Books Made Without Glue

Le Corbusier LC6 Table

The production model of my hardback book looks more like the Le Corbusier LC 6 Table than a regular book. It’s held together with adhesive tapes and films rather than glue. When I was starting to make books in Los Angeles some of the best advice I received was about glues. I was acquainted with an engineer who’d been at NASA during the development of the Mercury craft and Hewlett Packard when the inkjet printer was being developed. He advised me on carefully matching glues to materials and testing the glues under different conditions. I held book spines under the hot air of a hairdryer and put them in the freezer to see how they’d hold up to extremes of temperature. I relied on heavy duty aerosol adhesives but after I found out how environmentally damaging spray glues are I no longer use glue at all. I use staples, wire and screws, adhesive films, and heavy duty double sided tape in the place of glue. The structure of my books is significantly different to books produced in factories. The signatures are wired together onto an ‘inner spine’ that’s taped onto an outer spine, and the covers are applied directly to the body of the book.

The conundrum I face when putting together samples and specifications for books to be manufactured in factories that make traditional books is that glue is the main structural component of these notebooks. I use unusual, textured materials that may not move smoothly along production lines and synthetic papers (environmentally friendly ones) that are polymers and may react badly to glues. The spines of factory made books are glued. Hardback books made in this way are really paperbacks in heavy jackets. The structural strength comes from the end pages being glued onto the cover boards. But gluing is unforgiving. I’ve been looking at ingenious and charming books that have been ruined by poor gluing: a clever fold out and wrap around construction paper cover that’s been destroyed by a glue that’s too strong for it, a smart diary that’s ruined by the buckling of a glued in vellum insert, and a cloth cover that’s slipped on the production line and is askew and unravelling. I don’t cover my books, their exoskeletons are exposed.

In 1999 an old fashioned quality bookbinding company called Acme published a paper on the problems with assembly line manufacturing of books. “What differentiates a good binding from a fair binding can usually be attributed to materials used and processes omitted plus binder’s skill,” wrote Acme’s owner, Paul Parisi. “The most important point I wish to make is that publishers are almost always more interested in the aesthetics of a binding than the structure.”

Frank Gehry’s Cardboard Book

A few weeks ago I saw this book at Architext in Potts Point. It’s the catalogue for an exhibition of Frank Gehry’s drawings that’s housed in a corrugated cardboard slipcase. It made me think of Frank Gehry’s corrugated cardboard furniture. I hope that the covers I’m making for my hardbound books will have the fluidity and goofy elegance of these chairs. I first saw the wiggle chair in a conference room at Skidmore Owings and Merrill in Chicago in the early 1990’s. There were several of Vitra’s architects chairs in the room, I can’t remember exactly which, but among strange and odd chairs it seemed infinitely stranger and odder, both improbable and inevitable. It’s 60 layers of laminated corrugated cardboard held together by hidden screws and fibreboard edging. It’s a deluxe object that sells for nearly a thousand dollars, but is rough and humble too.

Manufacturing In Australia

Three versions of my Chef’s waterproof notebook are going to be manufactured for the retail market in Australia and eventually sold internationally. At first the wholesaler thought that I could adapt my designs to be made up in a factory in Korea. I’ve been taking apart some of the books produced by this manufacturer and figuring out how they’ve been made. Some of the detailing is charming, particularly die-cut wraparound covers. But it’s apparent from studying the gluing that it’s hard to precisely apply to unusual materials with the kind of machinery that’s being used. I suggested looking for manufacturing options in Australia but it’s expensive to make up books in the traditional manner here. I’m still a novice at this but it’s been explained to me that a considerable part of the cost of book projects is in calibrating the machines for each project. So what if I completely change the structure of the books and find a way to manufacture the components and put them together that doesn’t require complex machines that need to be precisely calibrated?
I’ve been thinking about materials for covers and I’m drawn to neoprene, a synthetic form of rubber first manufactured in the 1930’s. It’s chemically inert and a good base for adhesives. It’s used for a lot of purposes now. If Sidney Bechet was buying a new clarinet today it would be likely to have joints sealed with neoprene.
A couple of weeks ago I went to an exhibition of Scandinavian jewellery at Becker Minty in Potts Point. There was a pendant that had once had a leather lace, which had perished and been replaced by a neoprene string. It got me thinking that a neoprene cover for a Chef’s notebook would be elegant and practical.
There’s a company called Blue Monkey that does custom projects, mostly wetsuits, that has a factory in South Australia. When I have the shells of the books made I’m going to approach them and see if they can make covers for them.

