Given that I have an A4 printer and that A5 (half of A4) is an acceptable size for a hard cover book, I went with A5.

This was the hardest part. I looked high and low for A5 paper but couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I caught on to the idea of simply printing two pages onto A4 and cutting it in half. I still couldn’t find the paper I wanted, something that had rough edges, something that would look either old or hand-made. I bought and tried a few different drawing pads from art stores until I eventually lucked into this:

This book is A5, with unlined empty pages and ragged edges. Better still, it’s “thread sew bind” so it’s actually A4 with a perforated middle. Deconstructing it carefully to remove the threads without breaking the pages, I now had my paper (and cover boards!)

This was more of a pain that expected, and I ended up doing all the pages one-sided only, doubling my paper consumption. But it wasn’t that difficult

I punched holes into the pages. At this point in time I was still thinking about binding the pages using ribbon, for that hand-made look. That turned out to be incredibly impractical. The ribbon would cut through the pages, breaking the binding. I had actually anticipated this, and had bought pewter ringlets meant for home-made jewellery that I intended to put into the holes and then run the ribbon through. Unfortunately, printing single-sided meant that the book was thicker than anticipated and the ringlets weren’t long enough (and two were too long).

Plan B was to strip a presentation folder of it’s flexible plastic binding and use that. So first I held the pages together with that binder while I taped the bound edge of the pages. This was somewhat successful, but not completely. Not all pages touched the tape.

Before I could finish the binding, I had to prepare the cover boards. Each of these were already (professionally) glued to A5 pages, so I didn’t need to punch holes in the boards, just their associated pages. I had to position and hand cut those holes, manually.

Now with the same plastic binder I could attach the cover boards to the manuscript. From there, another round of taping to bind the whole together and to ensure that the cover boards won’t only being held by two small holes in paper.

This was itself a multi-step process and was actually done parallel to steps 1 to 3.

This isn’t for commercial use, just for my mom’s eyes, but I was trying to show her just how a real book would look like with my name on it. I searched until I found an image that I thought. captured the mood of the story, downloaded it* and overlaid text. I also made a title card for the spine.

Then I found A4 sized printable stickers.

I took the stickers and the design to a colour printer and printed copies of each.

At one of the print shops, I had bought a couple of pieces of large card stock.

I glued one of them to the cover boards of the book, trimming as I went. I DID NOT glue along the spine, so the cover and the book would have breathing room there. I let it set over night. Then I carefully applied my artwork to this cover, front and back and finally spine. I found that I needed to use extra glue to hold these in place (and later had to do a touch-up).

And that was it. In 2015, my mom got to hold a physical copy of a book of my work, over a decade before anyone else would.

At that point, her battle with Alzheimer’s was still fairly new and she won more days than she lost. I’d like to think she saw and understood what it represented: a promise, an idea, a future her son had that she wouldn’t otherwise get to see.

In 2018, the book came back to me. It did its job. Now it sits honourably on a shelf.