This morning I’m making a model of the “Concertina Cabaret” structure in Michael Jacobs’ latest book, Books Unbound. Except for my painted endpapers and the tomato red cover papers (and perhaps the olive green pieces), these are not familiar colors. Actually, I don’t know what “my” colors are anymore; the colors in the painted endpapers are pretty new to me still. But I digress.
The reason I took this picture is to preserve that feeling of satisfaction at this point in the process: all the pieces are prepared and I’m ready to begin constructing the book — each piece grain identified, papers measured, re-measured, cut, labeled. At this point — and this is true even if I’m constructing a book whose structure I’ve worked out on my own — it almost feels like I’ve constructed a kit, and it only remains to fit slot A into sleeve B, etc. It feels this way even though I know from bitter experience that at some point in the process it will become clear that slot A will never fit into sleeve B because piece C was cut 1/8″ too short, or because I forgot to allow for the width of the fold X, or … The possibilities for miscalculation are endless.
Foreknowledge notwithstanding, the feeling of satisfaction at this point in the process remains. To paraphrase Rona in “The Twenty-fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”, “It’s my favorite moment in the book.”Fortunately, as with Rona at the spelling bee, I have more than one “favorite moment” in the making of a book.