The Goldberg Inventor’s Logbook

Telegarden

My notebook production has two tiers. The Editions Ballard collection are the books that will always be produced, a fixed, reliable line of specific books: with the durable spirals, engineer’s tracing paper, and the waterproof books, made with Yupo. These are the ones photographed and listed in the ‘book types’ tab at the top of the page.

The second tier is my experimental line, sold only to private clients and a few stores in my neighbourhood. Editions Ballard is named for the telerobotics pioneer and explorer, Dr Robert Ballard, and the experimental line is named for another telerobotics pioneer, Ken Goldberg. He’s an old friend and the one who came up with the term bibliostructures. He invents robotic devices, for example a robotic arm that can be manipulated by many users, over the internet, and tested it with an art project called the telegarden. People used the robot arm to plant seeds in a garden plot, and water and weed the plot. I asked him to describe the notebook that he most wants.

“One notebook I’m always looking for is an ongoing log for all thoughts and meetings, ideally with pages numbered like an inventor’s log, and some way to insert tabs (?) to find key pages,” Ken said in an email.

This is the system I’ve invented for him.

It’s inspired by Rhodia’s saddle stitched exercise books made with gridded paper.

The pages will be perforated, so that they can be torn out to be archived in a binder, if necessary.

The cover extends slightly above the top of the pages, so that sticky note tabs and labels can be inserted, to mark key pages.

The whole book is hole-punched so that it can be put in a binder, or up to five of them held together with hinged clips that can be dated and labelled.

If Ken wants to glue or tape clippings into the book, he can tear out one of the perforated pages (and use it for rough notes) and when he tapes in the clipping, the tab from the perforated page will keep the taped in pages from causing bloating.

The book comes with a folder the same size as the excercise book and made from the same material as the exercise book. It will contain

Sticky note tabs

Engineers tracing paper with sticky note adhesive on them.

lined paper with sticky note adhesive at the side so that Ken can add notes to his exercise books.

The cover will be hole punched so it can be clipped or put into a binder with the exercise book.

Resourcefulness

The first business plan I wrote in January followed an old-fashioned template. One aspect of my business is making up small runs of publications for musicians to sell at their performances. There may be as few as 50 in a run or as many as 300. The business plan asked me to quantify this business opportunity using sales figures and trends from the record industry. The conundrum is that my business stems from the failure of the record industry and the fact that nothing has emerged to take its place, so musicians are taking back the rights to their own music and selling it directly to their audiences, but this is private and ad hoc.

The big picture only started to make sense once I started reading the blog published by the Australian office of the global engineering firm, Arup. They share their research materials on del.icio.us and project news on their blog. The neighbourhood is my business but the city that neighbourhood is part of is taking shape through projects like Arup’s Sustainable Melbourne.

I rarely read the Sydney Morning Herald but picked up a copy on my way out of the Australian Museum one day earlier this year and read a report about the Creative Sydney Festival. The SMH was bamboozled. It didn’t know how to evaluate the festival because it was full of people and projects without celebrity status or name recognition, there was no way, within traditional newspaper articles to show that it’s the cumulative dynamism of all of these projects and people, with small-scale cross-connections that’s important, not individuals.

I read about Marcus Westbury’s incubation of arts projects in Newcastle and the practical information he publishes on his blog has been invaluable to me in trying to come to terms with the funding of small scale projects. Here’s a sampling of his insights:

“I believe in the power of initiative, experimentation, entrepreneurship and innovation.”

“I believe that culture comes from the bottom up and not the top down.”

“Most artists and creative types don’t actually get or particularly need grants – but they need economic models that capitalise on their strengths and limit their weaknesses.”

“When you start to think of culture and creative enterprise as organic, and small scale, it starts to change the way you think about it and it starts to change your perception of what creative initiatives and enterprises need to succeed.”

