My Own Book Project

In the past year, I already had some of my travel photos printed out as books through an On-Demand book printer in Beijing, but this is my very first time to do the binding myself ...... a case binding learnt from little book of BOOK MAKING brought from New York.

Size : A4 borderless
Paper Stock : 157gsm Art Card Paper (off-white) Printing Side : Double Sided
One set is 39 pcs of A4 Art cards double-sided, totalling 78 sides

Folding part : Fold 1 A4 into half (folio) ; 3  Folios per signature; Total 13 signatures.

9 holes (20-25mm apart) are pierced with the awl.
The stitching is the most time-consuming & tedious process.

Here are the results.  Ho! Ho!

Still got 4 more to go.

The front & back end-paper is the subway map printed on special  paper
using Epson Ink-jet printer.

I intentionally leave the spine (the back of text block) in loose form.

Finally, have added the dustjacket.

Matchbook

Received these two,  Matchbook Stories Issue 2 & 3, last Friday.

Issue 2
Features two stories and two poems by Erik Boman, Pat Cash, and Marc Cinanni. 

CONTENTS
 "Weekend Dogs" by Erik Boman
"Yes" by Pat Cash
 "Ping" and "Dubai" by Marc Cinanni

Issue 3
Four great tiny stories by Etgar Keret, J. Robert Lennon, Tara L. Masih, and Yorgos Trillidis 

CONTENTS
 "Asthma Attack" by Etgar Keret
 "Fault" by J. Robert Lennon
 "Ella: Now" by Tara L. Masih
 "Verification" by Yorgos Trillidis

The Terminal Man

Bought this book by the late Michael Crichton (Oct 23, 1942 - Nov 4, 2008) years ago.  The receipt shown it was purchased on 10 Sep 2004 for $6 from CanadaBBQ ??? which I've cracked my head trying to remember what and where exactly this country-cum-BBQ was but to no avail.

Anyway, I only started reading it last week.  The technologies mentioned in the book were of course dated,  given that it was written in year 1972, but still fascinating in a way.

The author was quite good looking then.

Night Festival 2015

Caught this arts performance featuring fire props (Act 2 of Alchemy) by Starlight Alchemy at SAM front lawn last Saturday night.

Strings for Bookbinding

Found these at DAISO, Chinatown Square.

One pack comes with six colors, 10M long each, for aS$2 is quite worthwhile.

Recent Read

Read The Little Paris Bookshop immediately after The Reader On The 6.27.

Both are love stories set in Paris, and are book related.

Somehow this book does not work for me. It's just not convincing.

Disgustingly sweet? Yes. Too sweet to be true. That's it.
Poorly plotted? In a way.

Somewhere down the line, the father of the main character Jean Perdu has make this weird comparison of houses and women. What?! I simply don't get it.

Vilnius Book Fair Poster Ads

This year it's all about crime fiction.

Agency : Adell Taivas Ogilvy, Vilnius, Lithuania.

Beautiful Embroidery Designs for Saraiva Pocket Books

To publicize Saraiva’s pocket book collection, the largest bookstore chain in Brazil, have embroidered the covers of literary classics onto the pockets of jeans. A visually strong piece, reminding people of the basic benefit of a pocket book: They fit into your pocket.

Also got a separate version in Portuguese.

The Reader on the 6.27

Finished this in one day, it is not long but it glows.

The Story
Every day thirty-six-year-old Guylain Vignolles oversees the destruction of thousands of books at his job in a book-pulping factory. But it is a vocation he detests, a machination he abhors. The only pleasure in his day comes from reading aloud the random pages he rescues from the Thing's belly on his train journey to work in the morning, returning at night exhausted to his tiny flat and only companion, a goldfish named Rouget de Lisle. But even that has a certain uniformity to it. It is only when he discovers a lost memory stick containing the diary of Julie, a 28-year-old lavatory attendant waiting for her Prince Charming that Guylain's reading takes on a new significance.  As he reads from these pages to a rapt audience, Guylain finds himself falling hopelessly in love with their enchanting author .... and set out his quest to find her.


An excerpt of her diary :
I sat down at the table, grabbed the electronic calculator from the drawer and impatiently entered the figures written down in my notebook. As always, my heart began to race as my finger pressed the EXE key for the grand total. And of course, as always, the same depressing number appeared on the screen:14,717. I'm still dreaming of a warmer, rounder number, a more visually appealing number. A number containing a few nice bulbous zeros, even some deliciously plump eights, sixes or nines. A curvaceous three, as ample as a wet nurse's bosom, would be enough to make me happy. A number like 14,717, is all bones. It exposes its skinniness directly, assails your retina with its sharp angles. Whatever you do, once written down, it always remains a series of fractured straight lines. It would only take one tile more or less to give that unappealing number the beginnings of an attractive curve.

Another excerpt of her diary that I find it hilariously enjoyable to get you started :

Saturday is always the busiest day of the week, along with Wednesday, but when Saturday is also the last day of the sales, then you can tell a mile off that it's going to be a horrendous day, the kind of day when even the shopping centre's 100,000 square metres seem to be hard put to hold so many people. It was packed from the minute the doors opened. Hordes of visitors poured into my care all day long to deposit their stream of urine, excrement, blood and even vomit. Sometimes I see them reduced purely to sphincters, stomachs, intestines and bladders on legs and no longer as entire human beings. I don't particularly like these peak shopping days which turn the shopping centre into a giant ant hill. I find all this frantic activity disturbing, even though it often heralds excellent takings. You have to be on your toes the whole time so as to keep up. Restock the cubicles with toilet paper; don't forget to wipe the seats as soon as you get the chance; chuck bleach blocks into the urinals regularly, not forgetting to sit by the saucer as often as possible. Thank you, goodbye. Thank you, have a nice day. Hello, thank you, goodbye. The thing is that a lot of them don't give anything if there's no witness to appreciate their generosity. Auntologist number 4:Beggar absent, begging bowl empty. I think the entire human race has come by here today. That's what I said to myself as I locked the gates, exhausted, my back broken, my nostrils saturated with the smell of bleach and ammonia.

There are some more on the line that made me laugh but I'm not going to put them down here.

Purchases During The Trip (Part IV)

Atlas of the Human Body
By: Kanitta Meechubot
ISBN: 978-1-908714-17-6
Desc: Hardcover with quarterbinding / 32x26cm / 32pp / 40 colour ills
Release Date: November 2014

This large-format, beautifully presented book presents a journey through the human body both figuratively and literally. With exquisite, painstakingly detailed pencil illustrations by Kanitta Meechubot, the body is separated into layers on each page, and each layer is die-cut to show the layers underneath. As the pages are turned, you will find yourselves traveling through the body in a way that will delight and inspire.

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The Honey Hunter
by Karthika Nair (Author),
Joelle Jolivet (Author)
Hardcover: 52 pages
Publisher: Die Gestalten Verlag (14 Jan. 2015) ISBN-10: 3899557301
ISBN-13: 978-3899557305
Product Dimensions: 30.5 x 25.1 x 1.3 cm

The book itself is of quality and responsibly produced paper. It has shocking colors and great illustrations.

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Suffering the Ideal - F. Holland Day
by James Crump (Author), F. Holland Day (Photographer)
Hardcover: 141 pages
Publisher: Twin Palms Publishers (October 1, 1995)
ISBN-10: 0944092330
ISBN-13: 978-0944092330
Product Dimensions: 1 x 11.5 x 14.5 inches