy that should have been finished long before the coronavirus urged everyone to stay home.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Matthew Reinhart at matthewreinhart.com is an extraodinary pop-up book artist. He has a dozens of videos up on his site and on youtube. He’s enthusiastic about making pop-up books and exploring the possibilities of pop-up books. His instructions are clear and clearly aimed at novice artist.
Bookbinding
Nothing! Not entirely true, I’ve designed a few covers for novels I’ve completed. I’ve learned how to use a sewing maching — something my mother tried to teach me in the last century, but I wasn’t interested in sewing then. She was a child of the Great Depression where everyone was DIYing what they could in order to save money. I was not. Now, in the post-2008 current Coronavirus Depression of 2020, I am. She’d be proud. (Plus, I can mend my ripped and torn jeans now instead of forking out for a new pair.)
Fiction
I have written on two incomplete novels: Growing Slurry, and Saint Amelia: Assassin; I have also worked on two textbooks. One textbook is for medical students and one is for learning to speak (or read) Japanese.
I plan (famous last words!) to finish Growing Slurry soon so I can start the fourth book in my trilogy Fear the Dead! So I can upload it to Draft2Digital and offer the trilogy (and free introductory novel: Fear Zero) for sale.
It would be fun beach reading material if people were silly enough to go to the beach to read books and share the coronavirus; hopefully they are not and will download the intergalactic war story to read in the comfort of their own homes. With popcorn and the beverage of their choice!
Bookbinder of the Week:
Duncan Birmingham is a paper artist/engineer/pop-up book artist with a large number of very good tutorials on YouTube called the Pop-up Channel. His instructions are clear, repeated, and simple to follow for even the most complex designs. Or dullest students such as myself. After watching some of Colette Fu’s work, I slipped over to Mr Birmingham’s channel to learn how to make pop-ups. He was quite instructive, detailed, and complete. His channel is a good place to start if you find yourself wanting to make pop-up books.
Bookbinding
I managed to sew another book; this time The Priests of Hiroshima. I now have two sewed books. I glued on the spine paper and mull.
I also made two covers for two books but have not yet cased them in. I’m so lazy, eh?
I experimented with the width of the spine piece and the gap between the spine and the book board; always a problem for me.
Fiction
I spent a goodly number of hours doing two things in fiction: Reading Moby Dick and Writing Growing Slurry. The former influences the latter. Obviously, I mean, a book written 170 years ago can hardly be influenced by a book yet to be finished.
Gina & Sliven are the two main characters. They meet in a coffee shop and discover a mutual ‘like’ for Moby Dick.
As they talk about it — and each other — stories emerge from their past.
Sliven is a retired forensic accountant. I’m still working on what Gina might be.
I also discovered a novel I started, thought about but never got past the first two chapters, and forgot.
It’s a violent revenge story titled, so far, Sister Amelia, Assassin. Being a victim herself, Amelia sets out to right wrongs, punish the bad people, and find help for the victims.
She is a character from my just completed and edited novel Heart of November. This is her spin-off novel, her sister novel, her sequel novel. Her chance to grab the spot light!
I hope I finish it.
Bookbinder of the Week:
Colette Fu is a pop-up book artist. She makes incredible pop-up books that an adult can sit in, if you so desire. You can check out her pop-up books and her photos at ColetteFu.com. Watching some of her videos on YouTube inspired me to make my own – very simple – pop-up books. Hers are outta sight mechanically and visually. And big.
Tedorigawa News
Before rushing off to discuss myself, let me talk about myself. The Tedorigawa Bookmakers podcast is on Spotify, if you wish to use that service. I suspect this link links to my podcast. You can search for Tedorigawa or Tedorigawa Bookmakers. Both, hopefully, will get you to the podcast. Tedorigawa Bookmakers will get you there faster.
Bookbinding
This week I sewed Heart of November and The Priests of Hiroshima. This is my first sew-up of Heart of November but not for The Priests of Hiroshima. Heart of November has a lot – I mean A Lot – of graphics, typographical twists & turns, tricks & tumbles. I was hoping they transferred to both the printed page (they did) and the ebook version (they also did, I think.)
I also glued a re-covering attempt on my 30+ year-old Japanese textbook which is less a textbook and more of a detailed explanation of the language. It’s part of the Hodder & Stoughton publishing house’s Teach Yourself Books series; 14th printing in 1978. I probably bought it in 1979 when I first descended on these island shores.
After I upload this episode I will get to work casing in all three books.
Fiction
In moving my workshop/office from Place A to Place F (for free) I accumulated a lot of boxes; boxes for books, supplies, materials, unfinished work, attempts, and templates. Buried deep in these boxes were boxes I hadn’t looked in in several years. We’re talking at least two decades. Maybe more, as we shall see in a moment.
This week I opened them to sort them out in two piles: throw away or store. I found… Fiction. Short stories, plays, a few screenplays (mostly finished), and the scribbled outline of a novel that I never started and probably never will. I read the outline, didn’t like it so much, thought about it, and tossed it. Some of the fiction was typed. As in, typed on a typewriter. Yes, a typewriter. I haven’t used a typewriter since 1989.
I put one of them (There Is No Time in the Land of Nod) on InDesign and will probably upload it in a collection of short stories in the not to distant future — famous last words. I found a screenplay that I might turn into a novel called Sewers. As in people who sew. One character, the female of course, works in a factory making fancy jeans for rich people while the male character works for the department of water and power, ie in the sewers.
I have been writing Growing Slurry and reading its inspiration: Moby Dick. I’m a bit surprised at Moby Dick. After several attempts at starting it, I am finally reading it and one observation is the number of people who say they can’t get through it because he talks so much about whales seem to have missed the point; I couldn’t get into it because of his language style; now I can. Melville talks about whales a lot, yes, but as they relate to either the main characters, landlubbers, or a philosophy of life.