A business plan is a set of guiding principles, something to refer to so that one doesn’t lose sight of the big picture during the daily distractions of setting up and running a business. But where does the inspiration come from in a time of upheaval?

How does a neighbourhood bookstore thrive when the publishing industry is in peril, a newsagent when print journalism is rapidly becoming extinct, a music store when CD sales are plummeting? In my neighbourhood, the Potts Point / Kings Cross area in Sydney I’ve seen local businesses adapt, survive and thrive through ingenuity. Phoenix Music, for instance, is a beautifully designed CD store with the sleekness of a jewellery store and it is introducing a trade in rare vinyl albums.

Big Businesses that are in peril can provide no inspiration or guidance. Jeff Jarvis, who is monitoring changes in the newspaper business is favouring smaller enterprises. “Individuals who succeed in this upheaval become entrpreneurs” he writes. “The new business models have one entity being replaced by well more than 100 entities, each run according to new opportunities and needs, each smaller, each contributing real value, each sustainable (some very profitable, some choosing no profit). Everyone in this ecosystem has to think about running a business rather than preserving one.”

The collapsing of old business models that’s opening up new opportunities is also closing off opportunities for me to earn money to start a new business, though. I’ve been in two failing professions in a row. I’m trained as a journalist and my area of expertise is computer technology, science, architecture, industrial design and engineering. These are all beats that are invaluable foundations for my bookbinding and publishing services business but there is no longer a freelance journalism market that will allow me to earn money to put towards making things rather than writing about the making of things. I’m a gifted amateur in the kitchen, good enough to get continual casual work in catering, which is as much about planning and quick thinking as cooking skills. But the world’s economic crisis has made catering an unpredictable and unreliable sideline. Moving into new fields as old ones collapse is a great theory but in each new profession I start at the bottom, earning substantially less, and being far less in control of my fate than I would be in my own business. Pursuing these new avenues also takes me further away from my own business.

The crucial thing is to be able to show that the custom stationery and publishing services business is sustainable and that there’s enough security for a bank to fund me. At the moment I’m resourceful and flexible, working within the limits of uncertain and unpredictable financing. The next step is a workshop that is also a showroom, to consolidate my business and help it grow.

I presented my business plan to a bank this week for a small amount of funding to purchase materials to make the first orders I have from private clients and local merchants. These materials will be enough for the amount of books I’ll likely need to make until December this year and provide cash flow for the next phase of my business.

This week I presented my business plan twice. Once to my accountant and once to a small business manager at a bank. My accountant, graphic designer and bank are the most important relationships at the moment. I approached the only bank with a physical presence in my neighbourhood. I’ll be selling books through a few local merchants and my next step is to rent a studio / showroom in my area and work up to buying a building here. This bank has started a new venture to incubate small businesses.

In the last few months I’ve made up sample books, established the costs for making these books, shown them to local merchants, sought their advice on pricing the books and made some sales arrangements. I’ve also made an agreement with a wholesaler to distribute some of my books and I’m working out the manufacturing details and costs. My accountant has reviewed the costs and my cash flow projection to make sure they’re realistic and can be achieved.

The collapse of the large global publishing, record and art businesses has created opportunities for writers, musicians and artists to pursue their own projects. Manufacturing is changing too with economical local alternatives emerging to the current practice of having printed books and stationery made up in large quantities in factories in China. I needed to be able to turn those opportunities into tangible projects that could be valued and stand as the security a bank would need to fund me to make the first few projects and then let the business create it’s own momentum.

Say no to bibliotronics

 

Wall-E

Not so very long ago I would have been excited by the announcement that a company has figured out how to manufacture video screens on paper and bind them with the pages of a magazine. I would have been thinking about embedding screens into the television guide books I’m making, a sideline project I’ve started on the blog 21CTV. Now the idea of millions of magazines out in the world with screens blinking inside them seems like nothing but a colossal waste of resources. When I look at newspapers now, the day’s discarded towers of Sydney Morning Herald’s and Australian’s sitting on a table outside the cafe next door to my apartment all I see is dead trees and the skyscrapers of garbage that Wall-E builds. The idea that there would be video screens interleaved with those coated lifestyle liftout sections and that they would sit together in landfill imperfectly melting down into toxic sludge is creepy, bordering on irresponsible. Even the new and improved Kindle’s and Sony book readers seem a colossal waste of resources.

