I have now got my studio functioning again and have made some progress with this long running book project at last, though paradoxically I have had to move everything into another room to do so.
Having got the sequence of photographs sorted and hinged together, the next job, having drawn and printed the map to go on the reverse, has been to arrange the sections of the map to match the overall length of the whole sequence. This has proved to be much trickier than I had anticipated and has involved a certain amount of “editing” of the map. Fortunately, the map has never been strictly to scale, for practical reasons that I have already touched on, and all the more fortunately there are stretches of it that contain very little, and so are ripe for cropping without upsetting the overall scheme. From a practical point of view though it has not been possible to do a proper layout in the studio, because my working table is simply not big enough to accommodate the whole length of the nascent book (almost 2.5 metres, a good metre longer than my drawing desk) which has made synchronising photos and map sections difficult. This is a crucial task that needs to be got right before I can start to fit the concertina within the book covers. I have therefore had to resort to laying the whole thing out on the floor in my garden room, the only other practical space reasonably available. This is not the greatest of photographs because of the bright westerly sun but nevertheless shows how I have been able to lay out the ready prepared concertina sequence of photographs and arrange the map sections to match.
Since then I have pasted the map section onto the back of the photographs and now the whole thing has been refolded and is in my book-press to compress and flatten everything out. The next step will be to mount the cover boards (which are otherwise ready), add an internal lining paper to them, one final image on the inside of the rear cover to round off the main sequence, a small colophon plate that will go on the inside of the front cover, and at last all will be done! All being well, that will all happen within the next couple of days and after a little more time in the press to make sure everything is flat, it will at last be complete.
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 