I'm prone to sudden enthusiasms, but never has anything captured my fancy as suddenly and strongly as bookbinding. Well maybe one other thing, but that's a story for another day…
Ever since the class I took at J.C. Campbell a few weeks ago, I've thought about nothing but bookbinding. I bind books in my sleep. Eventually I want to incorporate handwoven cloth in my books, but for now I just want to master the coptic stitch in sewn bindings. I save my junk mail and cereal boxes, and practice the coptic stitch over and over on this recycled material. My first few attempts were pretty terrible. I cut the covers too small, my stitches were inconsistent, etc., etc. But now they're getting better. The book in the above picture sports a cover from a frozen pizza box––you can just see the pepperoni. In the picture that follows, the book on the bottom of this stack is my latest one; I rescued the pages from three twenty-year-old notebooks, and the cover is yesterday morning's Kashi cereal box. I think the stitches are almost ready to go out in public.