Coptic book

Last year I took several bookbinding courses at Sydney Bookbinding. If you're interested in learning bookbinding and are in Sydney, I'd highly recommend these courses. They're so much fun! The introductory course is booked through Sydney Community College, and subsequent courses and one off workshops are booked through Amazing Paper. Amazing Paper is also a great place to get supplies for any kind of paper fun (I think R. is always a bit worried when I go there that I will come home with enough paper and other craft supplies to fill the entire volume of the flat).

Anyway, to the books, and making of the books. We've made six books in the courses so far, each of them introducing new techniques and styles. In this post I'm going to talk a little bit about the book I made using coptic binding. Coptic binding is one of the oldest forms of bookbinding, and was developed by early Christians in Egypt. It is used to bind multiple sections together using chain stitching at the spine, does not require any glue in the binding, and results in a book which can open 360 degrees. In the early coptic bindings layers of papyrus were used to form cover boards, and by the 4th century AD wooden boards were also commonly used as covers.

There is a simplicity to coptic binding which I find very elegant, and the fact that the book is very practical (hard covers, opens flat) adds to that elegance. I may well explore this design further in IdeaLiza using laser cut covers, and I've got several ideas in mind.

But, back to the book I've already made. In the pictures you can see the exposed spine, how the book opens flat, and my cover and spine design. Now, because I'm a bit of a geek, that cover design is also more than a little bit geeky. Basically, I'm playing with wave-particle duality by showing waves in different colours (wavelengths) made up of little particles (made using a hole punch). On both the front and back covers I have colours from the visible part of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple), and this theme is extended by having the same colours featured along the sections in the spine. Hopefully the overall effect is intriguing and visually appealing, while still being fun and geeky. What do you think?