Creating Book Cover

In this session we began making the cover of the book, as well as cutting the edges of the book using a book guillotine in order to get smooth professional looking edges. For the spine, we attached book binding fabric with a thin sheet of card the width and length of the spine for support of the cover. We also cut the cover out of thick board, which will later be covered in book binding paper and then completed. 

Second Session

In this second session we started creating another book.

Creating Book

Below shows the pamphlet book I made to discuss in the next session. When deciding what taxonomy to fill my book with I chose to link back to my previous drawing elective and incorporate the Mandala designs I had created, which represent the world and are symmetrical. I thought these would be pleasing in a book and interesting because naturally the readers view of a book would be from left to right, however with a mandala design the eye is drawn to the center of the page. 

I made small changes to the cover template in order to accommodate for not having paper 5x the width of the pages, so I created a tab on both the front and back of the cover. To create the end pages I covered a sheet of paper the same width as the pages unfolded and covered both sides with pink dots using a blotter, this added some colour and interesting shapes to the book. 

Book Binding Elective

In this first session we explored different artists that use book binding in their pieces. We also made a pamphlet book.

History of book binding in art...
Since the creation of paper artists made books, including monks hand painted illustrations.
William Blake, early pioneer 1789.
William Morris, set up Kelmscott Press 1896.
Book binding one of the earliest forms of collaboration in art.
Pierre Bonnard Lithograph 1900, a form of owning a painting and poem at the same time.
Dieter Roth, series of diaries 1967.
Ed Ruscha, pioneer of American Art Book Movement 1962-78.
Laura Oldfield, 'Savage Messiah' 2006, borrows form from press/political pamphlet.
Richard Tuttle, series of compositions and colours.
Lawrence Weiner 

Below is the pamphlet book we made in this session, you can see the fold of the cover, which helps to hide the spine of the book, as well as the middle page of the pamphlet where the stitching can be seen. For next session we have to create another pamphlet book, this time also including an end paper, and fill the book with a taxonomy similar to the work of Lawrence Weiner.