Out there

I've been surprised and very pleased with the response to seeing my rebound Paris sketchbook. Tonight I've been notified that it is featured on http://www.whytraveltofrance.com/ (16th Sept). I was pleased to learn this, mainly because I found out about such an interesting website. I will be reading the posts there before I head off to France shortly. I also discovered 'Guide France'is mentioned on http://bibliophilebullpen.blogspot.com/ (13th Sept). I wasn't contacted by Bibliophilebullpen about their post and I must say I felt a little trepidation when I scrolled down and saw what kind of site it is (old book lovers*). I was afraid of a bashing there for my 'treatment' of old books, but was please to find they have the same idea as me about it - it's better to have a use (in my case, a loving use) for an old book than to see it go to the scrapheap.

This is the title page(s) from my rebound Rome sketchbook. The Path to Rome was the right size for my rebinding project, but not as exciting as Rome and It's Environs which had a plethora of fold-out maps (I love fold out anything, especially maps!) and plans of all the historic buidings and more more more. But unfortunately RAIE was verging on too small, but worse - it had a plastic cover that prevented the pages from opening flat and just wasn't suitable for rebinding. Also the 56 year old pages, thin to begin with, were very fragile. The solution was to add pages from both to my rebound sketchbook. Once again I used hot and cold-pressed watercolour papers and stonehenge drawing paper for the 5 signatures (groups of pages). I added a ribbon page marker, an elastic closer and a velum pocket inside the back cover.

*In reading over this post before pressing the 'publish' button I realised I should change that from "old book lovers" to "lovers of old books"! But I thought it was a nice little pun and I'd leave it as is.