#Corvi Tenebrae et Academici Rustic and Vintage Literature | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

angrenwen · 10 months ago

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angrenwen · 3 years ago

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The one on the left is Rebecca West’s childhood memoir—I spent hours on google images looking for a painting that matched the vibe... For the one on the right I just salvaged the original paper cover and embedded it into the new cloth cover.

Another childhood memoir (Marcel Pagnol’s)—it’s a trilogy so I added a leather band on the right that matches the spine of the next book in the series. It was a bit of a challenge to find marbled papers that matched both colours

Evelyn Waugh (left) and Borges’s Aleph (right). Borges deserves my most complicated marbled paper.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles—it was my first time adding hubs on the spine, I’m not a big fan of leatherwork but it was worth it. The leather looks almost raspberry-coloured here but it’s actually a cold purple in normal light. I was looking for a funereal colour for this depressing book...

On the left below is my first attempt at Japanese binding, for a volume of poetry—I wanted a quicker technique to do all my small poetry books and was pleasantly surprised when this one only took a couple of days, vs. two months for a cloth- or leather-bound book. And the rotund one on the right is a biography of Hypatia of Alexandria I bought in a secondhand shop in Mexico, it was basically just a sheaf of semi-loose, tattered pages—I had to re-cut them and make new signatures so I could stab holes for sewing without it falling apart. But it’s more interesting when there’s a lot of work to do, you can spend weeks caring for a book, feeling like a surgeon...

And as you can see from these last pics there are more books haphazardly piled up in every corner behind bookcases. I really need more shelves."

re the armchair post: your living toom looks incredibly cozy! And the book shelf in the background looks very interesting. Would you maybe tell us a bit about which books you have on there? Especially the top shelf, it looks like some kind of old encyclopedia with a staggering amount of volumes. (In other words, book-based bliss.)

I like posting pictures of my books almost as much as cat owners like posting cat pics :) I answered an ask about the bottom shelf books here! And here are a few books from the middle shelves:

The top shelf books are the complete works of Jules Verne:

I loved his novels as a kid, and when I was in middle school there was this complete collection in the window of a bookshop in the Quartier Latin, and every time we walked past it I used to tell my best friend that one day I'd be rich and they’d be mine—and then she plotted with my parents so they'd each buy 1/3rd of the collection as a gift for my 18th birthday <3 I loved re-reading them, ten years later.

And these are some of the books I bound myself:

I used to spend a lot of time prowling around the Book Market when I lived in Paris, looking to rescue old damaged books so I could re-bind them—I often got armfuls of books for free since they were going to be thrown away. It’s such a satisfying feeling to make a book from (almost) scratch, it becomes such a precious and special object. They make great gifts too, you can really tailor them to people’s tastes. I have a friend who once asked me to make her a quarter-bound Little Women with “cheerful cherry-red leather” and lots of gold accents “so it looks like a box of Christmas chocolates” and I was like okay, I’ll make you the most gilded, most garish Little Women ever conceived. :)

I’ll post some pics of my handmade books under ther read more!

The one on the left is Rebecca West’s childhood memoir—I spent hours on google images looking for a painting that matched the vibe... For the one on the right I just salvaged the original paper cover and embedded it into the new cloth cover.

Another childhood memoir (Marcel Pagnol’s)—it’s a trilogy so I added a leather band on the right that matches the spine of the next book in the series. It was a bit of a challenge to find marbled papers that matched both colours

Evelyn Waugh (left) and Borges’s Aleph (right). Borges deserves my most complicated marbled paper.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles—it was my first time adding hubs on the spine, I’m not a big fan of leatherwork but it was worth it. The leather looks almost raspberry-coloured here but it’s actually a cold purple in normal light. I was looking for a funereal colour for this depressing book...

On the left below is my first attempt at Japanese binding, for a volume of poetry—I wanted a quicker technique to do all my small poetry books and was pleasantly surprised when this one only took a couple of days, vs. two months for a cloth- or leather-bound book. And the rotund one on the right is a biography of Hypatia of Alexandria I bought in a secondhand shop in Mexico, it was basically just a sheaf of semi-loose, tattered pages—I had to re-cut them and make new signatures so I could stab holes for sewing without it falling apart. But it’s more interesting when there’s a lot of work to do, you can spend weeks caring for a book, feeling like a surgeon...