Victorine Bound

I just completed a custom book order for artist Tricia Sellmer. She asked me to bind 24 copies of her work, Victorine Meurent Erased, which combines Tricia's artwork and writings about 19th century artist Victorine Meurent.

For this project, I used a handmade abaca and comfrey paper for the cover, and bound it using a Japanese stab binding.

Quite a lot of the work in doing a custom binding goes into planning and working out the dimensions of a design. Here, I've finished cutting and hand-tearing some of the covers:

And here, I'm getting ready to sew the cover and text together. At the top of the photo is an unbound copy of the text, showing some of Tricia's artwork.

And here are three of the finished books.

The covers were letterpress printed by Howard Glossop, and the text was printed by master printmaker Linda Jules. There weren't any extra copies, so I had to be very careful not to make any mistakes, like putting the text in upside down, or putting holes in the wrong places, or cutting the covers the wrong size, etc., etc., etc. Even with a seemingly simple binding like this, there are a surprising number of ways to mess it up, as there are so many little details to remember. Fortunately, there weren't any nasty surprises along the way.

I like how the cover of this book looks a bit like the face of a tombstone. Which fits, as Tricia's project was to unearth this forgotten artist.