Continuing with working multiple books like in my October Build month, I made, in the last two weeks, five books. The fifth book I will talk about in the Fiction section as well, but now I will talk about the first four books.
The first two of the four books are called 24 for two (not 24) reasons. First, they were conceived on the 24th of October. Second, they have many facts about the number 24, not limited to math, but also the fact that in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams writes that the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. The opposite of 24. This and other facts about 24 are included in my blank notebooks, 24. Each is 118 pages. I did something different in the 24 notebooks made this month.
The differences all have to do with the cover: front, spine, and back. On the front, obviously, I printed the title, 24. On the spine, I printed the title vertically. On the back, I printed the Japanese equivalent of Tedorigawa Bookmakers: 手取川製本.
My main concern was that they all line up perfectly. They did not. The titles on the front were aligned properly because they could be anywhere, really. I wanted them in the lower third of the cover; no major concerns. The spines, too, aligned nicely. The Japanese on the back came out too low on one book and a little too low on the second. Plus, I accidentally printed markers where the titles and company were to be printed. A learning process, if you will.
The second two books are titled Black Moon Notebook and Cheshire Notebook. As with 24, I printed the title on the front cover, the spine, the company on the back, and the company initials (TDGB) above the title on the spine. These were 100-page blank notebooks.
But also and in addition, I made headbands and endbands. Seriously, this time. I made them before but just to see if I could do it. Then I reverted to glue-on headbands; much easier to use. With Black Moon and Cheshire, I concentrated on making the bands. I did..... not disastrously badly, but not as well as I wanted. A learning process, if you will. The endbands on both were better than the headbands on both because I made the headbands first.
As for printing, they all — cover, spine, back cover — came out nicely. The initials, not so much because I didn't think about them until after I printed the cover. The B edged over into the spine gap.
All four were bound in green covers; they are A6 (pocketbook) size, with between 118 pages (24) and 100 pages (Black Moon and Cheshire); and have floral endpapers with birds (except one version of 24, which has brownish floral endpapers).
The fifth book is my novel, Molly Bright, which came out to about 260 pages (there are extra pages because I included a Japanese-English glossary, a brief origin story, and additional fiction) in a B5 printing. It has not been bound yet, but it has been sewn up (case binding), mull applied, bookboards and spine cut, endpaper chosen but neither cut nor applied, and cover paper tentatively chosen.
The reason I printed the titles of the previous four blank notebooks was, they were practice for printing the cover of Molly Bright. And practice sewing headbands. Molly Bright is a much wider book than the four blank notebooks, of course, sewing a headband will be more time-consuming and, if history is any indication, frustrating. Next time, I can show you the results; hopefully done to my satisfaction.
I wrote a 30-page short story titled Snow Country (not taken from Kawabata Yasunari’s novel of the same name). Three women who are weavers meet on a Zoom-like app to talk about life, their children, and tell each other ghost stories. They do this because their life as a weaver means they work from home and only interact with their children (all three have two children, all in middle school) and a delivery person who comes only when delivering orders, supplies, or picking up finished products; they never appear in the short story.
The ghost stories give them something to think about as they weave on their looms and, later in the afternoon, knit. Their weaving and knitting are their livelihoods; it pays their bills. They have husbands, I suspect, but they are never mentioned.
Snow Country comes in three parts: Snow Country, Seaside, and Mountain because the main character of each part lives in a snowy village in Japan, a seaside village not in Japan, and in a mountain village in Japan. At the beginning of each part, one of the main characters opens their Zoom and waits for the other two. They tell each other ghost stories and then get to work weaving (except Seaside, who is just finished weaving and knitting; she’s waiting for her children to come home from school).
The ghost stories are based on my reading of several Japanese ghost stories.
After writing Snow Country, I went back to editing Growing Slurry and looking at but not writing on Caraculiambro. Then I picked up a 955-page book to read, The Books of Jakob by Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel, 2018). Oh dear. I just finished reading her Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
