Another Bound Book

Well, I bound another book. I know one of the authors, so I got permission to show it off. Well, she gave her permission, and assured me her co-author would like it, too. So here it is, a hand-bound, print version of Broken by Cedric Johnson and Veronica Giguere:

 

 

Here’s my title page, with the cover as a frontispiece. I think that turned out very nicely, if I may say so myself. {SMILE, wink}

 

 

And here’s my cover. It’s plainer than I’d like, but I haven’t found a satisfactory picture to add between the title and authors. I’m looking for one that suits the near-future cyberpunk story. I thought maybe a circuit diagram, but I haven’t found one that felt right yet. {Smile}

No, I can’t just use the official cover. At the large size inside, it would risk damaging the cover. At a size small enough not to do that, it doesn’t look like much. That’s why it’s a frontispiece now, and the cover is yellow, with easy to read letters in red. {chuckle, Smile}

And if you wonder about the story I enjoyed enough to do this for, Here it is at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Broken-ebook/dp/B00F1HUJSA/#

And here it is at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/354126

I used Smashwords, because I suspected I’d want a hardcopy, and they make that easy. Obviously I did, so that worked great. {BIG SMILE}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

P.S. If you're wondering what you're looking at, that's my best approximation of a Japanese stab binding, with cardstock covers reinforced by tissue-tape made specially for book repair. I'm particularly happy with how the reinforcing turned out. Compared to the last thick book I bound in this style, the covers are curling much less, and they don't feel like they're liable to rip out if I forget to handle them carefully. (This one is slightly thinner which might help the latter problem. Still, the change is dramatic enough, at least some must be due to the reinforcing.) {Smile}

A.E.B.
 

Checking in

{peek in} Sorry I’ve still been quiet. The weather decided to heat up to heat wave levels in August, and continued right thru September into October. It might have broken today. It was finally cooler, but only time will tell if today was a fluke or a real change. {smile}

I’m afraid I’ve never been good at either cooling off when I get hot, or warming up when I get cold. So the hot weather really got to me. It even had me convinced a few times that a heart condition I’ve recently been diagnosed with was a lot more serious than the doctor implied. Hopefully it was just the heat, which hopefully has passed the worst. {cross fingers, Smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

{peek in}

I've gone quiet again, haven't I? Sorry about that. I seem to have developed an odd, rhythmic spasm in my chest. Depending on intensity, speed, and such, it may feel like quivering, fluttering, or pounding. Fortunately, there's no pain involved, and I can detect my heartbeat's pairs of beats slower and steady under the more evenly spaced spasms if I remember to check.

My doctor doesn't know what it is, but he doesn't think it's life threatening. Not when I can find my pulse, and when there's no pain involved. However, he doesn't know whether it's cardiac, respirational, or muscular. So he's sending me to a cardiologist on the 22nd to see if he can figure out anything more specific.

I can hardly wait. It is good to know  they're probably not life-threatening, but they can still be quite debilitating. So I'd like to know what they are and how to manage them. Then maybe I can get my life back again, at least until the next crazy health incident crops up, as they do a few times a decade. {lop-sided smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Merrie Monarch Hula Festival 2014

This weekend, I have been officially distracted. The Merrie Monarch Hula Festival's first night of competition was Thursday, and last night of competition was last night (Saturday). All three night were on local TV; I was glued to it all three nights. I'm now beginning to try to catch up on everything that got sidelined by all the pretty hula. {SMILE}

If you want to see what I'm talking about, here's the official website: http://www.merriemonarch.com/ , and here's the TV broadcast: http://www.k5thehometeam.com/category/281345/2014-merrie-monarch-festival . It's supposed to have a way to view at least the previous night's competition. {Smile}

And I'm sorry I didn't mention this sooner. Blogger won't let me post thru Internet Explorer; I've been trying since Friday, and it won't load the compose-a-post page. I'm afraid I didn't think of trying thru Google Chrome until too late last night to try it. So far, that seems to be working. {cross fingers hopefully, Smile} 

