Tedorigawa Bookmakers

Bookbinding In bookbinding this week we have, for your visual pleasure, a book One Year in the making. Solaris Libri. This is, I’m assuming, Latin for Solar Book. (If Google translate is accurate with dead languages.) It is an A6 blank notebook of five signatures of five folios each for a total of 100 pages. The only printing in the entire book is the title pages: Solaris Libri and under that Exposed April 1, 2025; Re-covered April 30, 2026. It has a built-in bookmark that is a silvery yellow as is the cover, of course, to reflect its connection to the sun. I made it and then taped book board bits to the front and back covers. Then I taped it to my studio window for a year allowing the sun to do its job of fading the uncovered book cloth while keeping the book cloth under the book board bits their original color. After a year of staring at the sun, I was surprised how little it changed. The band of original book cloth yellow on the back didn’t look too bad. It changed, but not by that much. Fiction I’ve been working on two novels. One is quick and short. One is longer and more involved. The first one is The Madrid Marital Murder Mystery. It’s a detective story of a married couple investigating murders in Spain. So far. They might move soon. He’s an American, she’s Spanish. The second one is Dmitry the Scavenger about a man who finds things when no one is looking and sells them to whoever wants them. His dream is to move to Sicily where it’s warmer and more relaxing than Moscow. If you listen to the Tedorigawa Podcast you can hear the first chapter of The Madrid Marital Murder Mystery. And, yes, I’m still experimenting with cover designs for both books. Talkies / Flicks / Videos We have no new flicks to push today, but a brand new one is in the editing stage but it’s just not ready yet. You can, of course, check out dozens or more of my other videos at Tedorigawa Bookmakers. Books Rie, the 36-year-old electrical engineer, and Nagi, the about 80-yer-old retired high school kokugo teacher, randomly met in January and develop their friendship over the course of a year. Other people involved are Harumi, Rie’s free-spirited co-worker who wants to marry someone and can materialize wherever she wants anytime she wants. Tadao is also Nagi’s former student and dated Rie. He’s a manga artist who owns a bar where he does his drawing and writing. His mother, Junko, owns the bar where Rie and Nagi often meet. His manga is about the strangers he meets at his bar. Available at: Apple Barnes & Noble Kobo (and other sites.)

Bookbinding We are often urged to recycle and reuse. I did just that recently on a quick trip to Hanoi that netted me some Vietnamese paper and three barf bags from the flight over. And back. Here’s a small tip. Red-eye flights are good when you land in the evening, not so good when you land in the morning. I made one A6, 100-page, blank notebook with one barf bag with the creative title Bee Creative Now and the subtitle of notebook for inspiration. The front page as a small bee. The title page has a large Japanese kanji for bee: 蜂. It was coptic bound for ease of opening and using the entire page. And for me to practice making coptic-bound books; always a plus. The back cover has my boarding pass without my name over the barf bag. The front cover reuses only the barf bag (not used, fortunately). Fiction Dmitry the Scavenger has stumbled into both a logistics problem and a name change. The novel starts in Chernobyl which I knew as in Ukraine and Dmitry drives his modified rusty camouflaged military truck full of contraband from Chernobyl to Moscow. Problem: crossing borders (Russia and Ukraine) in the middle of a war between those two countries in a MILITARY TRUCK! A Russian Military Truck! I need to find him another way out of Chernobyl or another abandoned village to ransack.I also abandoned the Japanese word for scavenger as it was too obscure for even people who can read Japanese. You may reuse it as you wish. Also in the works: A Marsh Mystery #3 The Madrid Marital Murder Case. Joe and Carmen investigate the murder of an abusive husband whose wife works for Carmen’s brother, Símon, a wealthy owner of a popular Madrid restaurant. Movies/Talkies/Videos TDGB 84 Scavenge & Morph is available for your visual pleasure. It is the making of the A6 blank notebook discussed in the Bookbinding section of this podcast episode. At 6:20 (minutes, not hours) it is not taxing or tiring; it’s Enjoyable! Books The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street is eager for your attention, being as it is lonely and on a quiet website (Apple Books is quiet?) A beta reader came back with the following comments: “Wonderful. Great.” and “I cried at the end.” Find out what Rin Okabe (former high school student, current electrical engineer) and Nagi Shimeki (retired high school teacher) are doing. Available almost everywhere (Apple Books, Kobo) except Amazon.

