Innovative Bookbinding: Secret Compartments & Hidden Messages

This edition is tough to find. I ordered and received the 1997 signed, handbound edition, (#700 of 1000), and I am thrilled with it. I ordered it for two reasons; 1: I love Shereen LaPlantz's style. She was a gifted and articulate artist and educator. 2nd, I am interested in Chinese Thread Books, or Zhen Xian Bao and Shereen LaPLantz is one of the first, (as far as I can tell), book artists in the U.S. to document and provide instructions for the book form. (I have seen the 2013 facsimile and while it is good, it does not have the pull-outs and models that the 2 original versions have.)

I have a large, wonderful, collection of books on bookbinding but I have to say this will be my number one "go to" book. It is a great instruction book on the art of bookbinding which will appeal to all levels of learning. I am now trying to obtain the hardback book as this was only available in the Kindel form.

Content is fine, but illustrations are a bit hard to see.

This is a bad reprint of a poorly designed how-to. It is difficult to see the images in the photographs as they have been scanned poorly and are quite small in the text. Pages are crowded and many details are line-drawings that really give no sense of proportion or implementation. It would be difficult to make a book from the outlines given in this book. Price is very high for what you get.

It's not worth. The quality of the photos is so bad that you can't see the bookbinding you're going to make...

A wealth of innovative projects for books

All perfect.

I bought this as a Print-to-order book from the publisher--not through Amazon. I'll start with the flaws which you can mostly see in the preview offered here on Amazon. The photos do not print well, especially any with dark backgrounds or large areas of dark tones. This is the major downside of this printing. It is also not geared for an absolute beginner (though she talks about basic stitching and adhesives). But, I'm no master binder either and had no problem following along with the instructions in this book. The photos may not be that good, but the illustrations (line drawings) are clear and easy to match up to the text. I like her style which is concise and encourages you to make a model first. It gives me a sense of freedom when she says, "Start with a long strip of paper. Adding machine tape is a good material for the first model*, just to see what this looks like." I knew right away this was one of those projects where you do a quick, messy first draft just to learn how it works, and THEN you get to mess around with it somehow to make it fit your idea of a book. Shereen says almost exactly this throughout the book. (*Also, I chuckled every time I saw 'adding machine tape'). In keeping with my idea of good instruction, she tells you where you cannot be careless ("THEY MUST BE PERFECT" or "That first line MUST be PERFECT"). Anyway, I ended up taking away a whole bunch of ideas and found it to be very helpful. I think the balance between price and the poor photo reproduction is out of whack (and there are typos, too) so, minus 1 star. In the end, though, I'm going to get more than my $27.50 out it.

Great ideas

At first I dind't realized it was a re-print, it's a very poor quality (pixelous in the text, the images in b/w are too blurry to see what it's pictured... It's almost worse than photocopy. I feel the price is not worthy for the quality of the print. That's a pity

This book was a disappointment. The quality of the paper is poor as are the illustrations. I would not have bought it if I had know this.

It is a really great reference for several unusual mechanisms, and ways to incorporate them in making books. It lacks in complete instructions, giving you a general explanation, and no detailed instructions whatsoever for the constructions, so I do not recommend it to beginners, since you must have some prior knowledge of bookmaking and also some origami/paper engineering for some of the projects. Great for experienced bookbinders wanting to explore different possibilities.

I realise that this book is self published by LaPlantz and so didn't expect glossy colour, but I was appalled by the terrible quality of the images throughout the book. Many were not much better than smudges on the page. Some of the ideas were good and the hand drawn and instructions were clear enough but even those looked like 3rd generation photocopies. Had I been able to see inside the book first, I wouldn't have purchased it.