Book(s) du jour

Start, just start ... somewhere ...

Strips cut off the edges of photocopies were lying around, as was a thesaurus, so I opened it at random and started writing on the back of the strips with a non-inky pen. So far, the words are invisible on the front and look white but are backwards on the black side. A pile of tissue paper made a nice spongey surface for writing and made the letters sink in better. Then, out with the graphite and the words appeared. They don't exactly make exciting reading, but do supply the necessary line of text. Next, writing on the back - not over-writing; the graphite acts as carbon paper, an another line of text appears, also legible should anyone care to read it, on the black side.

Pretty boring so far, though. I was ready to abandon the idea - which wasn't really an idea, just "start somewhere and keep going" - but decided to keep going. I glued the sections into a concertina and added covers (long, thin strips of mountboard) - and this is what happened -

By opening the book in "the opposite way" - using the top edge as "the spine" - you use the weight of the covers to produce a 3D shape. Suddenly the project got interesting. That long strip could be a sort of journey ... or a timeline ....

By the end of the afternoon I had several similar books -

The largest is some textured black paper that was written on (while listening to Just A Minute; words were taken from those heard) and covered with graphite on both sides - so shiny! -

 Another had a wiggly "path" drawn on the black side and the white side darkened -

 To hold them closed, and to have a place for titles etc, I made loops of paper and wrote the titles before gluing the loop -

In order of making, they are (l to r) - Intention (Roget 617);  Evolution of script;  Playing Just A Minute;  Path there and back;  Fairy tales - and the small one is a different story, for another day. Titles are derived from the source of the text copied/used/evolved. The loops slide to the middle, if you like that look, but in the photo the books remind me of matchsticks ... incendiary devices ... (remember how you used to get books of matches?)

Messy stuff, the graphite. Maybe you can't see the smudges on the covers. If cleanliness is next to godliness, those covers have a ways to go. Black board might be a better idea. Or, wipeable plastic?