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By Alice Northover

What do you read when struck down with a winter cold? Run back to the classics of Fitzgerald and Spielberg; learn from the ancients and panic about technology; and try not to look at things that make your eyes fall out.

In anticipation of the upcoming movie, the literary world is going Gatsby. First up, “Where Daisy Buchanan Lived.”

The University of Chicago received a package for Henry Walton Jones, Jr (Indiana Jones).

Portraits of literary greats.

Russian animated literature!

Cancer scientists take lessons from the ancient Greeks.

Music inspired by books. Next up band names inspired by books?

New technology + publishing = +1 on to do list.

Rachel Fershleiser of Tumblr on the Bookternet.

Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman were pen pals.

Articles for deletion on Wikipedia.

Beautiful bookbinding.

In defense of memes.

The antimonopolist history of the world’s most popular board game.

An online tutorial for medieval Latin.

Our most intriguing book review yet: “my big criticism with The Book of Marvels And Travels is that it’s not very good as a videogame. i found it extremely hard to manipulate the controls through the pulpy binding and the graphics are no good. i tried to visualise about what i was reading and then i started imagining a blue triangle moving through an endless purple void and when i woke up my pillow was gone.”

And finally Gatbsy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Alice Northover joined Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager in January 2012. She is editor of the OUPblog, constant tweeter @OUPAcademic, daily Facebooker at Oxford Academic, and Google Plus updater of Oxford Academic, amongst other things. You can learn more about her bizarre habits on the blog.

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The post Friday procrastination: winter cold edition appeared first on OUPblog.

So much to do before Thought Bubble comics festival this weekend! The writer of two of my picture books, Gillian Rogerson, lives in Leeds, and we're going to run an all-ages activity table, where you can design wacky pirates, invent new worlds by designing treasure maps or just generally hang out with us and draw comics. I'm trying to make our tables a bit more pirate-themed, so yesterday I printed out this big pirate ship in the studio, from the cover I painted for You Can't Scare a Princess!.



Here's a poster I knocked together earlier this evening:



And some cut-out lettering so people will know where they are.



Now for mini comics! Handmade books take so long to put together, and this one is 70 pages long, but I really wanted to show something new that I'd made entirely myself. After I'd drawn and scanned the comics, I put together a cover out of stiff card.



I thought it would be a nice handmade touch to put a Chinese seal at the end of each book, so here they are, spread out on Gary's scanner to dry. (Sorry, Gary.)




I brought the print-outs home a couple evenings ago and laid out all the stacks of pages. I think I could have had my studio printer collate the pages and save me this step, but I had a whole bunch of printer glitches, so I won't go into that.



Here are the stacks of book pages, ready to be folded.



This thing's called a bone folder. Sometimes they're made of bone, sometimes Teflon and sometimes plastic. They're great for sliding down paper to get a really hard fold, and to save your fingertips.



Hurrah! Thirty comics folded, cup of tea mostly drunk. (Why am I sitting on the floor? I'd recommend doing this on a table.)



I didn't have to trim the pages, but the paper stack in each book was so thick that the pages were sticking pretty far outside the edges of the covers. So I cut off the edges to tidy them into one straight line.



And anyone would just have to take a little break to turn the trimmings into a fine moustache.



I used an awl to poke three holes through the 17 sheets of thick paper and cover. My awl didn't like that at all and the end is getting a bit blunt, which is a real pain. (Makes it such a pointless exercise... arf.)



If the paper had been cheaper and thinner, I probably could have got away with stapling the pages, but it's just too thick. So I sewed the pages by hand, starting through the middle hole, going around to the two other holes, then coming back to the middle hole and tying it off.

I love seeing skilled craftspeople at their work. This great picture book is screen printed white ink on craft paper, hand-folded and hand-bound, made in the tradition of Warli art from West India. And it looks gorgeous! You can buy a copy here.

(via CHILDREN’S ILLUSTRATION: Do!)

I just found a very interesting interview with bookbinder Michael Greer.  While some folks are quick to suggest that high quality bookbinding is a dying art Greer feels that this doesn't have to be the case.  He sees the expansion of print-on-demand publishing as the perfect partner for his luxury craft.

