At long last the book is finished.  It seems to have taken an inordinate amount of time, but I have to recognise that my studio has been out of action for quite a while and a number of other commitments have intervened.  Nevertheless, it has taken much longer than I anticipated, not least because I underestimated how much work is actually involved in making a book of this nature; not surprising, perhaps, because I have never before made anything quite like this.

Nevertheless, it is now done, and as a first attempt at such a project I have to say I am pretty pleased with it.  It is not perfect and is still, as I anticipated, very much a mock-up, a maquette, but nevertheless I think it looks good.  It is on the one hand quite a solid piece of work, not least because in part it is three layers thick – photographs, hinges, map backing – but on the other feels a bit fragile.  Possibly this is simply because of its hand-made nature and the fact it is, so to say, a prototype, lacking in a certain professional finish.

A bit of technical background on its construction.  The photographs are digital prints on Canon Pro Platinum paper, hinged together with strips of envelope (a bit more robust than the other papers I have available).  The map sections (prints of a scanned, hand-drawn map) are on ordinary plain printer paper and overlap the joins of the photographs, reinforcing the hinges.  The covers are cut from some fibre board that I happened to have lying around in the studio – just the right weight and thickness – and covered with a smooth finish rayon dark blue bookcloth   These are in turn lined with a white ribbed kraft paper.  Everything was stuck together with a rice starch and PVA paste, which has the advantage of being slow drying, so that everything could be adjusted and aligned properly before going into the press, dries without staining, and smooths out any folds or creases in paper.  As each step of the construction was completed the growing book went into an old cast-iron bookbinder’s press (which is incredibly heavy!) to keep everything flat while the paste set.  (Despite this there is a clear tendency for the photos to curl slightly so it is clear that over time it is going to be necessary to keep the book firmly closed to keep the contents flat.)  I have added a small colophon plate to the inside of the front cover and an extra photo, not part of the original sequence for this assignment and on a smaller scale, by way of a coda onside the back.

The specialist bookbinding materials (bookcloth, paste, a couple of tools) I bought from Shepherds in London, a Mecca for bookbinders.  I have not visited their shop but I expect it will be an Aladdin’s cave!  (My favourite such shop of all is probably Cornelissen near the British Museum, that dates back to 1855, from which I have in the past bought much of my print-making materials.)  

Here are some views of the finished article:

And a short video to give some further sense of the physicality of the book as an artefact:

It could be said that, in a sense, this has been a bit of a distraction in that I did not need to make this book.  Nevertheless, I feel it has been a very useful, and enlightening, not to mention valuable, diversion.  I have learned so much about the physical process of producing a book (at least one in concertina form) that I am sure is going to be valuable in the future and open up more possibilities worthy of consideration for the presentation of work.  It has also itself, as a physical process, simply been enjoyable and satisfying and worth doing from that point of view alone.

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.

Since I last wrote about this book project, which now seems to have taken on a life of its own, consuming mine in the process, I have been able to make some more progress and to discuss it with my tutor when we discussed my submission for Assignment 4 (I will post on that separately once we have finalised the feedback).  I had made a mock-up of the map (2.25 metres long!) which he quite liked.  I have since gone on and created a jpeg version of it, which has allowed me to add type for the stations and other points of note along the route instead of having to write them on by hand, which I fear would have looked a bit too messy.

The prints of the photos have now been made and trimmed to size and I am in the process of adding hinges between them.  Once that has been done, I will print and trim to match the sections of the map, then add the covers. Still lots of work to do and I still expect that the result is going to be a maquette from which a final version might, theoretically, be produced professionally, rather than an “artist’s book” in its own right.

On that last note, quite coincidentally there are a couple of brief articles in the latest edition of Printmaking Today (pp 22-23) relating to artists’ concertina form books.  (I am not actively making etchings or other prints of my own at the moment, being all-consumed in my spare time by this course, but I still occasionally collect prints so like to keep abreast of what is going on in the wider print world.)  I am not entirely sure whether it is reassuring, but at least I am not alone with my struggles, but both show how difficult, and time-consuming a process making such a book is.

With a bit of luck, and not a small amount of further effort, I should be finished soon!

Printmaking Today.  Summer 2020.  Vol.29, Issue 114

Although I have to produce the physical book for this assignment (I am currently awaiting some book binding materials and tools that will be helpful) I have been giving more thought to how I deal with the map that is to go on the reverse of the photos.

The original intention was to make this up from an Ordnance Survey map.  While working on the dimensions of the book (I am intending the images to be A5) it quickly became apparent that this is not going to work.  The problem is largely one of scale.  The ratio of the physical length of the series of photos to their height is 17:1.  Looking at the map though the ratio from the start point to the end is more like 17:3; the distance between the start and finish points, a straight line from west to east, is about 17 miles but the distance between the southernmost point on the route, the start point at Stocksfield, and the northernmost point, Clara Vale roughly half way between Wylam and Blaydon, is three miles.  The numbers simply do not fit the format of the book!  I have looked at a number of other possibilities but none of them work particularly well.  One is simply to distort the map to straighten out the train line.  This just looks odd.  Another is to make a sort of mosaic made up of twelve panels that each show a section of the line and fit the 17:1 ratio.  This though looks very disjointed and does not give a sense of the continuous journey.

I have therefore been looking at a more schematic approach and have been confirmed in my thoughts that this should be better by looking again at the two books I have mentioned in connection with Exercise 5.5.  I have been thinking along the lines of train network and route maps (think the London Underground map) that do not contain any reliable geographical information but merely show which station is followed by which when travelling along the line.  Northern Railway, our local train company, have a very simple, purely linear, schematic map showing the stations along the line.  This I think can form the basis for the book’s map, but to make it more interesting, and tie it more closely to the geographical realities of the journey, I intend to include, at the appropriate points in relation to the stations, some of the places of interest along the way, that are either referred to in the photographs, or are otherwise of local significance.  Not least it needs to give an indication of the river and of the bridges over it.  I am currently playing around with a few ideas but at the moment I think this is going to have to be hand drawn, at least for the purposes of this initial mock-up.  Depending on how well that comes out, it might of course be necessary to come up with something more refined if the book was ever to be produced as something more than an experiment.  More on this anon.

Molitor, C, (2015).  Sonorama.  Listening to the view from the train.  Axminster:  Uniformbooks

Stenger, S, (2014).  Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland.  Newcastle:  AV Festival

Following the discussion with my tutor, here is the revised final set for this assignment, including the two images that will form part of the cover of the projected book: