Using Every Part of the Animal

This is an old photo album I found at the Reninger Extravganza flea
market, and then gutted.

These are the guts from the album, used to frame a few
things around my room.

Rolls of paper for the new album book block

Book block cut and clamped, ready for binding

Binding materials: white corrugated linen thread, curved needle,
beeswax. Binding using coptic stitch

Book block binding complete

Book block ready to be glued into gutted cover, and completed

Completed album with end pages as the finishing touches

You Are My Specimen; Let Me Take You With Me

A Pocket Album

let's move on

from trying to recreate the moment with the watusi and the grappling hook

by the time I attached to you

you fell through my colander like a fistful of sand

years passed

before I came home to find you crawling through the window of my new address

while my frame scraped your spine, we grew embarrassed in our own ways

Materials For a Photo Booth Pocket Photo Album: old book, box cutter (or x acto), glue (preferably archival), some durable paper (for the spine, and inside), straight edge

I found this Centennial Pocket Album at a thrift store on a trip to Brooklyn.

I liked the idea of a pocket album so much that once I altered the original, I decided to make reproductions.

I think it's simple and low cost enough that the process is worth sharing. Start with an old book. Cut the spine and all the pages away from the book.

Separate front and back covers into three equal pieces each. Slice the edge away, and peel it off (it doesn't necessarily have to be the existing spine, but it is a convenient marker).

Burnish the underlying layer to make it smooth for the next step.

Take two facing pieces from front and back, leaving a quarter inch of space between them. Then, put glue, (I use yasutomo nori paste), down on the raw edges of the spine, and put the durable paper over the paste, leaving the two pieces as square as possible. Gently burnish the pasted edges, and let them dry. Fold the edges of the durable paper to the inside, and fasten them there with more paste.

The left picture is the original Centennial Album. The end paper in each the middle and left picture is the durable paper cut to the full length and width of what you're left with. Then, two strips of any miscellany can be pasted at each of their end edges (the middle of the strips left without paste, so the photo booth album pics can slip in and out, easily).

Our Journey Through Florida: Making a Photo Album

Materials:
Two old books, The pages from one old book, Archival Glue (Yasutomo Nori book binding glue), Every picture from my life, Cotton 5/2 thread for binding, plus bees wax, two strips of fabric, a zipper, PVA glue

Process:

Using archival glue, lay out personal pictures in the pages of an old book

dissect the books you intend to use

Rebind the Pages
Before, then After

Resolving the Cover, and using every last drop

The Album, the closing, and the closure

I think these photos explain as much as I could, here now, but I did feel compelled to write something more on it. This took a lot of time, and I enjoyed the entire process. When I stopped enjoying it, I stopped working on it, until I wanted to work on it again. The accoutrements of the cover were an insight nurtured by patience, and stem from an appreciation for deliberation's place in the creative process.