In the US, hand bookbinding as a trade has been nearly dead for many years. A few of us quixotic dreamers hang on. Still, the revolution in the last decade in on-demand publishing could create a space for us. Twenty years ago, self-publishers paid a hefty sum to print maybe 250 copies of their family history. They gave away ten and the rest went into the attic. For about the same amount of money, I can print and bind ten full leather volumes and create others on demand. The difficulty is letting people know that this kind of thing exists. When I do fairs, people often approach my table full of books with a mystified smile and say, “I didn’t know anybody did this stuff anymore.” If bookbinders can get the word out, we might be able to carve out a place for our services in the growing world of digital publishing.

I think this is a fantastic coupling of old and new technologies.  Imagine your own family history album, complete with photos, bound beautifully in leather and preserved for your grandchildren.

(Via Moby Lives)

Leatherbound Tales. A Box of Books.

Michael Sedano

This box of books comes with rata ravages, water damage, neglect, memories, and treasure. I remember the old man whose books these are. Born a French-speaking Canadian, he’d worked for the U.S. Treasury at the Embassies in Mexico City and Paris then settled in Los Angeles. The old guy danced in happiness, speaking Spanish with my family at the boda joining his granddaughter to my familia back in 1968.

After his death and then his wife’s, their son--my suegro--gathered the old man’s possessions piled them into boxes and shoved them into a disused space of his own home. Then, after my wife’s parents died, the boxes, along with other of her parents’ possessions, wended their way to a disused space in my home.

A rat made the move with the boxes. A plumbing leak took me into the disused space where the starving rata had piled detritus for who knows how long atop and within the boxes. Textiles had no value remaining, not even the hand-crocheted bedspread the rat gnawed but did not consume. Acrylic? Not even the most desperate poor want hand-me-down rat piss-stinking good cotton Levi’s. Into the recycle trash.

The only textile worth preserving is a lovely blue velvet woman’s hat with veil. I imagine the veil sat through many a Mass and church social. Now it sits in a metal box, waiting its next life. Who will provide it? (Click image for a larger view.)
The books fill me with heartbroken dismay. Volumes sit sadly destroyed, gnawed beyond redemption by the infernal rat. A couple have been soaked by the drip. These I toss into the recycle bin with a silent ave atque vale. Pulp to pulp. The rat, I think I remember the cat bringing me its head one day. Good kitty, now get that crap outside where it came from. Dang thing was inside, its final meal these boxes: my new books, some of which are 100 years old.

Thirtysix adequately preserved volumes are the glistering loot remaining after I inspect and clean the books.

It’s an eclectic collection of publications originating in Montréal, Chicago, Mexico City, Paris, acquired by J. Eugene Cauchon and his familia, from 1910 to 1955. Most have matching leather binding. Clearly my wife’s granpère paid to have his personal library bound into these luxurious tomes, probably when he worked at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Other books reflect a man who respects them and paid for top-quality leather bound volumes.

Worked leather spines feature raised bands defining pockets for gold-stamped titles and authors. Other volumes bear a different leather binding, a couple original cloth covers. One novel has the original paperback cover bound over within the set's leather. World Cat finds a few copies of one or another to-me obscure titles, others zero, others I do not look up. Some titles give pause to consider, why the deluxe binding on this? Others, obvious gems that deserve such elegance, require no apology.

omeone asked me where I found the art for my nonexistent biopsy scar-covering tattoo, and I thought you guys might be interested…

This came from a series of 18th Century bookbindings. It’s too elaborate for reality, perhaps, but I liked the idea.

This was intended to cover a scar that I have grown rather fond of. The tattoo plan was scrapped, but the concept was good.

I sampled my skin color from a photo, isolated two different florets from book covers I found in a digital library collection, overlapped them, messed with transparency, did a color mask to match a brown ink, and then chickened out at the last minute.

For more on why I didn’t get a tattoo, please see this very special episode of Red vs. Blue.

Erica said, on 3/11/2009 4:36:00 PM

Who needs the bathroom mirror when you’ve got a built in camera on your laptop?

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