Bookbinding I’ve made three books in the last week or so. All the same topic. All the same size - A6 or pocketbook. All with some mistakes. All three books have the same four short stories: • Morris & Maurice is about a janitor and his Siamese cat, if you please, who witness both the development of a park and a murder. • Paul’s Paris Disneyland’s Farewell Party about three friends who get together in Paris to celebrate Paul’s retirement. They walk in the footsteps of Marcel Proust primarily because I discovered Paris Disneyland is very close to a small village called Guermantes.  • Satan Rains is about a heavy metal band that has trouble getting gigs until a tragedy occurs.  • Snow Country. I told you about this short story last time, but I’ll refresh my memory. Three work-from-home weavers Zoom each other before their work day begins and tell each other ghost stories to give them something to think about as they weave. Two experience a ghostly event in their ’real’ lives. I put all four short stories into one book called Snow Country. I printed it out. In the first edition, I thought the type was too small and the leading too close. The first attempt has 117 pages. That’s the green volume. The second printing had an interesting problem: different fonts for the different stories. I don’t know how that happened. Probably when I imported the different stories into the book design app I was using.  Second, I usually want a new chapter to begin on the right page; the recto/odd-numbered page. One story in the second printing started on the left page; the verso or even-numbered page. Again, though, I thought the leading was too close. My biggest mistake on this printing was not gluing down the mull onto the book board. I did, however, glue it to the text block. I have no idea why I failed to do that. This attempt has 131 pages. This is the pale blue volume on the left. So, I tried again. I made sure the leading was good, the fonts consistent, and the type the proper size. I checked, and all was good. I printed it out. I began gathering the parts, bits, and material to case it in. I checked one more time to make sure. This attempt’s mistake is: it has two page 13s. Why? I have no idea. This attempt has 172 pages and is the pale blue number on the right. With the third printing, I didn’t want to waste the paper, so I continued making it. The printer decided the book-cloth cover, pale blue, needed a splash of ink on the back, so this printing has that. Unfortunately, I misaligned the cover. The name of the book on the spine is not centered correctly. Ah, how we wish we could live and learn. Fiction I started a semi-fictional something. In Japanese, it’s called a zuihitsu. I believe in English it would be called a miscellany or journal. Zuihitsu means to write where the wind blows you. No, it doesn’t; it means: follow the brush (as in a calligraphy brush, not shrubbery.) Ken Kesey wrote two zuihitsu, I believe. The first, Ken Kesey’s Garage Sale, contained essays, fiction, a play, and other musings. His second, Demon Box, had fiction and non-fiction essays.  The most famous, in Japan, zuihitsu is from the woman who invented the genre. Sei Shonagon wrote The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) in the late 900s and early 1000s. Yes, about a thousand years ago. Her book had essays, anecdotes, poems, her opinions, and descriptive passages of life in the Heian era court, and seemingly endless lists of things. I started it, in any case. There is a translator’s introduction that claims the writings were originally written by an Arab historian called Cide Hamete Benengeli.  So far, it has fiction, non-fiction, and a recipe (for bread). I started a novel, too. I have a name for it: The Tale of Kenshi. It’s about a woman who doesn’t fit her physical body; she doesn’t think she’s as beautiful as she’s been constantly told. She puts up an act when she’s around people, but buries her real personality out of sight. She meets and talks wit

Bookbinding In the last two weeks, I made two books. The first one was a quick, blank notebook using bits and pieces. The second one was a case-bound novel with one major mistake. First, the blank notebook. The base for the cover is a file cut to size. On the cover, I pasted a variety of bookboards left over from other projects. These boards were also partly plastic & paper files or folders, and partly real bookboards. Then I added a piece of string just offset the squarish files. The whole book was coptic-bound with 96 pages. I used US letter-sized paper (it’s wider and shorter than A4; 8.5 x 11 inches or 216 x 279 mm vs 210 x 297 mm or 8.29 x 11.69 inches). Why? Because, really, honestly, about 20 years ago, I bought five reams of US letter paper for a project that consumed only two reams. Why five reams? Because that’s the smallest amount the store would special order for me, and I thought I’d probably use it. Eventually. I still have three reams minus 24 pages. The second book was my novel, Molly Bright. About 250 pages, case-bound, B6-size paper, and one major mistake. Because it is B6, I needed to print A3 to fit the entire book. I don’t have a printer that can handle A3 (it barely handles A4). I printed everything on B5 paper: the front cover (with the title on the lower third); the back cover (with the Tedorigawa Bookmakers logo on lower than the lower third); and the spine (with my name at the top, Molly Bright in the middle (sideways), and TDGB on the bottom).  The front and back are purple with the words in black. The spine is off-white, close to off-yellow, with the words in black. I glued the covers on the bookboard first, then glued the spine over the book and the covers. It came out looking nice. I also added quick and dirty end bands (the purple cloth folded over a piece of twine. Naturally, with great caution, I test-printed everything. Especially the spine. Once everything was looking good, I printed everything on the bookcloth. I glued on the covers. So far, so good. I glued on the spine piece. So far, so good. I turned it over to smooth everything down. And there it was: the major mistake. The first letter of Molly Bright was 75% covered by the spine; only a vertical line of the M showed. Heartbreak. But I immediately tried to think of a solution. I practiced writing the M with a small magic marker, an ink pen, and a pencil. I practiced on the same fabric as the spine piece. But in the end, I let the mistake stand. And sent it off to a friend. Fiction Also, in the last two weeks or so, I wrote two short stories (of about 20 ~ 30 pages). While I should have been finished Caraculiambro and Growing Slurry. The first one is called Snow Country. Three work-at-home females who weave cloth on hand looms and knit sweaters and caps during the day start their day with a Zoom call. During the call, they tell each other ghost stories with ambiguous endings so that they have something to think about during the day as they weave or knit.  The second one is called Oh, That’s Good, No, That’s Bad. A man has a bully. (that’s bad) He makes a decision (that’s good). He decides to kill the bully (that’s bad). He needs to buy an unregistered, unmarked gun. He goes to a sleazy bar. (bad) He makes a friend (good). He gets beaten up. (bad) He ends up in the hospital. He meets two nice doctors who are married to each other (good). He falls in love (bad). The woman agrees to date him (good). On a date, they run into his bully at a nice restaurant (good). The bully is nice to the woman, whom he knows from a charity he works with (good) and the man (also good).  The man says he no longer wants to kill the bully (good). The woman admits her husband is a bully, and she wants to kill him (bad).  The title and the premise come from a 1967 song by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs titled Oh, That’s Good, No, That’s Bad. Sam, aka Domingo Samudio, is still with us at 88 years old. The songs vacillates between good and bad happe