The iPhone I bought last year and the Apple computer in March, after a decade of owning PC’s (a Sony VAIO and then a Compaq Presario) has changed everything for me. My computer is my audio system and DVD player. My iPhone is everything else. If I dream of anything to do with video it’s a very old fashioned, solar powered projector extension: imagining using my iPhone to stream video that would screen on my living room wall, like those home movies screened onto sheets hung outside at barbeques and birthday parties. I dream of a book reader that’s something similar, a projection device that screens the text onto a Rhodia bloc for easier reading at a cafe. There’s already a laser device that screens a keyboard onto a surface. I want that as an iPhone app. Dazzling perfection is no longer the issue for me. I’m happy for primitivism to resurface: for new applications and functions added to iPhones and laptop computers to have the inelegance of the radioactive, boxy green text on original computer screens, or there to be a little switching and delay involved in shifting from an audio application to a video one. The convenience of having everything together outweighs the pure elegance of the function. The saving of resources (power and material) is paramount.

I’m immune to the desire the Apple wants me to feel for the object. I’ve wrapped my iPhone in a clunky but practical protective black plastic case, and I bought the cheapest computer I could, the white plastic one, and it’s starting to look really shabby. The power cord for the iPhone is shredding, I’ll have to buy a new one soon but I plan to hold onto both devices until the absolute last moment upgrading and augmenting them until there is no possible regenerative energy left in them.

I think I’ve arrived at the “wave of revulsion against the phenomenon of manufacturing desire that Deyan Sudjic suspects might be coming. In The Language of Things he writes about the spell of his new Apple computer being broken as soon as he took it out of the store with the discordant note of clunky white cables for a sexy black machine. “There is nothing about this lack of colour coordination that makes the computer work any less fluently, and yet I could feel my sense of disappointment rising as I unwrapped my purchase. How could this portal to the future have such shaky, inconsistent foundations?”

He writes of the scuffs and inevitable marks on phones and computers as he used them destroying their appeal, in marked contrast to early cameras, whose dents and scratches added to their allure. “The traces of life as it is lived once seemed to add authority to an object, like those battered old black Nikons that Vietnam-era war photographers lugged around the killing fields of South East Asia, the shiny logo taped over to avoid the attention of snipers, the heavy brass body showing through the chipped black paint. These were objects to be treated with a certain respect. They were the products of craftsmen, ingenious mechanical contrivances that, at the press of a button, would lift the mirror that allowed you to see through the lens. These were objects with the sheer physical presence to reflect their intelligence and their value. They would last and last, delivering the performance promised by the skill with which opticians had ground their lenses, and the care with which the metallic blades that defined their shutter apertures had been designed. These are not qualities that diminish with the years. Possessions that stayed with us for decades could be understood as mirroring our own experiences of time passing. Now our relationship with new possessions seems so much emptier. The allure of the product is created and sold on the basis of a look that does not survive physical contact.”

The foundations of Editions Ballard books are built on accepting and welcoming patina and scuffs. I get an extraordinary response to the covers for my notebooks which are simple and low-tech, a modest grade of unbleached boxboard covered with a couple of coats of shellac. They feel smoothly organic and they’ll develop a rich glow, over time, as they’re handled. There’s also a benefit that I didn’t realise until I started testing my samples. That the covers are water resistant (maybe even fully waterproof, I haven’t done that test yet). So coffee and wine will run off them in cafes, and oil, vinegar and soy sauce will run off them in kitchens. The dilemma I face now is how to transfer those low tech materials and hand production techniques to the factory processes to make thousands of books.

The Travelling Salesman

I’m writing the marketing section of my business plan. The obvious things are already being done: using my blog, making direct connections with local merchants, keeping a log of potential clients. But one of the best ways I’ve found is by being a travelling salesperson. I carry around a few notebooks in my bag and when people see me using one at a cafe or library, or I’ve gone out to dinner with friends and they’ve asked to see what I’m developing, they often want to buy the notebooks then and there. That’s made so much easier now with the paypal application for the iPhone.
I was mesmerised by the travelling salesmen in Northfork with their guitar cases of angels wings they were selling door to door. When the salesmen, who travelled in pairs, alighted from their cars the doors opened in unison, like wings unfurling.

