Process

I began this project in November 2006 by laying out the pages and doing the calligraphy. My schedule was roughly this: November for calligraphy, December through February for illumination, and March for binding. I stayed pretty much on schedule; the final endpapering was completed the week the book was due to be presented at Coronation. I didn’t take any photos of the illumination process (although you can see scans of all the illuminated pages) or of the early stages of binding (because it looks the same as the early stages of binding of my other books, and photos of those are elsewhere on this site).

This was the first book where I got to use a plow, a tool for trimming page edges that dates to the 1500s. My father made me the plow for Christmas, using the plans given in Banister’s book. This photo shows the book in the plow.

Because I wanted to gild the page edges, immediately prior to trimming the edges I rubbed talcum powder (well, actually it was cornstarch powder left over from when my son was in diapers) in between the pages near each edge. The talc will help prevent the adhesive used for edge gilding from sticking the pages together. I also inserted sheets of waxed paper in between all the pages so the acrylic paint on facing pages wouldn’t stick together—when that happens, it results in an awful mess.

After plowing, I applied bole, a red clay, to the edge. I promptly sanded this off with sandpaper—at this stage, the bole shows you how even your edge is: the bole stays in any low spots. The edge needs to be very smooth for gilding to work.

I gave glaire, a period adhesive made from egg white, the college try and then some, but ended up using a modern adhesive for the gold leaf. I could get reasonable results from glaire about half the time, and I didn’t have time in the schedule to spend more than one week on the edge gilding process. (One of the frustrating things about edge gilding is that you don’t know how well it worked until the next day, when you do the final burnishing and remove the book from the press. I couldn’t spend more than 2 days on each edge.) These photos show the beaten glaire and the glaire after it has been strained through cloth.

Even with modern adhesive, the gilding process was difficult. Even small wrinkles in the gold leaf after it has been laid on the edge can create visible streaks after gilding. I followed the detailed instructions in John Mitchell’s book faithfully, including the multistep burnishing process, and the results are reasonable but far from perfect. Guess it’ll be a long while before I’m good enough at it to attempt gauffering the edge! Gauffering involves applying heated tools to the gilt edge to create decorative patterns. These photos show gold leaf on the edge in the press and the finished edge.

While these efforts were in progress, I was also working on the brass furnishings for the book. With guidance from Master Aldred Blackwood, I created a seashell-shaped template for the corner bosses from two sheets of steel and a block of wood. I hammered sheets of brass into this template, then engraved thin lines on the brass and cut the bosses out of the sheets. Engraving by hand is mighty hard work! After the bosses were cut out, I filed them by hand and buffed then by machine.

Latches were next to finish. These weren’t ready until the very end of March, just in the nick of time.

I chose to do all-metal latches, because the leather strap on my previous book started to rip as the boards of the cover warped a bit. (They only warped after I repaired a wrinkled endpaper, 2 months after the book was completed—that’s still puzzling to me.)

I used alum-tawed goatskin for the covering leather and wheat paste as adhesive. These photos show the spine of the book pasted up and the folded leather (white) on the table next to it. I am slightly disappointed in the final look of the leather. There are small wrinkles on the covers, where I possibly stretched the leather too much or used too much paste. This did not happen with the previous book, although that leather was considerably less supple than this leather.

To counteract any potential outward warp, I used the same leather on the inside faces of the boards instead of using paper as filler.

On the front cover, I decide to try using a leather inlay. On the whole, this worked out well. I got a box of scrap leather from a bindery in Boston, and pared down the blue leather somewhat so that the leather would lay flush. Even after the initial paring, however, I found I need to pare the inlay even further to get it flush with the other leather. I did this final paring with an Exact-o knife after the shape had been cut out.

The final decoration was my poor man’s attempt at imitating gold tooling. Real gold tooling is done with heated tools and gold leaf on leather. I would need to take a specialty class and acquire proper tools before attempting the real thing, so I used gold acrylic paint in a dotted pattern (an imitation of the pointille tool, which makes dots).

After the decoration was finished, I attached the bosses and latches to the boards, and then glued down the first and last leaves of the book to the covers and added decorative endpapers. I’ll post photos of those soon.