Bookbinding Continuing with working multiple books like in my October Build month, I made, in the last two weeks, five books. The fifth book I will talk about in the Fiction section as well, but now I will talk about the first four books.  The first two of the four books are called 24 for two (not 24) reasons. First, they were conceived on the 24th of October. Second, they have many facts about the number 24, not limited to math, but also the fact that in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams writes that the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. The opposite of 24. This and other facts about 24 are included in my blank notebooks, 24. Each is 118 pages. I did something different in the 24 notebooks made this month. The differences all have to do with the cover: front, spine, and back. On the front, obviously, I printed the title, 24. On the spine, I printed the title vertically. On the back, I printed the Japanese equivalent of Tedorigawa Bookmakers: 手取川製本. My main concern was that they all line up perfectly. They did not. The titles on the front were aligned properly because they could be anywhere, really. I wanted them in the lower third of the cover; no major concerns. The spines, too, aligned nicely. The Japanese on the back came out too low on one book and a little too low on the second. Plus, I accidentally printed markers where the titles and company were to be printed. A learning process, if you will. The second two books are titled Black Moon Notebook and Cheshire Notebook. As with 24, I printed the title on the front cover, the spine, the company on the back, and the company initials (TDGB) above the title on the spine. These were 100-page blank notebooks. But also and in addition, I made headbands and endbands. Seriously, this time. I made them before but just to see if I could do it. Then I reverted to glue-on headbands; much easier to use. With Black Moon and Cheshire, I concentrated on making the bands. I did..... not disastrously badly, but not as well as I wanted. A learning process, if you will. The endbands on both were better than the headbands on both because I made the headbands first.  As for printing, they all — cover, spine, back cover — came out nicely. The initials, not so much because I didn't think about them until after I printed the cover. The B edged over into the spine gap. All four were bound in green covers; they are A6 (pocketbook) size, with between 118 pages (24) and 100 pages (Black Moon and Cheshire); and have floral endpapers with birds (except one version of 24, which has brownish floral endpapers). The fifth book is my novel, Molly Bright, which came out to about 260 pages (there are extra pages because I included a Japanese-English glossary, a brief origin story, and additional fiction) in a B5 printing. It has not been bound yet, but it has been sewn up (case binding), mull applied, bookboards and spine cut, endpaper chosen but neither cut nor applied, and cover paper tentatively chosen. The reason I printed the titles of the previous four blank notebooks was, they were practice for printing the cover of Molly Bright. And practice sewing headbands. Molly Bright is a much wider book than the four blank notebooks, of course, sewing a headband will be more time-consuming and, if history is any indication, frustrating. Next time, I can show you the results; hopefully done to my satisfaction.   Fiction I wrote a 30-page short story titled Snow Country (not taken from Kawabata Yasunari’s novel of the same name). Three women who are weavers meet on a Zoom-like app to talk about life, their children, and tell each other ghost stories. They do this because their life as a weaver means they work from home and only interact with their children (all three have two children, all in middle school) and a delivery person who comes only when delivering orders, supplies, or picking up finished products; they never appear in the short story. The ghost stories gi

Bookbinding   This was a daily building challenge where you were allowed to build anything you wanted for one month (one of the longest months: October, with 31 days).    I, naturally, made mostly books. In fact, I believe I made 22 books. I first ran across Building Days watching Evan Monsma’s YouTube channel at Evan Monsma where he said that October, for him, was a challenge he gave himself to build something every day. I took up the challenge and, except for three days when I had a debilitating cold, I made stuff. Twenty books and seven other products, including cleaning up a table, writing & mailing about 10 postcards, and uploading a couple of podcasts.   Almost every book I made used recyclable leftovers in my To Be Used Pile Hoard.   For example, the A6-sized book above on the left is called 24. It has 24 facts about 24 (James Dean died at age 24, as did Lee Harvey Oswald). It was made on October 24. The cover and endpapers are from the Hoard. It is about 100 pages of relatively new paper.    The book in the middle was made of a used Amazon shipping envelope. It’s called The Amazon Notebook and contains facts about a river in South America, not about a major corporation that makes a billionaire richer. It is about 100 pages of relatively new paper.    The book on the right, The Epson Screw-Up Notebook, has a brand-new cover, but the interior pages are recycled from printing errors made by a certain printer, which will remain nameless. It is about 100 pages of relatively new paper.    I also made an A6-size blank notebook called The Starbuck Notebook with facts and figures about a certain whaling family based out of Nantucket, MA called Starbuck. They were the basis for the Starbuck character in Moby-Dick. Of all the facts and information about the Starbuck family in this notebook, not one of them deals with a certain coffee company. It was shipped off to a customer who enjoys coffee and notebooks. Except one: Why does Moby-Dick have a hyphen but Starbucks doesn’t have an apostrophe?   Most of the expense of making these books was tabulated in Time and glue. What did I learn making books almost everyday in October? First, that I can make a book in one day if I put my mind to it. Second, thinking about the book before delving in to make it is time well-spent. Third, it’s not impossible to do what you think is impossible if you concentrate not on social media, but life.    Fiction By the way, despite spending many an hour making books, I also wrote a little bit. I managed to improve and expand Growing Slurry (one of the books I made, and simultaneously made a big rookie mistake making it). I also edited and improved Caraculiambro. The rookie mistake I made was putting the text block in upside down (or the cover wrong side up). The kind of mistake I thought I was finished making, but evidently not. What I have not worked on much in the last month (October), was editing Molly Bright or The Nuns of Nanao, both of which are finished but need a good edit.   Video  A video of the books I made in October’s Building Days can be seen Here! Enjoy.