What I want is some kind of folder like this made of an ultra lightweight nylon, reminiscent of the famous Prada backpacks of the nineties, that folds over on itself and has a few pockets, like a regular backpack, so it can be an unobtrusive backpack sample kit hybrid.

Penguin Newspaper Classics

The remarketing of Penguin Classics with blank draw-it-yourself covers seemed a craven way to extend the brand. There isn’t muchintegrity in their repackaging, continually thinking of new ways to make us buy more copies of books we already have. The real Penguin classics, from long dead authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are in the public domain and now available free of charge through iPhone applications that are themselves free of charge. And it seems to me an iPhone application with classic books is the ultimate expression of Allen Lane’s inspiration for Penguin, that classic books should be cheap and convenient, modestly beautiful and made with contemporary printing technologies.

In the last few years I’ve seen Penguin mini’s, brochure length excerpts sold in stands in bookstores, stripped down, economical Penguin classics aping the original Penguins and now there are Penguin Moleskine-like notebooks with famous Penguin covers: write your diary inside A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf or Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. And there are Penguin book covers wrapped around the barrels of coloured pencils.

If I were Penguin I would do these things:

Artek Recycled Chairs

Readers Copies: Buy back genuinely old Penguins and recycle them. Fix the covers, clean them a bit, disinfect them perhaps, and put them back on the market, at a low price. The original ones are pricey, and collectors items if they’re in incredibly good condition but there are all of the ones that have an extraordinary patina: ex-library copies, some with touching inscriptions. It would be fantastic to see rows of them in bookstores. The lives the books have led should add to the value of the books. Tom Dixon has done this with Alvar Aalto chairs.

A Genuinely New Penguin Idea. Penguin Newspaper Classics.

Since print editions of newspapers are becoming extinct, Penguin could buy a newspaper printing plant in each of their major territories (England, Australia, USA, India etc.) and collect newsprint paper that would otherwise go unused. They could bring in technicians to clean up the process, save on power, make sure the emissions and waste aren’t too damaging, and print A5 saddle stitched collections of classic journalism, stuff that isn’t easily available online. It should be black and white, minimal, few photographs and illustrations (if any). No more newsprint paper should be produced. The editions will grind to a halt when the newsprint runs out. The Science pages, World News, Film News. There could be about ten stories in a collection.

The Factories of Comme des Garcons

 

Lace sweater

I’m now beginning to think about how some of my notebooks might be produced in factories. I’m an armchair industrialist. I don’t have any first-hand experience of factories. All of my research is from library books and photographs of hulking, brutish machinery served up by Google searches. I’m not working entirely in the dark: I’m re-acquainting myself with the principles of physics and inorganic chemistry. Some of the design decisions are common sense: it doesn’t take specialist knowledge to grasp that a certain material might snag on a production line, or that a particular surface texture might be too slippery for glue to adhere to it, and throw book spines out of alignment.

 

I’ve borrowed Deyan Sudjic’s 1990 study of Comme des Garcons from the library and it has useful practical information about the manufacturing process:

“It was Hiroshi Matsushita who devised the rayon criss-crossed with elastic that allowed Kawakubo to make the garments in the women’s collection of 1984 bubble and boil as though they were melting. And it was Matsushita who formulated the bonded cotton rayon and polyurethane fabric Kawakubo used for her asymmetric dresses of 1986 … For Matsushita, the distinctive character of a Comme des Garcons garment can be traced back to the thread that will be used to weave the fabric from which the collection will be made.”

Rei Kawakubo gives Matsushita abstract instructions: “I’d like something using thin thread, rather than bulky thread,” perhaps. Or “something with a cold feel, something flat as opposed to something bumpy, something with depth and texture.”

The Penn and Teller Notebook

Teller: “A miracle, even if it’s a lousy miracle, is still a miracle.“

What about making a magic notebook? Write in it with J Herbin invisible ink and it disappears in a vanish.