Book Art: What We Reuse

If you are a longtime reader, you might have seen the post two years ago where I wrote about purchasing a pack of ten sheets of recycled handmade paper at the San Francisco Center for the Book Roadworks event. (If not, you can go to the link, above.) The paper was made by Jillian Bruschera of The Mobile Mill, and when I bought it I had no specific plans for it. I left it out for several months, hoping it would spark a project, and when it didn't, I finally put it away.


Until a few weeks ago. As I prepare more small books for the SF Zine Fest, I've been looking around the studio for materials to use. The paper came back into focus. I found a linoleum block that was partially cut as a demo for a class and decided to form a loose, mark-filled image around it to print on the paper. I also had some paper made with silver gum wrappers in it made by Beth Herrick from long, long ago, and decided to expand my proposed edition from 20 (each of the 10 original sheets cut in half) to possibly 30.


My theme would be sharing ideas. How we might have the same ones but not know each other, how after hearing another's idea we might transform it. That turned into a poem about friendships and how they are lost and found and changed, how an old friend, lost, is reused, in a sense, as a new friend. Friends, recycled. It was going to have laserprinted text, but it really called for metal type, which can also be reused.


The structure decided it wanted to be a Shorts book (page 35 in Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms), which yielded a pocket. To sew it to the cover, I folded the cover with a pleat in the center, as you would for a Two-Sewn-As-One (page 100). So it is a hybrid of the two bindings.


What would go in the pocket? I had some old card catalogue cards for the base or substrate. And I had a banker's box full of bags of collected ephemera (mentioned in this 2011 post). Now, to put these to use. I only managed to use up one bag. Mostly parking permits, tickets, and stamps.


The edition of  What We Reuse yielded 27 copies.


Available at nevermindtheart on Etsy, and at my SF Zine Fest table, September 4, County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Hope to see you there!


Comments

LuLu Badgley said…
Thank you for sharing this. Beautiful work