Well.....what can I say, but if you read the first part....here....I thought this would take a couple of weeks - I was wrong.
However, the book I was dreading is finally done. I say dreading because of the state of the pages i was given.
The previous temporary Rose Seder binding had been stuffed with pages, all glued in in-properly cockled, boards glued to pages, all of the margins ignored!, and just a bit of mess really.
First it had to be broken up, and those folds that could were sewn on stubbs. Pages that were not folds were gaurded, the boards were removed and some beautiful caligraphy was reframed using more appropriate paper and japanese tissue. Pages were joined into folds, and sewn onto stubbs, and some artwork that had been very poorly glued in were removed, carefully seperated and remounted on the appropriate paper.All of this was rather nerve racking because all the artwork inside is completely original and irreplaceable, so...slowly slowly.
The signatures had to be individually gilded as there were many parts that needed gaurding compensation , were of different sizes, thickness, and as I mentioned before, some leaves were laminated to museum board , so doing it all at once was not an option....bad news for me, and for my gold.
We haven't even got to the binding yet.....a stubb binding, so all stubbs are sewn using an unsupported french link. Because of the size of the book(15x12x2) I knew I was probably going to have to split the binding up into 3 parts, as I wanted to use goat, and there aren't many skins about in a 1st quality large enough to do the whole thing in one go. Besides, I think it worked better that way.
Its backed in the normal way, lined, it got a 3/4 hollow, a cartonnage spine, finished with a paper cape which runs along the spine and over each edge about 2 inches which I will use along with the leather to attach the boards.The spine was covered and head caps made in the normal manner, the boards made up, lined and covered , and only turned-in along the spine edge.
I made several designs on paper, all were variations on circular straight line tooled patterns, chose the simplest( and best i think!). Have it on hand and ready to go before you cover, that way your blind tooled lines will go a lot better.The gold work took 2 days, 1 board a day, then they were attached and turned-in.
As you can see a leather joint was put in, in the french manner, and doublure of white calfskin could be inlaid.
Further tooling around the edges of the doublure was completed, and finally a goatskin suede laid down on the fly and trimmed.
After some simple tooling on the spine, a box was constructed with one my favorite additions of an outer wall along the trays.
The Rose Seder books will be on display at the NYPL from April 3rd to the 22nd for Passover, although possibly not this one, but they are worth a look - this is the forth.
All said and done....I like it....it was very hard to make ....took way too long, and came at a bad time .But I'm back.......and badder than ever!
