I printed my first small book project on the Chandler and Price. It was a small book of haiku written by my husband. For his birthday, I asked my brother-in-law, Roger Dolin, a muralist and artist in L.A., to hand illustrate some of the poems in a single edition of the book.
Many lessons were learned throughout this process. I have been so fortunate to have the patient guidance and mentorship of printer and book artist Dina Pollack. She has given me online lessons throughout the pandemic which not only kept me making progress on my work, but also provided me with so much moral support. I am grateful for her continued help.
This project was my first attempt at producing an editioned book which was why I started with a smaller one. I had planned on 15 copies and after production ended up with 13. I made mistakes in printing that I won’t make again, and I made choices in binding, in particular with the materials, that I won’t make again. I enjoyed every minute of the work, even the moments when something was going wrong with the press and I had no clue how to solve it. The problem solving involved in this work is turning out to be one of the surprising joys.
I still have about four more books to bind. It was fun setting up the binding process and breaking up the work into separate pieces. I sewed them together, forwarded them together, cut the pieces for all the cases, but then would have to make each case separately and case them in one by one. I might change that workflow with the next project.
I ended up doing two different bindings. Next time I will make two models and then select which one to do for all of them. Below are some of the photos from the process as well as one of the many amazing illustrations from Roger.
Of Paper and Ink 