Moss Creek Journal: for my students - book project complete

Saturday, May 18, 2013

for my students - book project complete

The past month I have hunkered down to LAY OUT the "year end book" for my students at Field School. It was a tradition I carried out for all three school terms (The Challenge 2004, What's Going On? 2005, and Motion Puzzles 2006) for my OT students at Root and Dietrich and High School and Adams in Carrollton. Because this year was a new school in another city and a fresh start to a familiar subject, I re-examined WHAT I wanted the compilation TO SAY. My OT (occupational therapy) heroes were all back-- Dr. Paul E. Dennison, Athena Oden (physical therapist) and the neuro-physiologist Carla Hannaford. My waking prayer: breathe on the pages. That breath came, that direction evident. Each step answered.
Double click on pictures to enlarge.

The dinette table used for cutting and inking woodcuts was cleared for the project. Evenings and weekends were spent sorting through previous drawings, deciding on which would come first, which would follow, which would not be included this time around, and which ideas required novel introduction. The hand lettered illustrations were drawn first on folded legal size bond paper. Finally the pages were taped in sequence with Scotch invisible tape on 8 1/2 by 14 inch sheets, folded in half, SO THAT that both sides could be copied on the office copy machine. The 76 page volume has a card stock cover, front and back, and a plastic loose-leaf spine (also called comb binding, or cerlox binding).

Example of double sided "section" here.

Cerlox binding on spine

For two days -- after I clocked out of work, I made the xerox copies needed. The routine went like this: a two page spread was xeroxed in twenty copies. The pages were gathered out of the upper tray, jogged on the table to make the stack even, and then set in the lower tray to xerox the backside two page spread, twenty copies. Staying on alert for errors, misprints, and making corrections or re-xeroxing said pages. There were twenty-four sections xeroxed back-to-back. Each of section was hand folded down the middle, which made four pages of content.

The sections were stacked in sequential piles on a large table, double and triple checked that the order was right. Then, you grabbed the last section, stepped to the left, grabbed the next section under that, stepped to the left, grabbed the next section under that, and so forth. My wife and I did this kind of hand-collating back when we were attending the California Lutheran Bible Institute (Anaheim) and worked after school at the bindery (click on video link and scroll down to see what hand collating can look like).

The card stock covers were hole punched TWO at a time for twenty sets. The paper book sections were hole punched FOUR at a time, twenty sets. The manual comb binding device had an arm bar you pulled forward, which spread the plastic comb binding curl apart. The hole punched book was carefully loaded in thirds, so that the fingers of the curl reached through the holes. Once loaded, the arm bar was pushed back, the comb curled and held the spine fast. One book complete. Load the next, and the next, and so forth.

Comb binding on spine