I went to a Coptic bookbinding workshop yesterday (a pre-conference part of the A. Dean Larsen Book Collecting Conference, which was today) and made my first book binding:

(You can see more photos on Flickr, by the way.)

So, it’s actually an Ethiopic binding, to be particular, but the generic term is Coptic binding. I’ll admit that it’s not my favorite type — I much prefer books with a spine board, especially leatherbound — but spending a day making one has definitely endeared it to me more than I expected. (The advantage of Coptic binding is that you can lie the book flat open quite easily. With pretty much any other binding, that’s a lot harder to do.)

The whole experience was fun. Very soothing and relaxing — working with one’s hands is wonderful — and it’s delicious seeing the final product. Not to mention that the time completely flew by. Flow state all day. It was great. :)

Most bookbinding classes and workshops use blank text blocks (as you can see in the pictures), which is great for journals (and I’ll use this one as a writing journal, I think), but what I really can’t wait to do is start designing and printing books and then binding those. Mmm.

Today I went to a class on English Bibles and a class on editions of the Book of Mormon (in which my reader’s edition was showcased, I should say :)), and now I’m itching at the bit to publish a pocket-size reader’s edition of the Doctrine & Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. I just need to find a public domain edition of the text… (The texts aren’t on Project Gutenberg.)

Yesterday morning I was browsing through my copy of Tales Before Tolkien, and I happened to notice the Recommended Reading section at the back, which I’d never seen before.

Goosebumps.

You see, that section lists early fantasy writers and their works (William Morris, E. Nesbit, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare, John Buchan, etc.), and almost all of the books and stories mentioned are pre-1923. Out of copyright. Fair game. Mmm. :)

So, I’ve decided that Riverglen Press will have one line focusing on early fantasy — a trend I’ve already started with Phantastes and the upcoming A Voyage to Arcturus. I’m very, very excited about this.

The other two main areas I see Riverglen Press publishing in, by the way, are classics (like A Christmas Carol and Jekyll & Hyde) and language-related books (both grammars, like the Old Icelandic Primer, and actual texts, like Beowulf).

I plan to work on at least one book in each of the three main categories at any given time. Right now I’m finishing up A Voyage to Arcturus in the fantasy line, and I’ve let Pride & Prejudice slip to the back burner in the classics line but I could easily bring it back. As for the language line, I’m feeling like either a Latin text (Augustine?), Grimm in German, or Afanasyev’s collection of Russian tales. (I do plan to publish lots of fairy tales in all sorts of languages, by the way. Lang, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault, the Arabian Nights, etc.)

Now if only I had more time… :)

I checked out some books on Hebrew and Arabic today, and as I was leafing through the Hebrew one at dinner (Hebrew for Biblical Interpretation by Arthur Walker-Jones), I realized something: I really want to publish language books. Both books about the languages and texts in the languages.

You see, as I browse through the books out there, a lot of them don’t feel like they do things the right way. I’m not saying I know what the “right way” is, but I think there’s often room for improvement — particularly among the less common languages (like Gothic) where most of the grammars were written in the 1800s and early 1900s. And so I want to write introductory grammar books for dead languages. And live ones, too, but there’s more available material for them, so it’s less pressing. (Seeing as there isn’t a whole lot of market for, say, Middle High German grammar texts, I’m not planning to get any money out of them. They’ll be freely available online, probably with print-on-demand hard copies through Lulu at cost.)

The other half of the coin is actual texts. I’ve done an edition of Beowulf, but that’s about it so far. Project Gutenberg has a nice list of foreign-language texts (like Don Quijote), but it’s not as long as I’d like. Getting texts that I’m sure are public domain will be the hard part. But not insurmountable. :) (Luckily my tastes run towards the older books, which are generally more likely to be public domain.)