Best of Frog Mill
Jim’s Description
Overview
Number of Pages: 832
Year of binding: 2002
Dimensions: H: 14 cm, W: 11 cm, T: 6 cm*
*H= Height, W = how wide the cover is, T = Thickness of book
Materials
Paper - All flax and hemp, made with a water powered stamper at my home. Gelatin sized and burnished with bone. It’s very difficult to make paper with flax or hemp that doesn’t turn grey. Even clean looking fibers will turn dark grey when made into paper. One must go the extra step of months of natural bleaching in the weather to achieve a light paper with flax or hemp. Flax is mostly old firehose. Most of the hemp is Russian, but also some Chinese, which was just breaking into the hemp market in the mid 90’s. The only other place I know that made paper with flax or hemp was the University of Iowa, and they don’t make it anymore.
Sewing - Pack sewn on double cords (88 Clarkson) using Melody’s homespun flax
Trim - Plough and scrapers, burnished with bone
Endbands - Melody’s homespun flax
Boards - Quarter-split air dried Oregon White Oak, totally by hand in the 1980’s
Splines - Quarter-split Idaho Yew, air dried for 40 years
The tapered dovetail spline, rarely seen today, was an all-wood cross grain reinforcement often seen on old panel paintings and antiphonals. They weren’t glued, allowing the main board to swell and shrink with the changes in humidity and temperature, but still firmly held flat with the tapered dovetail spline.
Clasps - Bronze, flush rivets and pins - all from the same sheet
Covering - Old formula Alum tawed Idaho deer by Billy Metcalf in 1988. Covering is patinated from traveling and showing book - handled by hundreds of people.
Some are nostalgic about paper made with a stamper as opposed to the more modern (1680) rotary beater. Stamping fibrillates (smashers as opposed to cutting) the fiber, and is nearly impossible to “over beat” the pulp. One can make good paper with a beater, but many agree the old stamped papers were best. Another factor is that the quality of books and paper have gone steadily down since Gutenburg’s invention.
Price: $12,225