Fanbinding(ish): Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
You've heard of the quarto-legal. Now get ready for the...
Quatro Legal
(ramen for scale.)
Okay. So. Context. For understandable reasons, people regularly say "quatro" when they mean "quarto," when talking about page size. (It's what it sounds like: a quarto is a quarter of a page.) @mourningmountainsbindery @zhalfirin-binds @ficcinghell and I were wondering what a "quatro legal" would actually look like, and decided it would have to be four legal sheets in a 2x2 grid.
So this book is 28" tall, and 17" wide.
I printed it on a large format printer a friend of mine was kindly willing to give me access to, and it's folded accordion style--looks like this when it's fully extended:
and the covers are chip board, though if I did it again I'd shell out for proper davey board, because I ended up spending way more time on the cover than I'd planned.
Here it is at the @renegadeguild retreat, with @mourningmountainsbindery's quarto legal, for scale:
Process pictures and videos under the cut.
So the first question was, how to get the cover on. Because PVA dries fast. I didn't want to use paste, because I was afraid the water would fuck up the boards, but in the time it would take to get glue on the whole board, the first glue would have already started to dry.
The answer:
dumping some glue onto the board, and slowly unrolling the fabric while my girlfriend frantically went ahead with a silicone scraper. So basically, curling.
For decoration, the first thing I knew I wanted to do was make a glow-in-the dark cheshire cat, so I started off by putting lines of masking tape up next to each other, drawing the design on with a sharpie, and then cutting on said lines to make a stencil. I then thought the cover looked a little empty, so I added the title. (Intermittently adding additional layers of glow in the dark paint.)
Then I peeled the tape off and the edges were a little wonkier in places than I'd hoped for. So, obviously, I had to do an outline. And I had all this imitation gold that I'd failed to make work on the page edges of my Good Omens bind, so obviously....
This also ended up requiring a ton of touch-ups: I just did the gilding adhesive directly onto the book cloth, which isn't the recommended method but I didn't trust my ability to keep my hand steady enough for primer. I did have to do two layers. (Pictured above is a bit of gilding adhesive waiting to be dry enough to put more gold on. It takes half an hour or so, and then the sealant that goes on top takes 4 hours to fully cure. So I did not do this on every single letter, though I considered it for one insane second.)
The endpapers are butcher paper a teacher friend kindly stole obtained for me. Getting them on required another frantic glue fest, with the assistance of @eebeesee, who was very nice about it.
Obviously, it was too big for the press. So here it is under a piece of chipboard, the glass top of the coffee table (surprisingly heavy,) 50lbs of dumbells, and then, for good measure, my actual book press plonked on top. Also required the assistance of eebee because keeping all of that aligned was kind of a four-arm operation.
The chipboard still warped a bit because, again, it's chipboard.
Eventually I'm going to make an actual quarto legal with the same cover so it can be compared to its mini-me.
We've just deconstructed the 1st floor portion of our current exhibition, Process, which was a display of the JCBA-based collaborative project, "The Beauty of Lemons." The project was constructed as a workshop in which nine copies of the accordion-bound book were produced. Each student enrolled was tasked with producing nine copies of their own lemon-inspired page spread, and went home with a copy of the book (containing the work of all of the participants) which they themselves bound. The Jaffe Center's copy was on display in the lobby until this morning.
Although the exhibition is scheduled to close tomorrow, August 22nd, the second half may remain on display for a little while longer. On the 3rd floor, East Wing, just outside of the Jaffe center, the Process Exhibition focuses on the production of paper from old blue jeans (the upcoming workshop, "Papermaking Blues", is to be taught by our very own John Cutrone).
Within the Jaffe Center, we have on display "Al-Mutanabbi Rising", which is a collaborative submission to the Al-Mutannabu Street Coalition. "Al-Mutanabbi Rising" was produced by John Cutrone and our current Artist in Residence, Paula Marie Gourley, and yielded a broadside and a pyramid shaped book, both of which rely heavily upon letterpress printing and pochoir to commemorate the initiatives and atmosphere of Al-Mutanabbi Street prior to the fatal car bombing that shook it in 2007.
To see the remainder of the exhibition, or to casually experience the collection, consider coming in to one of our student guided tours, which are offered at 3PM every Wednesday and Thursday, no RSVP required.