Bookbinding I purchased three books from Amazon. Two arrived in a timely manner: Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, which deals with memories and remembering; and Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto, which deals with both sibling rivalry, obnoxious and entitled people, and forgetting and possibly forgiveness, but I was intrigued by the envelope my Amazon horde arrived in: corrugated cardboard, which was plain on one side and festooned with a variety of QR codes on the other; probably my name, address, the deliveryman’s name, and et cetera for all things concerning delivery. (A Proustian sentence if I ever saw one; and I have.) I made a book cover out of Amazon’s envelope and added some facts about the Amazon River on the recto side. Facts such as the first European to explore the Amazon starting from Peru and floating all the way to the Atlantic (Francisco de Orellana, Spanish); why the Amazon is called the Amazon (de Orellana’s crew was attacked by warriors, including many females, which reminded de Orellana of the Amazons in Greek myths), and the direction the Amazon flowed 15,000,000 years ago (west). The Amazon Book is 100 pages, A6, with red endpapers, a cover made of an Amazon (the company) envelope, and blank except for small tidbits of information about the river that was, about 60,000,000 years ago, connected to the Congo, the second largest river by volume after the Amazon. October is, according to one Youtube creating maniac (Evan Monsma), Building Days in which you build something –anything– everyday for one 31-day month to build, among other things, confidence in your own abilities. (It is also the month of my high school girlfriend's birth.) I am building books, of course, but also made a drawing,  and a podcast. Several books in October are made up of leftovers, scraps, and unevenly cut pieces from my To Be (Possibly) Used in the Future pile of leftovers, scraps, and other pieces. I shall display some of them in our next podcast. Fiction I’m editing one novel (The Nuns of Nanao) while writing the final chapters of another novel (Growing Slurry). Doing both is complicated as the stories, characters, situations, places, and outcomes are all different. I think I’m going to concentrate on The Nuns of Nanao as this novel is finished except for clearing up misspellings, wrong words used, plot holes, and clichés; i.e. the regular stuff writers have to do to make their work better.  But on the other pen (keyboard? hand?), I just had an epiphany about the ending of Growing Slurry (my Moby-Dick inspired novel about a forensic certified public accountant meeting a homeless murderer in a character-driven plot that concentrates on memories, the unknown, and, of course, a kind of love) that clicked so well I’m outlining it before I forget it and before I get back to editing The Nuns of Nanao. And Facebook reminded me that I started a novel Ten Years Ago! that I have as yet to finish (a Don Quixote-inspired detective novel called Caraculiambro, the first 100 pages I like, but have yet to finish; and the plot might be too complicated for my feeble brain.) Video I have yet to drop a new video, but there are three in the works. Stay tuned. Subscribe. And I promise to upload more in the future. Tedorigawa Bookmakers on Youtube.

Bookbinding You might be happy to know that you have two books to check out this week. Two books of varying quality and ingenuity (or semi-inventiveness), but both useful (hopefully to you). First, the complete Woven Kanazawa with Useful (?) Japanese Phrases. About 100 pages with the phrases you can use throughout the Japanese-speaking world. Last week I showed you the incomplete cover. This week: The complete book! An exposed spine, link stitching, muted endpapers, but a cover made of cut-up Manila files and woven back together. With useful phrases such as “Where’s a pharmacy?” (薬局はどこですか) and “See you next year!” (また来年!) with transliterations so those of us who can’t read Japanese can pronounce them. (Yak-kyoku wa doko des ka and mata rai-nen, respectively, if you’re wondering.) Second, the complete third segment of Marcel Proust’s Guermantes Way. The second segment has about 120 pages. The third segment has over 200! The first segment, hastily slapped together with no regard to history or continuity, has 80. If I planned this out properly (or with a healthy dose of OCD), each segment would have had 160 pages - keep in mind the first segment starts 80 pages into the novel, which I read on my iPhone (not recommended).  The third and final segment is A5 in size, using the French link stitch, which came out too loose, in my opinion. But the real innovation here is the cover. It’s made of a clear plastic file, so, naturally, the cover is clear, too. The first thing you see is the first page, which has two photos. The top photo is a manuscript page marked up (with a doodle) by Proust. The lower photo is Proust himself looking sardonic and wise. There are no endpapers as the cover is sewn into the textblock via the French link stitch system. The next clear-file cover I use will probably be a Coptic binding, which tends to be tighter and opens the book wider. Or, which makes more sense, re-sew it using the French link stitch until I get it right; practice, I have been told, makes perfect. In my case, however, practice takes time. And might lead to improvement. I hope so.   Fiction Having finished editing Molly Bright, I have jumped into too many other fictional writing activities. First on the Too Many list is finishing Growing Slurry. Second, and pushing Growing Slurry onto the back burner, is editing The Nuns of Nanao, your typical transmigration of the souls of WWII-era Soviet tank crews from their deaths in Stalingrad in 1943 to Brighton Beach in New York and the subsequent second migration of the commander into a younger man novel. The younger man (ironically nicknamed The Russian because he isn’t) seeks out the commander’s possibly dead Stalingrad-era girlfriend. In Yokohama, of course. In the present day. I guess the sub-title should be A Transmigration Love Story. But it’s the love story that reincarnates, if the possibly dead girlfriend is found, not the people.  Third on the Too Many list is printing Molly Bright. Everything has to be checked: chapter title placement, page alignment, captions, and, as I’m checking, I’m also reading the text, so changes are made; this is a sort of final edit which takes time, as you can imagine. I could send my beta reader a PDF, but I know he’d prefer a Real Book™ as he’s a real book kind of guy. Video Part One of Woven Kanazawa is here. Part Two is here. A total of six minutes for your viewing pleasure if you’re a YouTube user. And want to watch me weave a book cover.

