◦◦◦ a break from August break ◦◦◦

Earlier in the summer I found myself in a meeting about funding for the arts, I always find it quite hard to absorb so much information and then have the wonder of what to do with it all. Meetings like this can be really great for meeting other creatives and I met Martin who was interested in my book making and he kindly commissioned me to make a limited edition of ten books. He had a friend who had sadly passed away and had left a little sheaf of pages of writing all about the building of a bicycle. Martin wanted to turn the flimsy pages into something more substantial but all on a budget. So we had a meeting and came to some decisions and the following images are what we came up with. The original pages were printed on what appeared to be a dot matrix printer in 1995. I didn't want to change the look of this at all as it had so obviously been designed by the author as he chose and to replicate these kinds of texts can be time consuming and costly. So, I scanned all the pages, with their creases and dust and reproduced them exactly.

Then I joined and collated all the spreads and sewed them up into the book blocks. This was then bound into plain white paper covered boards. I then took a selection of bike parts; a spanner, a few cogs, some bolts, a spoke etc... These were begged and borrowed from a bike shop and were rather greasy and black. For my plan they had to be absolutely clean, so I covered them in tomato ketchup over night and washed them in the morning which made them silver and shiny like new. A brilliant tip that worked beautifully. Mentally file it, it will serve you well.

Then I used my nipping press to deboss the bike parts into the cover.

It's not exactly easy trying to show you these white on white images. Imagine white velvety covers with very tactile shapes with every tiny detail pressed into the covers. They felt so crisp. I was very pleased with the result and so was my client Martin. I did an edition of 10 with 2 artist's proofs. Each book had a unique debossed cover and was numbered as an edition.

It was really nice to be able to help Martin achieve his dream of getting something nice done with his friend's work. And I should think somewhere his friend would be very touched too.