The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Books are magical treasure troves of knowledge and art. Academics love books. It makes sense that places of study such as colleges and universities would house libraries of rare collections. The University of Washington's Bhutan book, for example, is a massive seven-foot by five-foot behemoth.

This thing weighs 133 pounds and took an entire 24 hours to print. As a former Guinness Book of World's Records holder, Bhutan, at its mammoth scale, offers landscapes as big as windows and life-size portraits of the Himalayan kingdom and its citizens.

But books themselves are art at any size. With advances in mass production, less thought is given to how they're made. Not so long ago (and in some places still), books were made by hand. When most "written" words live and die digitally, it has become a common cliche to say "print is dead," yet it lives.

Bookmaking puts the art at your fingertips, and there are a variety of ways to go about it.

Books can be bound by staples, glue, or stitches. Staples are quick and easy but add to the project's budget and the finished product's weight. Glue is also relatively quick, though not quite as easy. The book has to be held in place until the adhesive dries.

Stitching books together is the traditional method. Colloquially, a signature is the official writing of one's name. In book terminology, a signature is a collection of four or five sheets of paper folded in half and gathered into bundles. A stack of signatures is called a book block. Bookmakers, using waxed linen thread, stitch signatures directly to the book's spine.

Some common stitching methods are the pamphlet stitch, Japanese stab binding, Romanesque braid binding, and Coptic stitching.

Before delving into the full-sized project, it is tradition to create a smaller scale version with the intended materials. This mini version is called a dummy. Even dummies are valuable in bookmaking. They help us iron out details before fully committing resources.

Overwhelmed to find yourself in stitches? Art books don't stop there. Take an old, outdated throwaway book (maybe from a thrift store) and fold pages back to create artful designs.

Or, go a step further to create an art journal. Paint over pages and add elements of collage.

By the time you're finished, you'll have a work of art as one of a kind as Waitsburg.