Book: Spinner Book
Video:
About the Project:
Books don’t change.
The book was born from our need to record important facts in an unchangeable, unforgettable way, “etching them in stone”. A book serves to preserve information.
To say someone has “book smarts” or “book knowledge” is to acknowledge their breadth of readily-available concrete facts. We turn to books as a source of indisputable, unchanging truth.
Spinner Book challenges the “unchangingness” of books, imagining a book with two titles which can be infinitely swapped.
The first time I saw this “spinner” mechanism was on a much smaller scale, in Shawy Sheehy’s paper engineering class Movable Metamorphs at the Center for Book Arts in New York. The most impressionable feature of this design was how spinning the dial made an image disappear like a six-foot glass sunroof that retracts smoothly into the car with the touch of a button, begging the question “to where”?
Designing this book, for which the front cover is made of four layered panels, required a fair degree of engineering. Several board weights were used to make sure the dial wouldn’t stick, but also wouldn’t move freely.
The top panel reads:
This is one such example of the whimsical yet precision-engineered book art that I make in my one bedroom apartment every day using specialized equipment and techniquesPlease enjoy these images of the making of “Spinner book”.
MATERIALS
Boards - Davey’s Binder Board - varied weights
Paper - 24/60lbs - off-white
Thread - French waxed linen thread (size 25)
Endpapers - Canson Mi-teintes drawing paper, orange - 98lbs
Headband - silk 5/8”
Book cloth (covers) - Euro buckram cloth- putty
Book cloth (spine) - Asahi book cloth - aqua
Book cloth (spinner dial) - Cailinen cloth - bisque
While this is not intended to be a tutorial, you may feel inspired and/or challenged to use some of the featured techniques to make something functional and beautiful. I hope this is the case.
If you have any questions about this project or otherwise, contact Bounty Archive Management.
