Re: hand made books

[Alan Mynett <a.mynett@ntlworld.com>]

Hi,

I've been lurking here for a while - and greatly enjoy the conversation,
arguments and all!
I think hand-made books are a great way of making a sense of order out of
photographs - they provide a way of grouping them into self-contained works
and allow you to control the sequence and pacing at which the pictures are
viewed. But, they don't display in galleries or exhibit well!

Shannon wrote
>If you were going to make a book for photos, would you print the photos on
>the paper you were going to bind into the book, or would you make the book
>and then mount the photos onto the paper separately?

I've done both, though not yet with alt images. The first book I made I
printed onto FB paper, dry mounted the prints back to back and comb-bound
them together, with card covers to make the book. I did it like this because
I wanted the feeling that the book had been printed. I used Letraset for
text and you have to remember to offset the image to allow for the paper
taken up in the binding. If you stick pictures into a ready-made book, then
you have to allow for the thickness of the paper the photo's printed on, by
removing most of every alternate page in the book. There are also the
problems that come with deciding what glue to use.The last book I made I
scanned the images and put them together in Pagemaker - that way I could add
text  - and finally bound the ink-jet prints into a book. The sequences of
images De Rebus Romanorum, Gardens & Galleries, Between... and Prague on my
web site (www.mynett.org.uk) were originally books. Sorry, conventional
silver-gelatin, not alt!

For a really stimulating book on many ways of putting images together in
book form I strongly recommend 'Structure of the Visual Book' by Keith A.
Smith (self published, see www.keithsmithbooks.com).

Alan Mynett