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

{indescribable look}

Remind me that I don't want a chimpanzee. {wry smile}

Tonight, we had flying termites in the dining room and kitchen. Not a whole lot – it seems to be the first termite swarm of spring – but Dad and I were busy trying to kill them. Not that either of us are particularly good at catching termites, but the flying ones are the breeders, so we really want to kill them before they start new colonies in our house and our furniture. {wry look}

A few days ago, Dad got a magazine with a picture of a chimp catching flying termites. (Apparently termites are a chimp delicacy.) She was having a grand time, and far more success than Dad and I had tonight. However, chimps are strong enough, I'm sure one would do more damage to our furniture, house, etc. than even the termites. {wry chuckle, half-smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

A book for my cousin

With my recent bookbinding, since I hadn’t done the oriental binding style recently, and didn’t have instructions, Dad recommended I make a blank book as practice before tackling the one I wanted to keep. That sounded like a very good idea to me. I thought it turned out pretty well. {Smile}

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/345229127658026820/>

>

In fact, I thought it turned out well enough to give away. One of my cousins loves handmade things. Even better, she’s an artist herself, so she can always use another sketch book. So I wrote to her, told her about it, and asked if she’d like it. I also asked if she’d like me to try to color the strings with a permanent marker, since sort of white strings don’t stand out well against offwhite covers. I told her which colors of permanent markers Dad and I had found that currently have working ink in them. {GRIN}

She very much wanted the book, and chose blue strings. I thought she liked blue. {BIG GRIN}

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/345229127658279201/>

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I think that looks even better. I showed it to my cousin, and she loves it. Now I just have to get around to mailing it. {SMILE, wink}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

P.S. Clicking the pins will take you to bigger pictures. Clicking again, to even bigger pictures. {Smile}

A.E.B.

Books I’ve Bound

I uploaded a picture of two books I’ve bound to Pinterest and Facebook last week. I meant to mention that here sooner. Maybe it’s just as well I didn’t; a conversation recently started on Pinterest is taking an interesting turn. I had no reason to direct you to it earlier, but it might be worth a peek. {SMILE}

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/345229127658132057/>>

In any case, these are the two books I’ve bound that I’ve kept and recently found. Most either stayed with the library that owned the, or went to friends and relatives as gifts, but not these two. {Smile}

The one on the left is bound in Occidental signature style. It's the very first book I bound, so it has a couple of errors I don't make anymore. Fortunately, they don't show much in this picture. {GRIN}

The one on the right is bound in my best guess at Oriental side-sewn style. I wish I could find instructions. I'm sure they'd save me some trial-and-error learning. {chuckle, lop-sided Smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Again?

I just found myself in an... Odd conversation for the second time. Well, they're almost identical conversations, which seems unusual when I really don't think the gals involved have ever met. I mean, they live on different islands here in Hawai'i when one isn't off on the mainland. I don't think they go to the same states on the mainland much, either. {look Up}

Anyway, both friends know I bind books. So when I mention doing more with some story I've written, they both suggested that I self-publish by printing and hand-binding books myself.

Ah... ignoring the problems of distribution, I couldn't even recoup the cost of materials without out-charging a Print-On-Demand publisher, because even they work on a larger economy of scale than any hand binder could reasonably hope to. Charging for labor too would just make the price ridiculous. {look Up}

{Chuckle-snort} Oh, I know it sounds neat, but trust me, the economics just do not add up here! {AMUSED GRIN}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

My birthday

Well, this has been a nice birthday so far. {Smile}

It's been particularly food-oriented. My parents and I had Portuguese sweet bread buns for breakfast. (Yes, they really are bread and really are sweet, unlike some other "sweet bread." {wink})