Bookbinding I created three covers for two as-yet unplanned books. All three are woven. The idea of the woven book cover came when I was cleaning out my stockpile of To Be Used in the Future material aka junk pile. About 15 years ago a friend abandoned Japan and gave me a ton of manila files. He kept teaching material in them. Everything from a very general Environment to a more specific Canadian holiday activities. I have used a few, maybe two, of these files as book boards. They are lightweight, flexible, and available. But I have a ton more. For some reason I sliced three up into strips. Then wove the strips back into a solid form. Thus creating a woven book cover. I’m not one to case in a blank text block. I understand bookbinders who don’t care about what the text block is, they want to create well-made, handcrafted blank notebooks. I like words. So, for one of the woven book covers, I created a semi-blank book. Semi-blank because the recto side of the pages has, in two languages (English and Japanese), useful (?) phrases. Now, as you probably know, Japanese uses three (or four) writing systems: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. 本 is kanji. ほん is hiragana. ホン is katakana. All three are pronounced hon. The kanji usually means book. But it can also mean, depending on the rest of the sentence: origin, source, base, basis, foundation, root, or cause. The fourth Japanese writing system is called romaji. Romaji is Japanese words written using Latin letters. For example, hon is romaji for 本, ほん, and ホン. For people studying Japanese, first they have to learn how to pronounce the kanji, hiragana, and katakana. There are 46 hiragana, 46 katakana characters, and about 46,000 kanji, of which about 3,000 are usually used. Whew. In my semi-blank notebook with useful Japanese phrases, the romaji is first, so people know how to pronounce the next sentence, which is in the normal Japanese syllabary. After that is the English equivalent. For example:  Tei-nen-go mo Kanazawa ni sume-ru to omoimas ka? 定年後も金沢に住めると思いますか？ Do you think I can live in Kanazawa after I retire? Fiction I finished editing Molly Bright, although are writers ever finished editing a book? (Also finished reading the unfinished The Pale King by David Foster Wallace and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen because it’s her 250th birthday.) Made it much better, in my opinion, as what happens early in the novel reverberates toward the end of the novel; a circle of ideas, as it were. For example, Molly meets a vagabond who makes chairs (Arisa). Molly mentions, early in the book, she’d like to make chairs, too. Molly gets fired from her job. By the end of the book, she ends up learning from Arisa about life, living on the edge, and, coincidentally, how to make chairs. A small detail not related to the main plot, but it makes Molly more human and gives the book more of a closure (unlike The Pale King which just ends with no loose threads explained). Video Video up about Sewing for a Blank Notebook is up for your viewing  pleasure.

Bookbinding I cased in two books in the last week. One, The Kenrokuen Souvenir Notebook, is an A6 (pocketbook-size) mostly blank notebook. The recto pages (right side) contain really short Japanese lessons; translations of useful (?) words you might need while being a non-Japanese tourist in Kanazawa. The verso pages (left side) are lined for your writing pleasure. A video of the pages being printed and folded is available here. A video of Kenrokuen Souvenir Notebook being cased in will appear semi-shortly. I mean well within this year. I hope. The cover has two outdents: a circle and a bar on the front to distinguish it from the back, which has no such design element. The second book was, in my estimation, sloppily done. The textblock is crooked on the cover, the endpapers sits cattywampus on the textblock, and the cover was hastily thrown together. The cover itself was meant to convey Marcel Proust in Paris. But it doesn’t; it portrays a man straight out of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Paris. The content, however, is the important part of this book. It is 200 pages liberated from Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way. I cannot read Proust on my laptop or iPhone. I need to read a Real Book™. So I print out my Project Gutenberg download. I print them in editions of about 100-200 pages instead of all at once. Why? Easier to carry. I mark up the printed version with notes, dates of completion, circles, lines circling back to related passages, and hundreds of thousands of question marks.  Fiction I continue to edit Molly Bright, write on Growing Slurry, and procrastinate on a hundred other writing projects. These procrastinate-linked projects include; three mystery/detective novels set in Kanazawa, one literary detective novel set in Seattle, one futuristic dystopian novel, and six English textbooks (three for specialized mechanical engineers, and salemen, one for medical students, and two for general university students). Video A less-than four-minute flick (viewable here) about printing and folding an A6-size semi-blank notebook. It’s semi-blank because the left (verso) page has lines on it for writing notes of your trip. And the right (recto) page has words or phrases in Japanese and English, possibly useful. For example, at the bottom of page 3 is:  お金 — o-kane – money Now, 金 alone can mean gold, money, iron, or metal depending on the context. 金 can be pronounced kin, kon, kane or kana, also depending on the context. For example, the 金 in 金沢 (Kanazawa) is pronounced kana and means gold. But with the お in front of it, it is pronounced okane and means money. As an aside, 金髪 is pronounced kinpatsu and means blonde hair. 髪 is pronounced kami and hatsu and means hair. But you’re not going to get this level of Japanese language education in either the four-minute video or the actual Real Book™ because this blog doesn’t teach Japanese, except as it applies to either bookbinding or fiction. Or, obviously, a video.

Bookbinding About two months ago, probably longer, I folded two sets of A5 sheets of paper in order to make two A6 notebooks (blank). Those signatures sat on my workbench for those months,  unfinished. I took a short trip to another part of Japan, visited friends, recharged my passion for living, and came back to Kanazawa (in a heavy rainstorm. I actually left Kanazawa in a heavy rainstorm, too.)  After a couple of days relaxing from my not-necessarily relaxing vacation, I started to work on those two books and finished them today.  The first one is a gift for a co-worker. It’s A6 with seven signatures of four folios each. It has my co-worker’s name on the front and her family name on the spine. It has page numbers and a ninja in various situations (left and right bottom and top corners.) Plus, a couple of shots of a local famous garden (Kenrokuen, if you’re interested). Plus, a very small, black and white, artsy photo of me that you can barely tell who it is. The second blank notebook is similar: seven signatures of four folios each, but no page numbers or other decorations save for a photo of a local river (the Saigawa, if you’re interested). This one is called The Saigawa Committee Notebook for no apparent reason. Another future notebook will be called The Spanish Exploration Committee of the Saigawa Notebook. On both of these, I practiced printing the title on the spine as my two other unfinished projects require it. Yes, after these two books sat on my workbench for a couple of months, I have two more unfinished projects.  Read on.   Fiction Speaking of not finished, incomplete, and shockingly surprised, I thought I had two novels that would be of interest to two people. The first friend is reading Moby Dick, and I wrote a novel called Growing Slurry, which has a heavy Moby Dick influence. Both main characters are re-reading the Melville novel; several chapters of Growing Slurry copy the style of different Moby Dick chapters, and one character is searching for a mysterious person (not a whale). I thought I would print, bind Growing Slurry, and give my friend the book. To my surprise, I hadn’t finished writing Growing Slurry! I thought I had. In my brain, I’m sure I had. So now I’m writing it in order to give it to the friend who is reading Moby Dick. My other friend lives where my novel Molly Bright begins (Miyazaki, if you’re interested), and I wanted him to read it and critique it so I can improve it. I opened it on my computer, read through it – scanned and skimmed it, really – and discovered — to my horror! — that I hadn’t finished it either! My oh my. Now I have to finish two novels that I thought I already finished. Besides the two I know I have finished, but want to (Caraculiambro and Merengue, if you’re interested). Video And, yes, I have film footage of a couple of books that I have bound that I have not yet made into a YouTube video for your viewing pleasure. Incomplete, again! Goodness, am I that lazy? Or that busy?  

