Leather Memory Album

 

I made this for a retiring Carleton College Music professor.  I took a big piece of leather to my favorite letterpress guy who does work for both colleges (St. Olaf and Carleton), so he had the college seal. He letterpressed the Carleton seal on the leather, with which I then covered the boards of the album. Unfortunately, the picture of the seal is on my external hard drive (with all of my photos from the last 6 years that Doug dropped and has promised to take to somebody to retrieve my photos and 10,000 music CDs...), so you'll just have to imagine how beautiful the letterpressed leather looks. Then I lined the boards with that pretty black stringy paper, and added a fly sheet with torn pieces of music in it. The album is filled with letters to Phillip from former students and colleagues. I was just commissioned to make another for another prof retiring in the spring. Should be fun!

Minding Our Own Business

I grab these books with picture endsheets (and this one even has the book jacket!) whenever I find them. This one I ripped out the text block and rebound with my own letterpressed lined blank pages.  A long time ago I was trying to figure out how to make hand bound journals with lined pages. All I could find to purchase online were single sheets. To do a sewn book, you need large sheets of paper to fold down to make a "signature". You sew several signatures together then attach your book covers.
Anyway, I couldn't find any large sheets of lined paper, so I had a print shop make a die of lines and then I befriended this great guy in Northfield, MN who had letterpresses. I spent an evening with him printing big sheets of my lined paper. He was so good at perfecting the print - he took a lot of time adjusting the height of the die so that it would make an even print. I love watching someone who is really really good at what they do.