April-May Sketchbook Bound

My April-May sketchbook completed.

My latest sketchbook with sketches dated from April 15 through May 20 is now bound and complete. On the covers are the ship I sketched outside the Museum of History and Industry on Opening Day of boating season and one of many sketches of Haystack Rock I did last week in Cannon Beach.

Ever since I decided to stick with 140-pound papers consistently in my handbound sketchbooks, I’ve been using the same format: three 9-by-12-inch folded sheets (12 sketching surfaces, using both sides) per signature, six signatures bound together into one volume, yielding a 72-page book. But more often than not, I opt to sketch across the gutter, and that signature format gives me only five double-page spreads per signature (the first and last page of each signature is a single page).

Wanting more double-page spreads per signature, I tried binding four folded sheets per signature instead of three this time. Since the paper is heavy, the fore edge (opposite the binding) is a bit messier than with three sheets (a book artist would probably trim the fore edge clean), but I decided I can live with that look, particularly since it fits with the less-than-perfect look of my hand-stitched binding (but note the red-orange thread that matches the covers! It may not be perfect, but it’s colorful). To keep the book from being too thick, I bound together five signatures instead of six, yielding an 80-page volume. That gives me a few more pages per volume but one less signature, which means the binding goes a little faster – a tiny bit more bang for my bookbinding buck.