Bookbinding I cased in The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street novella. It’s B6 (which is B5 folded in half), nine signatures, and 125 pages. In making this book I discovered a warning I must pass on to my listeners/readers. Warning: Keep your fingertips away from sharp objects like exacto knives. Exacto knives are frequently used in bookbinding and, from experience, I realize they cut not only paper, but also human flesh. Fortunately, I did not video-tape the incident. I made a rookie mistake, too. I measured the width of the book cover using the text block but forgot to reduce the width of the book cover by the space of the hinge. This results in the book fore-edge being TOO big. I used washi probably made in Kanazawa for the book cover. It looks nice but is thin. I needed to be careful not to tear it when folding it or using a bone folder. Fiction I tallied up the number of unfinished novels I have padding around my house in their pajamas and tattered bathrobes. To be considered works-in-progress they had to have more than 80 pages; I have many ‘novels’ that have only one or two pages. The total: four. One is from ten years ago. Is it a work-in-progress or forgotten or abandoned? This is Caraculiambro, of course. The giant of a detective investigating a murder, a death (not related to the murder), and land fraud. The others include an historical fiction about a woman who lives about 200 years without aging past 40 (The Posthumous Autobiography of the Widow Agnes Grout); a dystopian future about a man who survives not only war but also the politics of peace and is part four of a trilogy (The Sound of Fear); a happy novel about a dancer who first shows up in Molly Bright but takes center stage with his own novel that takes place in Italy, the Dominican Republic, and Japan but might end in India (Merengue). Which one do you think I started re-working on in order to get it off my Work-in-Progress pile? That’s right! I started a new novel about a Russian scavenger who collects, gathers, ‘finds’ what he can, sells it for what he can get, and ends up in a strange land (Japan) by mistake. Tentative title: The Russian. Talkies I uploaded an eight-minute video of me casing in The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street for your viewing pleasure. Search for or click here: TDGB 82 Warning and Mistakes. Books The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street is available on Apple Books. Former Japanese teacher Shimeki Nagi and one of his former high school students, electrical engineer Okabe Rin bump into each other throughout the year on national holidays and random days. They meet, talk about romance, love and life. They learn about each other, and discover an izakaya owner who writes a manga called The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street.

Bookbinding Not truly amazing, but nothing this week. I got involved in a gardening project and tuckered myself out. Hopefully, more to come next week. Fiction I finished the first draft of The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street. But immediately found or thought of some changes that need to be made. Please remember that there are 12 chapters for each month of the year. • First change: A character is introduced in February but doesn’t show up again until November. I want to make him a little more memorable in February so readers will remember him in November. Also, he owns an izakaya and writes manga. His manga hasn’t been published yet, but the two main characters think it is really good. The name of his manga is The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street. Yes, it’s basically his izakaya. • Second change: Add a bit more loneliness to the two main characters. Tokyo can be very lonely. Also, the main female character wants to quit her job, which she doesn’t like, move back to her hometown in Fukushima, and open her own design shop. That is going to be a major rewrite. • Two more changes. ❶ Set up a disease one character gets. Right now it is just sprung on the reader. I’d like it to build gradually. ❷ Humanize a jerk; one character dates someone because he’s handsome and rich but discovers he’s a jerk. So far, in the first draft, the jerk is just a jerk. I plan to make him a little bit more human. Still a jerk, but more human. I want to finish this novel soon; at least finish draft 2. And make a cover for it. Talkies Please check out the videos already up on my YouTube channel for your viewing pleasure. While there is nothing new this week, you can still enjoy watching your videos.

