This is part of my ongoing series, Make Summer Camp, about all the making and learning that I’m doing in preparation for a very busy fall in the Design Lab.  I’ve made box books, and Lotus-style Books, and I made a mock-up of a fold-out four-room book. This is all following a series of posts on origami, which was my previous obsession.

Can you tell that I’m on a book-binding kick after all the origami? This is my first coptic-bound book (no actual Copts were injured in the making of this book, nor even tied up briefly). It’s seven signatures of 6 sheets of paper each (24 pages per signature; 168 pages.  I actually made these signatures, and weighted them, several weeks ago.

Each page is a ‘worksheet’ to fill out, a geomancy shield chart and analysis discussion. The pages are folios, meaning they’re folded once; rather than quartos, folded twice. The pages are copier paper. The covers are two pieces of card-stock. I’m pretty happy with it for my first coptic-bound book. I mostly learned the stitching process, albeit with some hiccups. I needed a piece of thread/yarn/string about twice as long as the one I had. But I was able to tie in a second piece relatively cleanly.

I don’t think this book will stand the test of time; the cover is too flimsy, and the book itself has holes mis-punched, knots that aren’t quite tight enough, and so on. A curved needle would have been a really good idea, but I didn’t take the time to make one. Argh. Still, it didn’t turn out too badly.

The ‘text’ within the book, such as it is, is a Casebook of Geomancy. That means, it’s a lot of blank shield diagrams for Western-style geomantic divinations, along with blank spaces to record the meaning of the geomantic reading and whether the reading was correct or not.

Liked it? Take a second to support Andrew on Patreon!