Bookbinding                             This week in bookbinding, I made an A6-size blank notebook with a relatively unique cover. First, the book is six signatures with four folios each. It’s called The Complete Saigawa Exploration Committee Notebook. In both Japanese (犀川探検委員会全集) and, of course, English for you non-Japanese speakers/readers. The Saigawa is one of two big rivers that flow through Kanazawa (the other being the Asano river, meaning shallow river.) But the point of this book is the cover. First, it has a flap that goes over the front edge, but it’s not tied down. It covers about 2/3rds of the back cover, keeping the pages protected. Second, it is mostly green, as is the thread. On the front cover are two decorative bits. First, a wide vertical band of colorful red-blue-black-white Japanese-style chiyogami. But on top of the chiyogami is a wider, thin, green, lacy paper that is only glued down on the inside; the part that covers the front flaps freely. The endpapers on the back are greenish-red-yellow chiyogami with birds. The endpapers on the front are the same colorful chiyogami as on the front cover and the same bird chiyogami.  Fiction I have just started writing again after the trauma of two+ months ago. However, I am looking at two unfinished novels. One is The Merengue Dancer and the other is Caraculiambro.  I started The Merengue Dancer maybe three or four years ago. Merengue is a character from my novel Molly Bright. In that novel, he plays a free-spirited Japanese man who was a former company employee. He helps Molly and other vagabonds find a kidnapped physicist when the Japanese police aren’t interested. In Merengue, we learn how he came to be a free-spirited person. I started Caraculiambro maybe ten years ago. Maybe more. The name comes from Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He is a giant Don Quixote is going to fight, defeat, and give to his lady friend, Dulcinea del Toboso. Like Dulcinea, Caraculiambro is a figment of Don Quixote’s imagination; he never appears in the novel. He’s only talked about. In Caraculiambro, he is a giant, driven out of his hometown (Olympia), and he becomes a private detective in the town of S—, which he does not wish to identify (straight from Don Quixote, the novel.). The first character he comes across in the opening scene is a character very much like Don Quixote. He investigates a murder, a case of fraud, a conspiracy involving real estate, and the death of a character very much like Don Quixote. Video The Complete Saigawa Exploration Committee Notebook can be seen being folded and sewn (mostly) here. It is the longest video I have sprung on you, my listeners, at almost 14 minutes. I do a lot of talking and bookbinding on it, but it’s not packed with information. Please enjoy.

Bookbinding This is the first book I’ve bound in a couple of three-four months; maybe more. It’s  A5, five signatures of five folios each. It is unique in that it has two endpapers on the front and back. The second endpaper is not glued to the cover but it looks nice.  When I first made this book (I made it twice), the thread got caught on the cover but I didn’t notice it until I was finished. I wondered why the stitching on the cover was loose until I opened the book and found a large thread relaxing between pages. I untied the whole book and started over. Even adjusted a few sewing holes that I didn’t like the first time. You can see these on the photos.  Fiction I’ve written a short story of about 13 pages titled Raul’s Paris Disneyland Farewell Party. Raul and Marcella work for the same company but in different offices (Raul is in Spain, Marcella in Morocco) but the company is  going belly-up. Raul wants a farewell party. He invites Marcella and an unnamed narrator who flies in from Tokyo. While enjoying a whiskey in a small, well-lit café in Madrid, Raul meets Odette in an unusual way. The four of them meet in Paris, get a hotel in Guermantes Village because it’s near Disneyland, and proceed to get drunk. It is influenced by Proust’s Swann’s Way and Guermantes Way, which I didn’t know was near Disneyland so I incorporated the mouse into the short story. Video For your view pleasure I have two short (less than two minutes) videos up on YouTube about me cutting files to use as book boards. I have lots of files. Many, many, many files. Both my wife and were teachers and collected a huge amount of files during our years together. The videos can be found here and here.

Life I have told you in the past that I had a relative who had a terminal disease and that I was taking care of her. That relative has died. That relative was my wife. We met when she was 23, and she passed away at 63. She passed away in May of this year. We were married for 31 years, but had a lively and romantic life together for almost 40 years. Fortunately, we also had two wonderful children who took care of me for the last month. I have a lot of memories (good and bad) to work through. And a lot of thinking to do about the future. However, in the arena of bookbinding and fiction writing, I have done nothing for the last month. This podcast, Episode 312, is the first thing I’ve done in the last month related to either of this podcast's topics. Bear with me. I will be back soon. Take care.  

