Reflect, evaluate and rework
Having printed your images from the previous exercise, take the opportunity to view all of the pages, reflect on them and evaluate before moving on to the next step of collating and binding the pages together. Which pages are successful? Which pages have not turned out as well as you had hoped? Are there any visual surprises, or happy accidents? Given the experimental and open-ended nature of this exercise, the answers may be quite subjective, but it is important you reflect on these and other questions, to sharpen your self-critical awareness and assessment of your own progress.
You may want to re-work some of the images, and the printing process, and this is your opportunity to do that. You may end up with more and more pieces of printed paper.
Select and collate
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in your work and then begin a process of selecting up to 16 pages that work well together as a whole. Do these pages have images on each side of the page, or will the images appear on facing pages only? If you want to create back-to-back images you can work manually to cut and paste images and pages, using spray mount or similar. Equally, you can collage elements of printed ephemera onto and into the pages. Again, the brief is to be experimental, so work inventively with the process, cutting, gluing, pasting and arranging as you see fit. Collate these pages, putting them into a running order from beginning to end.
Binding
Drawing on your understanding of bookbinding so far, bind your 16 pages into a small book format. How will the pages be held together? Consider how the pages might be bound and experiment with solutions. Will you create a cover? Will the pages be stitched, sewn, glued, stapled or will you use another inventive approach?
There are many ways to bind a book, either by hand or by machine. A few examples of bookbinding are saddle stitch, Japanese binding, coptic binding or perfect binding. Consider which binding is most appropriate for your book. There are some good tutorials online of bookbinding and this might be useful for you to have a look at. Try to use one of the bookbinding techniques mentioned above for your own book.
Document the whole process, photograph the book and incorporate them into your learning log, accompanied by supporting work, including pages and images you chose not to include into the final book form.
Reflection on my images
I was happy with my final imagery for the last exercise. If I could say that I had a least favourite it would be the image of the woman and the bridge. This was one of the first images I did and it seems very simplistic compared to the others, however it did convey it’s message very well.
My personal favourite was the cows and oranges which is a slightly surreal nod to the poem and also adds some humour to the overall design. How that would be viewed at the time the poem was written is a different matter. To me the poem seems very serious and solemn with little room for humour.
The idea of using the bird’s squeal and writing it in the Cyrillic alphabet worked well and gave an essence of authenticity to the piece as well as a nod to the propaganda of the communist state.
I had somehow jumped ahead in the last exercise and displayed my images as a concertina-fold publication with the images on both sides in a non-linear format. I had also had them printed out to scale by a company called Printspace but they could only do them single sided. I thought that maybe I could stick the 2 sides together to form the booklet but wasn’t sure whether it would work. I decided to give it more thought.
Binding
As I’d already imagined my design as a concertina-fold publication I wanted to replicate this as ‘proper’ book.
I began researching how hardback books were made and watched several YouTube videos on how to make a book cover. One in particular was very useful:
This was purely about making the cover for a pre-made text block and was very easy to follow and I felt I could replicate something similar.
I began by cutting out the board which would make the book’s cover.
For the cover of the book IO used some of the GF Smith paper that I had collected. I wanted to give the effect of a concrete texture on the paper(as this was a Concrete Poem) and picked a be-speckled paper called Gmund Bier that is made using the waste material from the brewing process which gives it its texture and feel. On this paper I printed my piece from the Concrete Poetry exercise to use as my cover.
I then lined this with more GF Smith paper, this time a scarlet colonnade paper from their Colorplan range. I was pretty chuffed at the result at this stage, not bad for a first attempt!
I then concertina-folded my printed images to stick into the cover. I had decided to keep them separate and attach on to each side of the cover and then they could fold out when the book was opened.
I was relatively happy with the result, but if I were to do this again I would think about lining the reverse side of the pages, maybe with the scarlet paper in a lighter weight, and possibly some form of band or fastener for the two sets of pages as they didn’t open easily as two separate sets of pages.
I thought that this style of book wasn’t really bound. I decided to try something else. I divided my images into individuals and thought about stitching them together, but the images didn’t have enough of a border on which to stitch them. This then led me to have a go a perfect binding as this wouldn’t impede on the imagery. I went back to Youtube and found a tutorial on DIY prefect binding:
I thought I’d give it a go and began by gluing my images together.
I applied 3 coats of glue in all to bind the edges of my images together. Once dry I added some of the scarlet paper which I would then use to attach the pages to the inside of the cover. I made another cover, smaller this time to fit the contents better, which I finished in the same way as the previous version and stuck the perfect bound images into it by attaching the red papers to the insides of the cover.
This was more of a traditional way of displaying the images but it had worked better than I’d anticipated. It was an interesting process which on the whole was a success. On reflection the cover for this could’ve been a little larger as there wasn’t much room top and bottom inside the book.
Reflection
This was an interesting exercise that made me think more about how books are constructed and the things to bear in mind when putting books together such as margins, what type of binding to use and how the book would be read. This exercise has given me a lot more to think about when continuing to design books in the future and I hope to use some of the lessons I’ve learned here going forward.
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