Bookbinding Last episode I cased in Our Truckin’ Book but the book boards splayed out as if I had cut them perpendicular to the grain rather than with the grain. This episode, I tore off the cover and repaired it with the proper grain. But the same book cloth so it looks similar. This week I printed out two copies of Benengeli’s Zuihitsu. One is A5 and one is A6. This week, I cased in the A5 version. With one experiment that isn’t so experimental except for me. I sliced off the fore edge and I liked it. It made it easier to measure the text block which made it easier to accurately measure the covers. Very useful, although I like the deckle fore edge look as well. The book cover looks like Italian terracotta roof shingles, the endpapers are a light green, the thread is red, and there’s a colorful chiyogami accent on the front of the book to differentiate it from the back of the book. Clever, no? It has five signatures and 84 printed pages with five blank pages pulling up the end. Fiction Two books were completed this episode. First, Benengeli’s Zuihitsu. A zuihitsu is from the Japanese of the Heian Era (about 1,000 years ago) meaning Following the Brush. Writing whatever the writer wanted to write about. It was coined for Sei Shonagon who wrote The Pillow Book about her life in the Heian court. Benengeli’s Zuihitsu is similar; writing about anything that fits his fancy, including that Benengeli is mentioned in Don Quixote by Cervantes (written about 400 years ago). Second, The Dry Watermill Case, a Marsh Mystery. In this episode, Joe and Carmen solve a murder in Seville, Spain and anger some powerful people, so they have to escape to Madrid. Talkies Episode 79 Zuihitsu Large is up and enjoying itself and hoping you can join it. Like zuihitsu in general, it talks about making the book, shopping, music, and new, to me, innovations in bookbinding.

Bookbinding I went to Tokyo for four days. Before that, I finished a client’s hardcopy of The Briefcase Case. I presented it to the client in Tokyo. Other than making that particular book, I didn’t make any other as I was busy going to and from Tokyo by shinkansen. Fiction I’ve got three bits of fiction floating around my computer and brain. One: Zuihitsu. It has two plots that are coming to end soon and when they do finish, the book will be finished. Plot one – a revenge story. Plot two – a crumbling marriage story. The wife in the crumbling marriage was a teacher for one of the mean people in the revenge story. By the way, three characters in The Briefcase Case also appear in Zuihitsu. Two: The Dry Mill Case. A mystery short story involving the same two main characters of The Briefcase Case in a similar plot: a woman is murdered, they discover who the murderer is, they are threatened by the woman’s family. Also, a similar length; about 50 pages. Three: The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street. A 30-something woman meets her high school teacher and they get together over food, alcohol, and life. Not exactly the same as Strange Weather in Tokyo but the same plot but different outcome; written from the third-person rather than first-person. The Talkies You can see a video of The Briefcase Case being made at here. With narration about making books, the plot, about the difference between bunkobon and pocketbooks; and a bit about Kenrokuen, a famous garden in Japan that is in Kanazawa.

Bookbinding This is a120-page, A6-size blank notebook with a collage cover. The important part is the collage cover. As is most of my collage covers, this was an experiment in two ways: first, could I film the process? Second, did it look okay? Top right is the front cover. Top left is the back cover. Off by itself is the book opened up so you can see both the front and back at the same time. Fascinating, eh? To the first question: yes, I could film it. If you go to RhinoTattoo on YouTube, you can see and hear the video. It was necessarily a pretty static shot that didn’t show my hands as I worked. Primarily because I don’t have that kind of tripod many collage makers have. Fortunately, much of it is speeded up. To the second question: It’s up to you. I like it. I think it accomplished what I set out to do. My goal: film a cover collage. What I would do differently is not put on the hazy gauze. The gauze made the book a bit fuzzy, of course, but it was also difficult to glue down, especially the edges. I would also had more pictures. Fiction Okay, sad to say this but I’ve been working on three, yes, Three, different pieces of fiction. As a result one has dropped by the wayside. Again. Caraculiambro is once again sidelined while I concentrate on the other two. The most further along is Zuihitsu. I believe this one is tying up loose ends in a satisfactory way. A few more months, I guess. The third one, just begun, is The Lonely Izakaya Down a Quiet Street. Here is the plot: a woman in her 30s runs into her retired high school Japanese teacher. Again and again. They talk. So far, this is the plot of Hiromi Kawakami’s very popular Strange Weather in Tokyo (which has nothing to do with the strangeness of weather in Tokyo). In Kawakami's book, the two fall in love. In mine, they might not. I haven’t finished it, so I don’t know yet. My novel has a touch of magical realism, I think. The main character, Rin, can “see” herself in different places with different people. Also, one of Rin’s co-workers can float in the air but nobody comments on it. Flicks Rhino Tattoo – so called because it has a kangaroo on the title page with a tattoo of a rhinoceros – is up on YouTube. It has kangaroo in Chinese. There are other videos that concentrate on bookbinding up as well. Please explore, subscribe, and enjoy.

