Re-Bound

 

Re-Bound
Creating Handmade Books from Repurposed and Recycled Materials

by Jeannine Stein

Quarry Books

2009

 

 

Re-Bound is another craft book - combining photos of handmade art objects with instructions for making your own - but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Good Mail Day.
 

I suspect the difference at least partially lies in the relative difficulty of the two crafts. Mail art requires fewer skills and so is more accessible to amateurs, so Hinchcliff and Wheeler wrote their book as an enthusiastic invitation to start making mail art for the first time. (There are also few if any mistakes that could totally 'ruin' your project.) 

 
Making books (or at least making books well) requires more precision and skill, and so it requires practice and experience, as well as familiarity and comfort with the tools and procedures. Stein writes for an audience who can already craft handmade books from normal materials and now wants the added challenge and fun of making even-more-difficult books out of recycled materials.

 
So I enjoyed looking at Stein's books, and reading her descriptions and justifications for her crafting decisions, but the instructions themselves were basically lost on me, and by the end, I'd stopped even skimming them.

 
The cover image is a tiny book whose cover was made from leftover Starbucks giftcards. She also made a book bound with paint swatches and one wrapped in a felted sweater. She recommends, but doesn't demonstrate, using record sleeves, although a couple projects use a similar 'chipboard' material.

 
Like Hinchcliff and Wheeler, Stein also includes a gallery of handmade books by other artists. My favorite was an accordian fold book made of Monopoly property cards, with the blank side of the money as a writing surface, and a box to hold it made from the gameboard.