Fail Again Fail Better: The Baroness' Book

I was asked to make a book by the incoming Baroness of Carolingia. She wanted something to keep a journal of her time as Baroness and had been inspired by a picture she had seen of a noble woman holding a small book with ribbon closures.

I should get the reference information for this picture.

It was decided this book would be blue to match Carolingia's colors and the decoration on the front and back would be simple blind tooling. Of course, the elephant in this room was that fact that I have never added closures of any type to any of my books. So I would need to come up with a way to make that happen. I decided to go with an technique that I saw in the Coptic books in the Morgan Library and Museum where they inserted ties through the boards and glued them down on the inside of the board.

I put this together like many of my other books. The text block is made of 8.5in x 11in sheets Beckett 60lb antique vellum cut in half to get the correct grain. The signatures are four sheets folded together and sewn on linen double cords with waxed linen thread. The endbands are blue and gold silk thread wrapped around a linen cord. The cover boards are birch craft plywood boards 1/8 inch thick, hand sawn to the correct dimensions. The boards are attached by treading the textblock cords into the holes drilled into the boards and then fanned out and glued to the inside of the board. The endbands are similarly laced in the boards. The cover is blue veg-tanned goat leather attached with modern PVA glue. The endpages are a gold, handmade paper purchased at a local craft store. The ribbons are blue silk threaded through the cover boards and glued under the endpages.

Here are some process pictures.