Bookbinding This week or last, can’t remember, I made a sunny yellow book called Solaris Libri. The original name was the Sun Book, to go along with the Snowbank Book and the Earth Book, but decided to jazz I it up a little bit by throwing in Google’s Latin translation for Sun Book. The idea was I would make the book and then put it in the sun. Originally, I would just drop it in the garden and let nature take its course. But that meant it wouldn’t be the Sun book but the weather book. So I taped Solaris Libri to a window. Also originally, Solaris Libri would spend, like the Earth Book, a month in the outdoors. Upon reflection, I decided six months would be better as one month is barely a blip in the life of the sun or the Earth’s rotation around it.  I put markers on the cover so if the sun causes the cover to fade, we can still see the original color when the markers are taken off. One marker is over the title on the front cover; another is horizontal over the top of the back cover; a third is perpendicular to the title. Hopefully, the non-faded parts will look stylish and artistic compared to the faded parts and will give it an added accent of unique-ness. Solaris Libri is A6 in size (pocketbook size for you Americans), and 100 blank pages, like its partner, the Earth Book. It has a yellow cover (like the sun), and floral endpapers (unlike the sun). I printed the title on the front of the book and, miraculously, on the spine as well.  Also in Bookbinding, I have three projects in various stages of progress, mostly the first one. The first project is Truckin’. I need to sew a coptic binding for Truckin’ which I wanted to send out this month but it will have to wait one more year (on my mother’s birthday. It’s been folded but no holes have been punched because I need to make a cover for it first as the cover is the first part of the sewing process in coptic binding. This project is in the preparation stage based primarily on my being busy do other things. Truckin’ is the book I will send to friends, artists, strangers to draw or write in, mail to a friend, until we have 100 pages filled.  The second project is the sewn board binding I learned about a month ago. I need to sew it, but life happened and time is being used up doing other things, like taking care of family members, paying taxes, and work. It sits on my desk next to my first project. I plan (famous last words) to work on it during Golden Week, a series of holidays in Japan starting April 29 and going to May 6 when most companies close up shop; many smaller stores and restaurants are also closed. My third project is probably dead on the ground. Pun intended. I wanted to make a book with coffee-ground colored paper, but I soaked the paper too long and they all fell apart. Is it salvageable? We shall see. Fiction In writing, I have discovered, along with millions of other writers, that research can bog you down. It can especially inhibit your writing if you have access to this new-fangled doohickey called The Internet. Several rabbit holes can be fallen into if you’re not careful. What I do, when writing The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver, is using the x key on my keyboard. If I’m in the groove and pounding out a chapter or two but get stuck on a particular fact that needs to be checked, I type a few capital xs to remind myself to check it out later, after I find myself greeting writer’s block with open arms.  This week I needed two things: A name of a lawyer-type Quaker person in New York in 1840 and the kind of jails they had at the same time. Rather than look up names or types of jails while writing about Polly’s story, I exed it and kept going. Later, I looked up Quaker names and holding cells. Pretty bleak, the cells. Especially since many were privately owned. Glad we got away from that situation, aren’t you? But what happened with the name is, I found one I liked and realized the character was good enough to have

Bookbinding I did something I should have done when I first started making books, but was too naive (dumb?) to do. I recommend new bookbinders do this activity.  I made three A6-sized blank notebooks with five signatures of five folios each for a total of 100 pages. They were made with two different hinge gaps and three different spine pieces. This was a mistake. They should have been made with three different hinge gaps instead of two. Why did I make three books like this? Again, just to see how they all turned out. Also, to learn more about hinge gaps — the space between the spine and the book board — and spine pieces. The Liszt/McCartney Notebook’s hinge gap was 5 mm. The spine piece was the size of the text block (6 mm). This, I discovered, is too small for both the spine piece and the hinge gap. However, it has been my go-to-size for the hinge gap for far too long. The Harrison/Handel Notebook’s hinge gap was 8.0 mm, and its spine piece was the size of the text block plus one book board. The book board was 2 mm. This was a good size; I liked it and will  remember these dimensions on my next book. My next book might well be Truckin’ which I’ll tell you about in a future episode, but for now, let it be known it is yet another experiment and deals with art with a capital A. Stay tuned. The Lennon/Mozart Notebook’s hinge gap was also 8.0 mm, but the spine piece was the size of the text block (6 mm) plus the size of two book boards (a total of 4 mm). This is the traditional measurement for the spine piece. However, I felt that it was too large. But the hinge gap was good.  For my next book, I will make the hinge gap 7 mm with the spine piece a text block and one book board to see if it is as good as the Harrison/Handel Notebook, or if 8.0 or larger is the way to go. I have seen binders using 9.5 mm hinge gaps (Sea Lemon). I think 9.5 mm might be good for larger books (B5 or more?). For an A6-sized pocketbook, I like 8.0 mm. Maybe 7.5 mm?  Who knows? That’s why bookbinding is such an Adventure, yes? Yes! Stay tuned for the next adventure. Fiction Naturally, I’ve been working on Agnes Grout. In one segment involving Polly, the Ashanti slave from what is now known as Ghana, I needed to introduce a new character: Cadwallader Milhous, a Quaker. And this has led me into Developing a Character. When first introduced, Cadwallader was simple. He was an info dump character. He was introduced to move the plot and nothing more. This didn’t sit well with me. I needed him to be more. I gave him the three requirements for a memorable character: language quirks and ticks, a body, and a motivation. Taking the body first, he was originally described as a tall, thin, angry man. He morphed into a rotund Benjamin-Franklin-ish fellow. Having a body kind of dictates how the character moves and movement can show the reader what the character means and desires. This is the least important attribute, but the writer needs to see her characters before she can use them in her novels. The language he uses has more tag questions than most people use: You’re Polly from Lowell, right? You want to be moving back to Africa, aren’t you? Plus, he interrupts himself a little bit: I’m from – we’re all from – Boston, you see?  His motivation, which he doesn’t express openly because that would make him an Info-Dump character, is to guide Polly through the labyrinth that is the US judicial system in the 1840s, which didn’t take too kindly to runaway slaves. Which Polly wasn’t, but she was the wrong skin tone to argue the point.  Visuals A video of the Three Books I made for your listening and watching pleasure is up on YouTube.  

Bookbinding In the last week, I have made four or five books of varying skill levels. Mostly, I made three books to test out various hinge gap spacing. Some people recommend one size, others another size. I will talk about those books in a future Tedorigawa Bookmakers podcast, so be sure to subscribe to hear that one. Also on a future podcast will be Solaris Libri (The Sun Book) that will be left out in the sun, the moon, and the stars (plus weather) for a month (30 days). I’m currently making this book (again, A6, five signatures, 100 pages). Both a future podcast and video! Exciting, yes? Yes! Today, I want to talk about my The Earth Book. The Earth Book was an A6-size book with, I think, five signatures of five folios each for about 100 blank pages. I buried this book in the back garden. Similar to the Snowbank Book that I buried in a snowbank when we had snow. You can see it get made, buried, and dug up on YouTube. Spoiler alert: it got wet. The Earth Book was buried for 20 days (March 10 to March 30, 2025). And just before recording this podcast for you, I dug it up. Did I bury it? To see what happened. What happened? As expected, it got wet. And dirty. What was expected was the 100 pages lumping together like a solid piece of paper. Plus, there was a gash in the front that might have been from me shoveling it out or from a vegan giant ancient worm intent on destroying the world. You guess is as good as mine.Now the Earth Book is sitting in a sunny spot, enjoying a refreshing beverage and waiting to dry out to see if it will be a useful (i.e. profitable) member of society. Fiction I’ve been doing three things in fiction: 1. writing (good), 2. editing (also good), and 3. formatting for epub (time-consuming).  Writing is mostly The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Making it more concise, more dramatic, more character-driven, and more suspenseful (I hope). Because of family matters, it is not going as quickly as I hoped, but it is moving forward. We are almost into the US Civil War (the one started in 1860). This requires a lot of research (i.e., Googling) about language and customs in the US pre-1860. Did you know, for example, that before the Civil War, most African-Americans/Black people identified themselves not by their skin color, but by their tribal affiliation. For example, one slave in Agnes says she’s Ashanti, not Ghanaian or African. Editing is me reading the books I read and running the pages through the free Grammarly online site. While probably grammatically correct, Grammarly seems to insist on clarity and, in my opinion, a kind of boring way of writing.  Formatting the books I want to upload is time-consuming and irritating because I have to upload them to iBooks (or another ebook reader) to see if they look okay, and often, they don’t, so I have to tweak them again. Hopefully, to the benefit of you, my reader. Visuals TDGB 45 Earth Book Pt 2 is up on my YouTube channel just waiting for you to watch it. Speaking of which, if you subscribe, YouTube will do all the work of letting you know a new video – just for you! – is available for your view pleasure.

