Best laid plans and all.

Well. Look at that. Where does the time go? I've gotten myself into some serious business of late - I minded a printshop a couple of weeks ago, which was only barely work, in exchange for time with the guillotine; I drove to VT with a friend of mine to pick up a guillotine for her; I decided that, dammit, I am going to get a press. You know. Eventually.

Until then, I am practicing printing from linoleum blocks by hand. Which, surprisingly, is a huge pain. Especially on awful paper - I'm using some that I made from glossy magazines, and oh boy does it not want to take the ink. It's also far too thick, and far too hard, to work well. On the other hand, I've observed some interesting things, and I think if I switch to decent paper, I can make some of it work.

As for the rest of the awful paper, I'm going to laminate it into bookboards. Should be pretty easy, and practical, and if it works I have a solution for the problem of getting boards.

I still haven't decided whether or not I'm going to do blind tooling on the Byzantine mini. In fact, I haven't decided on clasps, either. My next book project is to finish a fine binding in an uncharacteristically large size. The book is about 12" x 14", half-leather (spine and corners), with endpapers of this ridiculously awesome red cotton paper that friends of mine made. This book has been languishing for longer than I want to think about, so the inside corners of the boards were a little warped. Sadly, even putting leather on didn't fix the problem, but it's definitely still in usable shape, and I wasn't planning on selling it anyway. The remaining steps are getting fills in on at least the front of the boards, putting on paper, and gluing down the endsheets. I'm putting it off mostly because I don't want to make methyl cellulose paste and have it go to waste - and I don't think I can do a book this big quickly enough to use straight PVA.

All of which is ridiculous procrastination, and I'll get over it. I have a pile of book blocks ready to prep for an everyday notebook experiment, and I need to finish the leather binding before I get started on those.