When I say sweatshop, that’s exactly what I mean – it’s rapidly approaching 50 C outside and in here it’s only a little cooler. Maybe that’s why I chose this pretty purpley-navy color for Volume 3’s cover. Nice, huh? Makes you feel all breezy and cool.

The books I make are flat-backed case-bound hardbacks. A case-bound book is made in two separate sections, consisting of a cover and a text block, then the two are glued together and live happily ever after as a book. Today I am going to use lots of photos to show you how a cover gets put together.

Here we have a piece of the painted paper I use for a cover:

 

The paint I use is gouache, in a very thin wash, which looks like watercolor. After it’s dried, the paper gets printed and varnished, which makes it all shiny and nice. Then it’s ready for cardboard backing.

Cardboard is a bit of an issue. I haven’t been able to find the real bookmaker’s cardboard, which is called chipboard and looks like the paper version of plywood, so I use cereal box cardboard glued together in a double thickness. Someday someone will dissect one of my books and uncover the Arabic logo for Kellog’s All-Bran.

            Anyway, the paper gets glued very carefully to the ex-All-Bran box, and rubbed down with an old sock and a toy rolling pin to eliminate bubbles. The areas where folds and corners are get scored, slit, or trimmed away. And then it looks like this:

 

After that’s dry I glue the edges down, and put in the endpapers. I like my endpapers, even though they never come out exactly even; I use a heavyweight drawing paper sold at the stationary shop down the street, and it has a nice creamy feel to it, which I think welcomes you, the reader, into the book in a cordial way. Someday I will figure out a way to make this marbled, and it will be even nicer.

After the endpapers are dry, I fold the cover on the crease lines so the book will have a nice hinge to it. And here it how it looks when the cover is all ready to go:

 

So that’s what I’ve been doing this week. Next week: the even more exciting process of making the innards!