Category: book structures

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Tunnel Books — Links

I’m not a fan of tunnel books, but a current class assignment has led me to look at them more closely.

It’s often frustrating to look at images of tunnel books. You’re shown the cover, you see the sides, you see the sculptural aspects of the book, but only rarely do you get to see even an approximation of what one sees when one looks through the tunnel book.

Here are some of my favorite tunnel books that you can see online:

  • Roberta Lavadour’s Harvest Moon, a luminous view of the moon with layers of twig branches covering the main image.
  • A collaborative tunnel book made in Julie Chen’s class at Pyramid Atlantic. I like it that the square confines of the outer shape are breached.
  • Tara Bryan’s World Without End, with the story on the accordion panels and the images in the tunnel. At roughly 3″ x 3″, it seems a little small for comfortable tunnel viewing, but since the story is on the outside, maybe that’s not as important as it might be otherwise.
  • Ed Hutchin’s Grandma’s Closet — a great use of the tunnel structure. (Update Nov 2017: no longer on the internet except on Pinterest and as a rare book for sale.)
  • Peter and Donna Thomas’s awesome Ukelele Tunnel Book, part of a series of uekele books. The back of a ukelele was sawed off to allow for the tunnel structure. The entire series is here. Although I found this book first, I list it last, so that the rest of the list wouldn’t be disappointment.

I don’t like tunnel books as much as I like other book structures, I think because it functions more as a sculpture than a book. You get the whole picture at once, and time doesn’t play the part that it does in books whose pages have to be turned and whose images and words appear serially. In a tunnel book, there are more things to see as you look around more, but that’s true of paintings and sculptures.

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Concertina Cabaret revisited



Even though it’s been a month since I photographed all the pieces of the model I was making for Michael Jacobs’ structure, Concertina Cabaret, in Books Unbound … I did actually make the book that same day. I’m only just now getting around to photographing the model.

I used mostly Canson Mi-Tientes, sheets from the Fabriano Artistico artist’s journal (a nice book — the larger one — to have around for small pieces of good colored paper) and a few scrapbook paper scraps.

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Concertina Cabaret

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.

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The finished book


Here are two views of the finished book. The different colors on the front are the result of sanding through all the layers of paint on the distressed surface.

It was gratifying to make, although I’m not sure I’ll make another anytime soon. It’s rather small not particularly sturdy — not suitable for use as a carrying-around artist journal, for instance. It’s more of a library book. If I remember correctly, these Egyptian books were stored face-up with the fore-edge pointing out, and they had metal feet on the back cover to protect the cover from being scraped as they were being removed from or replaced on the shelf. So formal content would be more in keeping with the structure of the book, and the idea of supplying (let’s see: 12 signatures of 16 pages each equals) 192 pages of formal content is daunting!

But it is a very satisfying thing to hold in one’s hand.

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International Dunhuang Project

Click on the title of this post to visit an excellent source of information about the bookbinding structures found in the collection Dunhuang and other Silk Road manuscripts housed in the British Library. The information at this website is both extensive and well illustrated with both photographs and diagrams.