Book du jour

The plan was to make a back to back accordion book, as seen in Alisa Golden's Making Handmade Books (rather like this one) but I got a bit lazy about the length of paper used - this is only an experiment, right?

First, something for the back/inside of the pages - the text would be coming from the maths exhibition catalogue, so I used the French title. It looked very bold when it was the only thing on the page, but almost completely disappeared in the finished book, obscured by the darker pen soaking through the paper -

Each strip is written in four sections, so actually reading the text is initially tricky. In between the lines are the titles of the two pieces, both written by Mischa Gromov  (who said elsewhere, "it is very difficult to write books with a wide appeal, and very few mathematicians are actually able to do that. You have to know things very well and understand them very deeply to present them in the most evident way") - not that the text is mathematical; more philosophical and relevant to the exhibition. The larger writing in finer pen is the title, much repeated -

In trying to find aesthetic ways to present handwritten texts, I'm trying out various writing materials and book structures. The texts chosen for the experiments are ones that I enjoy reading slowly, and thinking about as I write (though too much thinking does lead to mistakes in the copying). If this develops, the text and its presentation should be in harmony - but I'm not yet clear on what that involves. Maybe the work with type (choosing style, size, spacing - and paper) will feed in to this.

The original plan was to make the text illegible ... I seem to be losing sight of that, or rather it conflicts with my desire to have interesting text readable.