A collage cover using a collage I didn’t like when it was a collage but like as a book cover. Also, Zuihitsu and Caraculiambro are covered.

Bookbinding I have experimented with collage for a few weeks now and decided to make a collage cover. Expect to see more collage covers in the future. It was also time to practice making French link stitch binding so I combined the two in a blank, 100-page B6-sized notebook. The book boards are recycled files destined for the garbage pit. The covers are a recycle kite and left over bits from another book.The endpapers are recycle pieces that lived in my To Be Used Someday pile for the last decade or more. Fiction I've been working on two things. One has been in production for ten years. But not consistently. Caraculiambro. I’m re-reading it to catch up to speed on the plot and characters. Hopefully. I’ll be writing and/or editing it soon. Two, Zuihitsu continues to converge to a (happy?) ending. At least to an ending, although I suspect there might be violence. Video TDGB 69: French Link Stitch II. A recycled collage cover; the first of a few collage covers. With 100 blank pages and the French link stitch. The first books using French link stitches; more coming, I suspect. With even a tutorial coming soon. I hope.

Bookbinding I’ve made three books in the last week or so. All the same topic. All the same size - A6 or pocketbook. All with some mistakes. All three books have the same four short stories: • Morris & Maurice is about a janitor and his Siamese cat, if you please, who witness both the development of a park and a murder. • Paul’s Paris Disneyland’s Farewell Party about three friends who get together in Paris to celebrate Paul’s retirement. They walk in the footsteps of Marcel Proust primarily because I discovered Paris Disneyland is very close to a small village called Guermantes. • Satan Rains is about a heavy metal band that has trouble getting gigs until a tragedy occurs. • Snow Country. I told you about this short story last time, but I’ll refresh my memory. Three work-from-home weavers Zoom each other before their work day begins and tell each other ghost stories to give them something to think about as they weave. Two experience a ghostly event in their ’real’ lives. I put all four short stories into one book called Snow Country. I printed it out. In the first edition, I thought the type was too small and the leading too close. The first attempt has 117 pages. That’s the green volume. The second printing had an interesting problem: different fonts for the different stories. I don’t know how that happened. Probably when I imported the different stories into the book design app I was using. Second, I usually want a new chapter to begin on the right page; the recto/odd-numbered page. One story in the second printing started on the left page; the verso or even-numbered page. Again, though, I thought the leading was too close. My biggest mistake on this printing was not gluing down the mull onto the book board. I did, however, glue it to the text block. I have no idea why I failed to do that. This attempt has 131 pages. This is the pale blue volume on the left. So, I tried again. I made sure the leading was good, the fonts consistent, and the type the proper size. I checked, and all was good. I printed it out. I began gathering the parts, bits, and material to case it in. I checked one more time to make sure. This attempt’s mistake is: it has two page 13s. Why? I have no idea. This attempt has 172 pages and is the pale blue number on the right. With the third printing, I didn’t want to waste the paper, so I continued making it. The printer decided the book-cloth cover, pale blue, needed a splash of ink on the back, so this printing has that. Unfortunately, I misaligned the cover. The name of the book on the spine is not centered correctly. Ah, how we wish we could live and learn. Fiction I started a semi-fictional something. In Japanese, it’s called a zuihitsu. I believe in English it would be called a miscellany or journal. Zuihitsu means to write where the wind blows you. No, it doesn’t; it means: follow the brush (as in a calligraphy brush, not shrubbery.) Ken Kesey wrote two zuihitsu, I believe. The first, Ken Kesey’s Garage Sale, contained essays, fiction, a play, and other musings. His second, Demon Box, had fiction and non-fiction essays. The most famous, in Japan, zuihitsu is from the woman who invented the genre. Sei Shonagon wrote The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) in the late 900s and early 1000s. Yes, about a thousand years ago. Her book had essays, anecdotes, poems, her opinions, and descriptive passages of life in the Heian era court, and seemingly endless lists of things. I started it, in any case. There is a translator’s introduction that claims the writings were originally written by an Arab historian called Cide Hamete Benengeli. So far, it has fiction, non-fiction, and a recipe (for bread). I started a novel, too. I have a name for it: The Tale of Kenshi. It’s about a woman who doesn’t fit her physical body; she doesn’t think she’s as beautiful as she’s been constantly told. She puts up an act when she’s around people, but buries her real personality out of sight. She meets and talks wit