>Well, I just made two more books in the last week, 009 and 010. This is after I sat around making exactly zero books for about a month, kicking myself for not finding the time to work on this, and now it seems I have come back a little bit, a little more inspired. Maybe.

009 is a little recycled bag affair I put together using brown paper bags from Cashwise and Central Market. Honestly, that’s really the only recycling involved with the book, but it saved about ten plastic bags from being used, so huzzah! I reinforced the hinges with strips of cloth cut from a black t-shirt and originally they were too tight, so I had to cut the covers apart and re-hinge them. I thought I would just give up right there, and then I had the brilliant idea of giving the book the quarter-leather look, except instead of leather I would use brown paper and then I wouldn’t have to re-do both the covers entirely. It worked like a charm. The hinges are still a tad bit tight, so I could go a little more liberally on them in the future, but the overall look is good and I’m satisfied. 009 is stab-bound with hemp (which I didn’t wax, but probably will in the future) and features a button-and-cord closure (my inspiration from the interdepartmental delivery envelopes at work) using a single metal button and a piece of waxed hemp affixed to holes drilled through the covers. I’ve read that the brown paper bags can be ironed flat; I think I will try that out next time, because I already have enough bags to make another one, and I know for a fact that pressing the pages doesn’t flatten them. Enough jibber-jabber – here’s the photos:

010 is my first leather-bound journal, I made it in about two hours last night while I was watching Return to Oz and by the time the movie was over, I was putting things away and the book was being pressed by a book topped with two twenty-pound dumbbells. I decided to do something different and less complex than anything else I have seen on the web: I stab-bound it. The cover, which was reclaimed from an old leather jacket I got for free, was cut and the pages were cut and stacked, the text block was knocked up, clipped, and drilled, and then I wrapped the cover around the text block with the binder clips still on it. Then I waxed up some black floss and started to sew the cover on. The wrinkling around the spine was precisely what I was going for, but I needed to go in a straight line while I was sewing the cover to the text block to ensure that the covers would lie flat. It worked out pretty good, and I cut tabs into the ends of the covers where the binding goes around the top and bottom of the book to give the spine a little wraparound kind of look. Then I glued some cardstock inside the covers just to give them a bit of stiffness and pressed the book overnight. It looks great, but I’m thinking of adding some kind of closure, which can be sewn in. That’s that. Here’s the book, in all its visual glory: