My partner, Alicia and I decided that we had rather more time than money this festive period – also making things for people aligns well with our collective, burgeoning world view. Anyway, I made these little books. The following are some photos documenting that process.

There was much consternation over: format, typography, how to impose a one hundred and sixty page document into ten sixteen page signatures (printed four pages each side of an A4 sheet), how to print with the best registration on our dinky laser… etc.

After cutting, grouping, folding, sewing (yes with a sewing machine), folding (again) and cutting (again) the signatures could be glued to their covers. For this I made a little jig and put to use one of the most versatile of kitchen items – the chop stick.

Speaking of covers, I thought seeing as I was making each of these one at a time for friends and family I could do something erm, specific. I went to one of our (many) local op shops and bought the 19th edition of the Anglers Omnibus, published in 1987. I took interesting pages from this, cut them out and glued them to card. Captions for many of the photos are preserved by folding them, they become a flap on the inside of the back cover. I really wanted to hang onto these neat little local fishermen’s tales – they link in an obvious but odd way to the story I chose.

This was all initiated as a part of the the first Me and You Make and Do, an idea of Alicia’s which went smashingly I might add. We bought a bunch of lino-printing supplies – to print cards and sundry with. I decided that the cover of my book could be lino printed also (and while I’m at it a fiddly drop cap too, why not?).

The title proved handy, leave it to Hemingway to title a story exclusively in three letter words.

We also lino-printed these rad square tea-towels with instructions for folding an origami dog on them. Below is an image of: towel, towel-dog and dog-dog.