book mock up

I’ve bound my most recent mock up into a mock cover to see how the paper from the shop is to glue and bind with. On the back the paper has crease along the horizontal channels. and at first the front had some big air pockets, but these managed to dry flat. I’ve not bound anything with the spine before so it was guess work. It fits nicely round the body, but if I had stuck the front page down as end paper like I’ve done with the back page it wouldn’t sit flat when open - this is where knowing how to do spines is important. I found with a very shoddy mock up I did a couple of days ago that having a narrower spine was much more comfortable than having a big one.

I like the green and brown - I will have to try having the brown as a spread of front and back end papers and binding this to a cover in a mort traditional way.

Clean Dirt

After a couple of weeks of hunting I came across this beautiful poem by August Arps and he's very graciously allowed me to use it for the moss book.

Clean Dirt

deep in the clean loamy. in the dark froth of top soil and odd moss - deep
in the tendrils of microscopic cosmologies; fecund and rampant with life -
the long reed holding the wind's note in it's throat
in the failing light, beneath the canopies...
you're gasping. you gasp
at the habit of
love's heart
and the little things, teeming
in the underneath.
where gnashing teeth are dead leaves.
and yellow is origami
in the dappling
of the sun.

and the peace.

http://hellopoetry.com/poem/clean-dirt/

I think it's going to work.

The Wind in the Willows

This is my entry for the 2013 Puffin book cover competition

more moss photos

These are some of the photos that I'm going to try and make into a book, I don't know whether to go down the factual or poetic route. It would be great to find a poem to typeset through the images, but that could be tricky...