Excuse me while I play corona-slump catch-up. This binding I’m sharing here today is really important to me (and I’m in love with how it turned out), as perhaps the most frequent question people ask me when I tell what I do (I’m a poet and a bookbinder) is do I bind my own poetry books, or would I like to. The answer is a firm no. No, I don’t really want to bind my own words into books, even though I love how a well made book feels. It would be strange to unexpectedly send that sensation into the hands of a random poetry reader, like it would be cheating, if I lured a reader into haptic ecstasy with my book, instead of just verbally hinting at the existence of such a thing.
It’s important to me that my poetry stands its ground without distractions, maybe especially so because I write in such a marginal language. Books are always compared to one another, perhaps even more harshly here, when so few poetry books are published in Finnish. So, my publisher wrapping my words into a fairly standard commercial binding feels like an armor of sorts - here is the poet’s work, now judge the poet’s work, not the binder’s (if the binder got involved, she’d dazzle you so completely the poems would also improve by 50%, and for weird insecure reasons, we don’t want that to happen….).
My relationship with the possibility of having my two professions come together is clearly a very complex one, but I do have good news for you: I made an exception to my rule of not binding my own books and for July’s #areyoubookenough_sea challenge I created a one-off tue-mouche binding* of my poetry book Koko meren laajuus (it’s in Finnish, so let’s say it would translate as The Whole Wideness of the Sea), originally published in 2018 by Poesia (still available through their website!). I shared this book on Instagram as soon as I finished it late July, but it’s finally here, too.
*see Bookbinding out of the box for more info about the tue-mouche binding - I gave myself a couple of their tutorials as present a few years ago and I absolutely recommend them!
While my personal goal with #areyoubookenough is to have fun and simply explore things I maybe normally wouldn’t, there’s always artistic ambition at play, too. My work is often very personal and therefore sometimes weirdly difficult to discuss. Now perhaps more so than ever before, as I’ve now combined my Finnish poetry with book art (which I almost never do), and unfortunately, book art, to me, is a realm of languages other than my native tongue. To me, the way book design and content interact is key, and now I feel I should somehow explain or summarize in English an entire poetry book I wrote in Finnish (and I abhor explaining poetry) in order for you to fully appreciate this binding. The book is about the sea, intimacy and connection. It’s fragmented, sensual and tactile, rising and receding like waves. It’s not a collection of poems, but longform poetry book that consists of five more or less separate units.
For this binding I took apart the original hardcover binding and turned it into a softcover book with dark blue khadi cotton rag paper covers and yapp edges. Both the covers and the endpapers are decorated with splatters of copper leaf. I wanted to incorporate something liquid into the design to represent the sea and the sweat overflowing from the pages, and found copper leaf was such a perfect pair for the slightly teal-tinged blue of the cover and endpaper materials. Its glint also retains that wetness I was after, and the cover as a whole has this most amazing tactile quality to it. Even though this project terrified me in the beginning, the binding turned out just right - it makes my soul sing and I feel it visually and tangibly represents the words printed on its pages. Enter a big sigh of relief and satisfaction.
Even though the binding is the main focus for the #areyoubookenough_sea challenge, I also want to share my words with you. To make up for the lack of an English translation of Koko meren laajuus I decided to at least give you an idea of how my poetry sounds in Finnish and recorded a short video of myself reading it - you can view the video here on instagram. If you’d rather just see more of the binding - you’re in luck, there’s a video of that, too - you can view a video of this book here.
This is the first time I bound my own book, might also be the last, but who knows. It won’t be the last time I use the tue-mouche structure, though!