Ep. 316: Casing in Kenrokuen Souvenir

Bookbinding

I cased in two books in the last week. One, The Kenrokuen Souvenir Notebook, is an A6 (pocketbook-size) mostly blank notebook. The recto pages (right side) contain really short Japanese lessons; translations of useful (?) words you might need while being a non-Japanese tourist in Kanazawa. The verso pages (left side) are lined for your writing pleasure.

A video of the pages being printed and folded is available here. A video of Kenrokuen Souvenir Notebook being cased in will appear semi-shortly. I mean well within this year. I hope.

The cover has two outdents: a circle and a bar on the front to distinguish it from the back, which has no such design element.

The second book was, in my estimation, sloppily done. The textblock is crooked on the cover, the endpapers sits cattywampus on the textblock, and the cover was hastily thrown together. The cover itself was meant to convey Marcel Proust in Paris. But it doesn’t; it portrays a man straight out of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Paris.

The content, however, is the important part of this book. It is 200 pages liberated from Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way. I cannot read Proust on my laptop or iPhone. I need to read a Real Book™. So I print out my Project Gutenberg download. I print them in editions of about 100-200 pages instead of all at once. Why? Easier to carry. I mark up the printed version with notes, dates of completion, circles, lines circling back to related passages, and hundreds of thousands of question marks. 

Fiction

I continue to edit Molly Bright, write on Growing Slurry, and procrastinate on a hundred other writing projects. These procrastinate-linked projects include; three mystery/detective novels set in Kanazawa, one literary detective novel set in Seattle, one futuristic dystopian novel, and six English textbooks (three for specialized mechanical engineers, and salemen, one for medical students, and two for general university students).

Video

A less-than four-minute flick (viewable here) about printing and folding an A6-size semi-blank notebook. It’s semi-blank because the left (verso) page has lines on it for writing notes of your trip. And the right (recto) page has words or phrases in Japanese and English, possibly useful. For example, at the bottom of page 3 is: 

お金 — o-kane – money

Now, 金 alone can mean gold, money, iron, or metal depending on the context. 金 can be pronounced kin, kon, kane or kana, also depending on the context. For example, the 金 in 金沢 (Kanazawa) is pronounced kana and means gold. But with the お in front of it, it is pronounced okane and means money.

As an aside, 金髪 is pronounced kinpatsu and means blonde hair. 髪 is pronounced kami and hatsu and means hair.

But you’re not going to get this level of Japanese language education in either the four-minute video or the actual Real Book™ because this blog doesn’t teach Japanese, except as it applies to either bookbinding or fiction. Or, obviously, a video.