Making the Massive Book

In June 2007 I finished a series of twelve screen prints made from a collection of photographs. All of the prints were large scale, over a meter wide, I was stuck as to how to present them. I thought framing them for show wasn’t the most interesting option, and it would have been unlikely for me to find a gallery space to display the entire series. I also had this second layer to the series, text I wrote that described each image. I made a small artist book without photographs of the screen prints, only the words that described each composition.

So, after some consideration and meeting with an art critic in my former residency I decided the image and text should be bound together in one book. This would have been fine except the prints were on different size paper from A1 (33in x 23in) to quad elephant (54in x 45in), which meant it was going to be extremely tricky to find a method to bind securely. Oh, and one more thing, I had no idea how to bind a book.

I had to consider how to lay the text out, intergrate it more appropriately with the images. After two months of rewriting my original descriptions I decided letterpress would be my best option, the aesthetic I wanted to go with my screen prints. I chose to emboss the words with a varnish, which is almost entirely light dependent and looks as though the words are fading away. The biggest paper I could print on the letterpress was A2 (23in x 16in), this meant I was creating laborious work without resolving the problem of binding the book with different sized pages, but I didn’t think of that at the time. Setting and printing the letterpress was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book’s construction as I had Ian P on board with his wealth of experience to give me a hand.
After two weeks of full time setting and printing of the text I had to figure out how, or where, to get the book bound. My investigation led to a handful of places telling me my project would fail, "9ft when opened", a book that size could not possibly "work". Only one place gave me the time of day, Bookworks. They were really nice, but unfortunately would have cost me £800 to bind my pages so I was left with having to figure it out myself. I signed up for an introduction to a Japanese book binding evening course. This method was not appropriate, but led me to meet the course’s instructor who advised me on a technique.
A week later he instructed me on the process of Keith Smith’s Flat Back Coptic Stitch style with tapes. It’s a non-adhesive method where you sew around a spine... effectively.Binding and Page view of "Interpretations to Here" artist book, 2008

Three and a half months after my tutorial I started to bind the pages. I’m glad I stepped back from this project to work on other things. When I decided to work again on the book I made the decision to mount all of the letterpress and small screen prints so I had everything on a quad elephant size sheets of paper.

However one huge problem of letting time pass, I only vaguely remembered the stitch I learned, I could see it visually in my head but technically it was a blur. So, I just improvised.

In my tutorial to learn the stitching method we used cardboard for the spine. I realised this wasn’t going to be practical, as it wouldn’t be strong enough for the 30 pages I had. So, I chose wood. I bought metal hinges to screw the back and cover to, which were 6-ply wooden sheets. Resolving the matter of what material to use and testing took me three days alone.

Spine of "Interpretations to Here" artist book

The hardest part of binding a book, according to me, is glue. I can’t use the stuff. If I’m near glue everything surrounding me is splattered in it. Covering the back and cover of my book in bookcloth was a complete nightmare. First of all they don’t make bookcloth wide enough for me to use a single sheet from a roll. Even if they did, it would still be near impossible to stretch over a backing board, as it rolls up like wallpaper and glue stains! What stains even worse is transparent spray mount, I tried this in desperation after being fed up with PVA only to realize it marks worse. Also, these websites that explain “how to remove glue stains” do not pertain to wood glue on bookcloth, in fact those methods also result in worse stains. One website suggested to rub an ice cube over the stain and scrape off with a spoon. All this created was spoon scrape marks over a glue stains. In any rate, I covered the marks, as best I could, with a different idea…Cover of Interpretations to Here, artist book, 2008

Back of Interpretations to Here, artist book, 2008