A quarter bound wedding album & guestbook in blue silk with silver, black and blue marbled cover.

Well, in actual fact, it’s my wedding album! I had the not-so-smart idea of binding a book for our wedding. The book was an album and guestbookbook in one; we supplied disposable cameras at the ceremony and reception for the guests to shoot what they liked. The idea was that we would have the guests sign the guest book one-per-page, and afterwards, we stick in all the photos that the guests had taken on the disposables. It worked out pretty well, actually! But getting back to the ‘not so smart’ statement in the first sentence… One of my favourite statements that really annoys my partner wife is “there’s plenty of time yet”. Yeah, well I was feeling slightly stressed when it was the night before my wedding and I was casing in the album. Anyway, it worked out fine in the end and we both love it.

The book is hard cover and it’s finished with pale blue silk dupion and blue, black and white on silver hand-marbled paper from Joan Ajala (whos papers I can very highly recommend – I think I’ll do my next blog post on her papers!). The page construction uses interleaved folded 120gsm Van Gelder Zonen laid papers to create, in effect, a ‘long page’ (the full length of the book) and a ‘short page’ (2.5cm/1″) in intervals. The short page is, of course, not a page but a page spacer to allow photos to be pasted without swelling the book. The pages are put together into 4-leaf signatures by putting one folded page forwards and the other inside it in a backwards orientation. The silk was paper backed using extra-thick starch paste before pasting onto pH buffered, laminated boards. The end-papers are japanese papers of some description, but I can’t remember where they came from or what they were called! They’re pale green with cover leaf patterns in teh paper fibre.

The "Handmade Books" Flickr group website.

This would have to be one of my favourite Flickr groups – Hand Bound Books. There’s so much good stuff there – it makes me want to bind a new project every time I browse through it.  Check it out!

A collection of book trade labels from the "Seven Roads Book Trade Labels" Flickr group (image from user Auntie P).

Today I came across a Flickr group called “Seven Roads Book Trade Labels“. Something I’ve always looked at and liked, but didn’t know anyone collected – those book trade labels you see in the backs of (mostly) old books. Printers, binders, publishers, retailers and so forth. Any of the folk that helped bring that particular book into your hands. These appeal to me as someone who likes bookish things, old things, and things that are a bit different. There’s some fantastic designs there from all around the world; from uninspiring “Price: $1.50″ type labels to intricate pieces of art in themselves. The group was started by the blogger The Exile Bibliophile and he has a post on his blog here.