Bookbinding In Episode 306, I showed you a French Link Stitch I made in January of this year. Well, this week I cased it in with book cloth I made last year and chiyogami Japanese endpapers. It’s still seven signatures of five folios each for about 140 pages, but now it’s enclosed in a nice cover. After casing in that book, creatively called Notebook January 2025, I made a similar book with a different name: Earth Book. I’ll talk more about Earth Book in the video section. It is five signatures of five folios each for 100 blank pages.  After casing in Notebook January 2025, I made another book called Blank Earth Book. (I might change the name to Clean Earth Book – is that a command or a description?) It will not be buried like its brother book, but will be displayed and available for use (and purchase). It is, like Earth Book, A6 in size, with five signatures of five folios each for 100 pages, and blank except for a title page and the Tedorigawa Bookmakers logo on the penultimate page. It was also sewn on cords (well, two cords), but I don’t know why. Maybe just to practice sewing on cords? It has not been cased in as of this podcast but is prepared for it as I’ve been looking for an appropriate endpaper. It might be mentioned in four weeks, as our next podcast is reserved for Earth Book. Fiction I continue to work on The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. This week, I saved her daughter’s life. My original plan was to have her die young in an accident. I wrote the scene of her death, but it didn’t feel right. I stepped away from the book to think about it. Both of her brothers get to live to be about 100 years old, so why does she have to die young? Because, as is mentioned in the novel, she’s touched? (Meaning, she has a mental problem that is never diagnosed in the book but is probably some form of autism.) So I rewrote the premonition Agnes has about her daughter’s death and substituted someone else. I believe it works out better, and we can expect to see some changes in the daughter. I’ve also tinkered with chapter titles. I’m leaning toward including the year. For example, now it has a chapter title like The Youngest Ever. I might change the chapter title to: The Youngest Ever 1820. I think this might make it easier for the reader to understand what’s going on and where in Agnes’ life she and her family are. What do you think? Video Earth Book (mentioned earlier) was created following Snowbank Book, where I made a small, cheap, disposable book out of scrap paper and tossed it in a snow bank for 48 hours to see what would happen to small, cheap, disposable books. Earth Book is more substantial. Five signatures of five folios, cased in with proper bookboards and plain white endpapers. Its destiny? To be buried in the earth for 20 days (March 10 to March 30). Earth Book is the subject of TDGB 45: Earth Book Pt One. Basically, it is me making the book and then burying it in the garden. Part Two will appear when I ressurect it, pull it from the earth, expose it to the elements on March 30th. You want to stay tuned for that, I’m sure.  

Bookbinding Two things happened last week. First, a family member fell sick. Second, I fell under the spell of norovirus, the stomach bug. Third, the family member physically fell and needed to be taken to the hospital; in the middle of the night. All of us are resting well. Needless to say, making a book was not my top priority.  But, having said that, to relax, I made a small B7 not-blank notebook with five signatures of four folios each. Not-blank because the paper was leftover school handouts with writing on one side. It was coptic-bound with a paper mailer that is used to send documents through the Japan Postal System: thick enough. More about this book in the Video section. Other than being ill (no fever but also no appetite), I was in no mood to get out of bed or deal with the joys and intricacies of bookbinding. I am now, though. Feeling much better. Fiction One thing a writer can do when they’re not feeling up to par is think. So I thought. About The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. I thought of ways to make it better. Ways to make it clearer to the reader what is going on. Ways to make it snappier not in a bon mot Frasier-Nyles repartee way, but snappier in a plot-and-dialog way. Having thought of all those things, now I have to start writing, re-writing, and rearranging the novel. One person who read the first 50-some pages encouraged me to continue as they want to learn more about Agnes, her family, and what happens to them. This is quite the encouragement; getting a reader to be so involved in an unfinished, unfamiliar story is a talent I’d like to have for all my books. Video I uploaded a two-minute (ish) video of me putting mull on a book. On, of all places, YouTube. Amazing, eh? With charming (?) music.  It’s called TDGB 43: Mulling the Signatures. All for your viewing pleasure.  Coming in soon! to a Youtube channel near you! is a video of the B7 not-so-blank notebook. It’s called Snowbank Book because after I made it (five signatures, coptic binding, cardboard cover — all caught on video), I put it in a snowbank to, uh, I guess, season it? Dampen its spirit? It’ll be in the snowbank for two days. When it comes out, I’ll figure out what the next step will be. Any suggestions?

