Bookarts: work [part 2]

Shhhh. It's the secret Belgian

Today I’m sharing one of the earliest books I ever made using a binding method with an odd name: The Secret Belgian Binding. Read the first post in this series here:

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When people talk about Belgium they’re never really talking about the country Belgium. They approach it obliquely. Belgium is ‘boring’. I’M NOT FRENCH I’M BELGIAN! They’re not quite sure where it is.

For example, when John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, mentions Belgium in his songs he’s talking about doing drugs.

"It's hard to explain any experience from the outside, but particularly when it involves a lot of experiences that a lot of people haven't had. Um, so when you talk about staying up all night shooting meth, you exclude ninety-nine percent of the population from really being able to say, oh, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. They don't know. To make them know, well, you don't want them really to know [laughs]. You think, what's another thing that people can't understand? A country they haven't been to, right. A, a place they know something about, they know its name, they've heard about it, they could identify stuff that's from there, but they can't go there. They can't have been there. I think that's where, that's where that intersects." -- 2022-04-25, Depresh Mode podcast interview, explaining the "Belgium" references

I digress.

The Secret Belgian Binding was created by an actual Belgian, though. Thankfully. Anne Goy, a book artist from Brussles, came up with this binding method as an alternative to Japanese stab binding.

It’s better, in my opinion! It’s just as pretty and allows the book to lay flat open.

I made this so early in my bookbinding ‘career’ because I was tackling different binding methods in order to enhance my binding vocabulary.

Which is good because, lemme tell you, this binding method is a bit of a finicky b1tch.

I was questioning my life choices when I was only halfway through. Now I think, looking back, maybe I just found it so hard because I didn’t really know what I was doing.

About the book I gutted

This was the first book I ever took apart. It felt a little sacrilegious, but that old paper smell made it worth it. It came apart gently.

I kept all the pages in a drawer - I still have them, but don’t really know what to do with them. So, it’s a first edition copy of Small Gardens and How to Make the Most of Them, by Violet Biddle. You can download it or read it for free at Project Gutenberg. Who was Violent Biddle?

I have no idea, and the internet doesn’t help.

Learn the Secret Belgian Binding

As with most of my book structures, I learned this method from Sea Lemon on YouTube, and you can too:

Thanks for being here

See you next week! I always love to hear from you in a comment, with a ❤️, or even a restack to Substack Notes. 🐝

Jessica