Don Lusk Books, Poems with a Purpose, Lessons from the Dead

Book Making

The best motivation for beginning writers is the potential of seeing their words in print; their ideas extended to a larger audience than just themselves. But first-time authors soon find out how hard it is to get their work commercially published. Books on writing stress that it is almost impossible for unpublished authors to be accepted. Worse than this, aspiring writers see this fact for themselves first hand in bookstores where they are assaulted by thousands of books; so many successful authors that their chances of being published seem almost non existent. Writing just for your own satisfaction is a good beginning, but not an end in itself. There must be some prospect of getting your thoughts to others to sustain you through the long last stages of the project. After you’ve overcome the initial hurdles of beginning to write and found your natural pace at slogging through the daily toil of transcribing your ideas, suddenly the problem of disseminating your work looms up to sabotage your efforts just when you need encouragement most as you near completion of your quest.

My experience writing Lessons from the Dead has uncovered several solutions to this problem. I have found that making my own books helps conquer the daunting prospect of commercial publication. It also has the advantage of preserving your work in an almost finished form for others to read and comment on, no matter what stage your writing project has reached. More importantly, it provides you with a tangible symbol of your efforts that inspires you to continue on and finish your work, add to it, or improve it. You now see, not just a sheaf of loose manuscript pages stuffed in a drawer or confined to a non descript file folder, but an almost completed facsimile of the finished product you hope to create. It can be proudly shown to friends and family as the embodiment of the worthwhile goal your efforts will some day bring to fruition.

One of the most inspiring sources of book making that helped propel me over my chasm of self doubt is Betty Doty’s Hey Look, I made a Book. Here is a resource that shows how to print, put together and bind a commercial quality book; one that could be made in large enough quantities to sell in local book stores. Most strikingly, you will see that her book is, in fact, a home made affair itself, complete with velour cover and hand stitched binding. It proves by its very existence and commercial success that book making besides just being a motivational factor or a family activity, can blossom into a commercially viable enterprise if you so choose. Thus your facsimile book helps you not only finish your writing project, but at the same time could be the means of getting your message out to a larger audience.

A good web resource that gives most of the book making facts found in Doty’s book, but doesn’t have quite the inspiring spirit of her home made volume, is Douglas Jones’ A Bookbinding Tutorial at http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/jones/book/index.html. Another good general reference on bookbinding is Manly Banister’s Bookbinding as a Handcraft. He shows many different types of binding methods from the traditional signature binding to single sheet and book restoration binding. Best of all he shows how to inexpensively make some the tools needed in binding operations: for example how simple woodworking tools can be adapted to binding. He also shows how to restore your favorite, worn out volumes or save your best magazines by binding them into attractive volumes to grace your book shelves.

There are many other ways of using book making arts to further your writing efforts. For example, art books, binder books and day books are just a few. A good reference here is Handmade Books and Cards by Jean Koppers. All of these book making methods are based on our writer’s innate love of books; on our almost uncanny ability to communicate with another and sense his thoughts through the medium of the printed page. It’s natural then that we should want to be part of this great silent dialogue with our own contribution in the form of a well bound volume of our words. Hence arises our addiction to books and our need to write our own compendium of quiet comunication. It is the reason books exert such a profound psychological influence on us, and so can be used as a powerful motivating factor. All of these ideas on book making as they pertain to our writing work are discussed in my forthcoming book, Writing Insights, designed to help first-time authors see their words in print.