Bookbinding Over the past few weeks, I’ve been binding quite a bit; not crazily, but more than usual. I made three A6 (pocketbook)-sized blank notebooks with between 140 and 160 pages. I’ve used kettle stitches and French link stitches; mostly to practice the French link stitch which I think looks nice on an open spine (similar to the Coptic stitch) but is more inspiring? creative inducing? artistic? Maybe all three at the same time. Let me know which you prefer when sewing a few signatures together. The other reason I’m throwing myself into more bookbinding is to create covers. In the past, I have made covers with the titles on the front and the spine. I have made covers out of recycled paper. Now, I want to experiment with an Islamic cover. A few years ago, I made some Islamic covers but that was in the past. I need to renew my Islamic cover skills. Plus, I think they look good, especially on smaller books where people can shove receipts, memorabilia, and other memos they write on scraps of paper and insert them in their notebooks. Fiction The Post-humous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver (the title alone is a short story in itself) progresses as we speak (or as you read). Agnes is meeting a few political and business leaders. She is also having visions of people dying violent deaths which she can’t understand. Her children are growing up and making their marks in the world, kind of. Ishmael, her elder son, will be a shipmaker/carpenter/nice guy who helps people in trouble. Marlowe, her second son, is destined to be an artist working primarily in Vienna in the early 1900s (aka when Klimt and Schiele worked, lived, and died — 1918, the both of them). Rebecca, her daughter, will succeed as a weaver, like her mother, but without the visions of the future but with the talent of making complex patterns seem easy. Plus, the Oregon Duo of Feeding Vicki’s Corpse and The City of Cocks will be available soon, I hope. I haven’t uploaded anything anywhere but I wonder if the title of the second book is going to cause the gatekeepers problems, even though the final word is in some versions of the Bible and is the technical term for those in the chicken-breeding business. I’ve proofread The City of Cocks and am formatting it this week. I proofread Feeding Vicki’s Corpse. As I proofread, I’m also making dramatic or clarifying changes. Feeding Vicki’s Corpse requires a bit of big changes. Major backstory has to be addressed. Both novels take place in a small town in Oregon about twenty years apart. The protagonist in Feeding Vicki’s Corpse helps the local police solve a murder and a rape. The crime in The City of Cocks is a random murder. Video (killed the radio star) TDGB 41 is me attempting to sew a case-in book without skipping too much. A ten-minute video of me fumbling through sewing a kettle stitch requires a bit of dialog and I have included more. Not dialogs, but a monolog as I’m the only one talking. If you’re interested in bookbinding, please check out Tedorigawa Bookmakers Video.

Bookbinding In January 2025, I made my second attempt at a French link stitch on a 160-page, A6-size blank notebook called, appropriately enough, The 2025 Blank 160-page French Link Stitch Notebook. It has eight signatures of five folios each for a total of 160 pages; the title page and the Tedorigawa logo use two of the pages. The other 158 pages are blank.  I used an interesting scrap of paper I found in my To Be Used Later pile. I glued this scrap to a thin upcycled envelope to make the front and back covers. I found a chiyogami endpaper, also in the To Be Used Later pile for the endpapers. I think the cover paper and the endpapers work well together; one is mostly abstract while the other is more realistic (but not overly realistic as are most chiyogami papers.) Finally, I sewed it all together using a French link stitch with blue thread. For the end stations of the signatures I used a kettle stitch.  The end sections use a simple kettle stitch but on future French link stitch notebooks, I’m going with the more traditional style which I believe looks a tad better. Other than the end sections completed with the traditional style, what else am I going to change? Possibly to make the sewing tighter and the book less loose. But then I say that about everything I sew from Coptic-bound books to jeans.   Fiction I continue to work on and confuse myself with The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout, Death Weaver. Two plot arches are shaping up. One, Agnes sees visions of people who are about to die or be injured or people who kill someone. Two, her children grow, become independent, and make their mark on society (or societies, in one case). She observes their growth but also “sees” in her trances their deaths, which she can’t prevent or warn. A complication, at least for me as I’m writing this novel, is coordinating Agnes and her children’s lives with real life in a sort of Forrest Gumpy kind of way. Unlike Forrest, Agnes is not the center of attention for most of the historic action that takes place. For example, she knows the grandmother of the person who assassinates a US president but not the actual assassin. She has a very tenuous connection with another killer who happens to be a greatx3 or 4 child of a person she used to work with. A grand scope of a couple of centuries of change surrounds this novel; quite unusual for me. Most of my novels deal with one or two people and truncated time frames. Heart of November, for example, takes place in one month and concentrates on three or four people (with lots of minor characters, of course), Video My updated Tedorigawa Bookmakers YouTube channel. Today’s video is me punching holes in paper for your tactile enjoyment. This time, I don’t shove the awl through my thumb. Success! TDGB Video 40 Punching Holes.

Bookbinding Playing around with DaVinci and Gemini I requested a nun with a smirk on her face in an abandoned village. And got this lady with an uncharacteristic moon hovering above her head, a detail a living artist would not have included. I turned her into a 50-page, A5-ish notebook. The recto page is 10x10mm graph paper. Verso is lined. I used Coptic binding with green thread. The cover has three or four papers from my To Use bin under my workbench. As you can see the cover includes: 1. A very thin towel (called tenugui in Japan) turned into book cloth with the help of fusuma paper and glue with what could be called clouds or waves or fans. They are predominantly blue with shades of white; 2. A red vaguely Indian-designed thicker paper with a delightful design in gold; 3. A light blue slab of book cloth that has been hanging around in my workspace for at least a decade; 4. A dark green book cloth that has accompanied the blue book cloth for its entire life;5. A rabbit offering a monkey a sip of water or about to scrub the monkey’s back (as they’re in water and the monkey has his or her back to the rabbit.) 6. And a red strap with a dandelion-style brush at the end. The back has a similar motif.  The blue fan-shell-cloud cloth is larger; the blue book cloth is thinner; the red & gold cloth is smaller and vertical rather than horizontal; the green book cloth is much bigger; and the monkey is sans rabbit and smaller. All in all, a nice activity that is useful as well. The only change I would make if I were to labor over Grandma again would be to add pages. Fifty is too few. One hundred feels about right. Fiction I continue to be puzzled as I work through The Posthumous Autobiography of the WidowAgnes Grout, Death Weaver. First, this book juggles six major characters (so far) and progresses through about 200 years of life. Agnes, herself, lives to be about 215, mas o menos. I’ve done quite a bit of online research into such topics as women’s underwear and public transportation in the early 1800s.  Video The first video is my gluing up the cover of a French link stitch book. French Link Stitch. The second is a video of me writing Agnes Grout. If you’re a writer, you’ll understand the sentiment in George Stenson: Writing.  Coming soon, I hope, a video of me sewing the French Link Stitch blank notebook. Stay tuned!