In celebration of Archives Month Smithsonian Institution Archives has posted two videos showing how old and sometimes fragile books are being digitized to allow wider public to access them on the web site.
I’ve decided to make a follow up to the previous post. I wrote that sometimes it is hard for me to set a “fair price” on my bookbinding and book repair work, while I understand that bookbinding is a very special sort of work that shouldn’t be undervalued.
A recent discussion at the Facebook account of Huhu Hu (a bookbinder from Quzhou, China) has made me to analyze myself and to think about how I interact with my clients. It all started as a call for a bit of advice on repairs and restoration of a cloth-covered book (you should probably read that too), but soon we were talking about the rates and prices for bookbinding services.
iBookBinding.com is launching a campaign at Patreon. This platform allows people to support makers, bloggers and other creative people with regular donations (small or large, you choose).
Book Title: Francisci a Mesgnien Meninski LEXICI Arabico Persico – Tvrcici (Tomus Qvartvs)
I love my students. They are smart. They are creative and inventive. They listen (and do not listen) and they always try to do their best. Yesterday I had another wonderful class, and I’m in a wonderful mood once again =)
My bookbinding workshop now is located in the same room with my woodworking workshop. This offers some benefits and has its drawbacks. The one major problem is omnipresent wood dust. It is the reason I want to make map cabinets for my bookbinding materials as soon as possible.
I have to confess to a strange experience that happened to me lately. I’ve been making a portfolio folder for a new client recently. Everything was fine. Folder was covered with bookbinding cloth and a layer of paper over the cloth.
This is just a fast update on how the iBookBinding.com looks like. I had to make some changes to WordPress and installed plugins lately. These changes were due very long ago, but as it always happens to be, when you start with some small updates, a working day later you find out that you have to change almost everything.
Check this video. Narration is in Chinese, however, the footage is almost self-explanatory.
It is always suspenseful to begin a first class of a season. OK, I feel jitters almost before any session — no group of students is the same, and I’m worried if I can help them to learn new things (yes, I can =))
Ten days ago, I have received an order an offer to bind an anniversary book for the upcoming 25th celebration of the beginning of the academic year at the lyceum where I have spent my three last school years.
For my current project, I have to draw shadows of objects inlaid on the book cover on the leather of the cover material.
Several weeks ago, I wrote about my first experience with soft weights. I had to construct a fake curved spine for a box. It is not possible to use flat weights to press a rounded surface and I had to find some other solution. On our kitchen, I found two synthetic fiber bags and filled them with rice and buckwheat seeds. It worked!
This October marks the beginning of the third year I’m teaching bookbinding. Being a bookbinder for almost a decade, I have never thought to give lessons. Well, at least before a friend of mine asked me to show her and her photography colleagues some basics on how to make photo-books.
