Handbound Hahnemühle

 

I stickered up the cover with Notegeist Bindery's stickers!

When I use wet media, my hands-down favorite sketchbook for more than a year has been Hahnemühle with 100 percent cotton paper. The A6 size has been the most portable and actually the only practical size with my everyday-carry mini-size Rickshaw bag. My only complaint with the otherwise excellent edition is that it only comes hardbound, and the sturdy covers add to the weight and bulk.

My favorite A6-size Hahnemühle that is, unfortunately, available only in hardcover.

When I discovered that Hahnemühle offers the same paper in watercolor blocks, I started thinking about hand binding again. (For those coming late to my blog, I used to hand-bind my sketchbooks for many years. This tag will take you to all the posts related to my bookbinding; this post explains why I stopped bookbinding.) Cut the 9-by-12-inch paper in half, fold, and stitch or staple into thinner, lighter A6-ish books – it seemed like an ideal solution.

The price, too, was appealing: An A6 Hahnemühle works out to be about $0.26 per page (I’ve found the best prices at St. Louis Art Supply). Making my own books from blocks of paper would be about $0.18 a page. Last spring I bought and cut a block of paper with this intention, but then good outdoor-sketching weather happened. Around the same time, I had become focused on making on-location comics in Uglybooks. In any case, I never got around to binding.

Hahnemühle at left compared to Uglybook

I was chatting about all this with a friend one day – a friend who had recently started a notebook-making business. Gary thought it would be an interesting opportunity to try some custom prototypes with different binding styles. I provided the paper, and he got to work.

An immediate issue he discovered was the paper’s thickness. I realized a long time ago that this is probably the reason softbound sketchbooks with heavy paper are rare – Stillman & Birn is the only one I can think of (and I loved and used them for many years). Glue bindings are often insufficient for thick pages (as we found out from one of the prototypes), and even stapling can be difficult.

Hand-stitching, which would have been my only option if I had done it myself, turned out to be the best solution after all. I’m now using the first prototype, and it’s working out beautifully. With 24 pages, it’s about the same size and thickness as an Uglybook, half the thickness of a hardcover Hahnemühle and much lighter in weight, too. This single-signature form is so simple that I may just have to go back to binding my own after all.

By the way, if you’d like to see some of the handmade notebooks Gary sells in his shop, check out Notegeist Bindery. (Mine, however, were made just for me!)

Commemorative note: Thirteen years ago today, I started drawing. Usually on the anniversary of that date, I write a retrospective or introspective post about practice, process, learning and other thoughts about drawing and creativity. Last year’s post on Murphy’s Laws of Urban Sketching is one of my favorites. Drawing has become such an integral part of my life that I can’t think of anything new to say about why this daily practice is so much more to me than a hobby. Today I’ll just say, Happy drawing anniversary to me! I’m happy that I started 13 years ago, and even happier that I kept going.

The same as my favorite Hahnemühle but lighter and thinner