Then I had a long and leisurely lunch at a nice restaurant with a couple of friends. Talk about a surprise! I've read about birthday lunches with the girls, but I'm not sure I've ever been to one before. Certainly not as the birthday girl. It was such a nice treat! One gave me lotion in a shopping bag with a very cute kitty on it, and the other gave me a card as well as lunch. I had coconut limeade and a mushroom burger, while my friends had wine and I forget which main courses they ordered. We shared cucumber sushi, Italian herb bread, and passion fruit ice cream. (Um, have I mentioned recently that Hawai'i can be quite cheerfully blatant about multiculturalism?) And we talked a talked... we left the restaurant two hours after we got there. {chuckle, HAPPY SMILE}

For dinner, my parents and I had pork with apples for the main course, with buns, sparkling cider, and chocolate cake for dessert. I chose them, and was very happy with the results. My presents are mostly still in the mail, but Dad did give me a book I'd noticed about Nainoa Thompson, who may have helped start the modern Hawaiian Renaissance when he brought back Polynesian navigation and canoe-building techniques as re-creational Archeology. That should be interesting reading. {SMILE}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

{chuckle}

Mulluane asked an interesting question on her Old Bat's Belfry blog ( http://oldbatsbelfry.blogspot.com/ ) yesterday. (Over here: http://oldbatsbelfry.blogspot.com/2014/01/fun-fridays-let-your-imaginations-fly.html ) She asked what job we'd like to have in heaven.

I said librarian, and apologized for not being more creative and original.

She asked me to save it, and come up with another answer. My first answer was the right one for me. I just explained why in a follow-up comment:

"{blink} I don't think it would be much of a heaven if you didn't have stories to keep you entertained, or if you couldn't finally learn the answers to the burning questions you always wondered about.

If you have enough stories to keep everyone entertained with all their different tastes, and enough information to answer everyone's burning questions, including the highly technical ones of specialists within their fields... well, you'll have to store that information somewhere. Libraries started with wooden boards, clay tablets, and papyrus scrolls. They moved to parchment and vellum, then started cutting the vellum and binding it into books. Then they started getting audio visual materials and computer files. Every last type has been collected, organized, and preserved by libraries. Even if they stored al this in the minds of assorted residents, they'd need a very detailed catalog to tell you which resident to consult about what.

But I bet they don't, because who wants to have to drop whatever they're busy doing to answer a question every time someone thinks of it? So they'll have some way to store both stories and information that saves everyone from interruptions. Then it won't matter whether they store it books, or clouds, or stars, or atoms; they'll still have to store those materials, and organize them, and help folks find the specific information and stories they want when they want it.

The folks who do that will be librarians by definition... and I'd give anything to be one of them. {SMILE}"

I'm not sure what either she or David, the other fellow in the discussion so far, will think of that, but it really is the truth. {SMILE, wink}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

{sigh, wipe eyes}

When am I going to stop tearing up when "Amigos Para Sempre" by Andrew Lloyd Webber plays? It describes so well the kind of close friendship that lasts a lifetime. {pause}

That's the kind of friend I lost last summer, when cancer took her far too soon. {wistful look}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Holidays {Smile}

I probably should have said this sooner, but both Christmas and New Year's went well if quietly. The Christmas Tree never got as many ornaments as meant to add, and the mochi never got baked. I really need to find traditions that are closer to my own talents. Then again, you may have noticed that this year's story hasn't been sent yet, either... You'll get something when I get something done. Currently it's stalled. {rueful Smile}

However, the tree did have some ornaments. Dad fixed a nice dinner on Christmas Eve from steak, potatoes, and cake an aunt sent. (She's noticed that Dad complains that he can't find reliably tender steak in Hilo. In fact, we gave up on non-ground local beef after one batch was so tough, all three of us complained about how much exercise chewing was... {wryly amused smile}) Then there was a nice breakfast followed by present opening the next morning, followed by present reading for Mom and Me, since we both got a lot of books. {Smile, wink}

New Year's was surprisingly quiet this year. There weren't nearly as many fireworks as previously, not even the "novelty fireworks" you don't need a permit for. (You need a permit for every 5000 firecrackers in this county. They aren’t expensive compared to the fireworks budgets of the people who want them, but they're a nuisance to get. I guess that's one way of making people cut back. {lop-sided smile})

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin