Customer Reviews

The Essential Guide to Making Handmade Books

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a practicing book artist, and a teacher of many book arts classes, I have tested many books about making books. This is one of the best I have seen. Gabrielle Fox's Essential Guide is full of innovative and stimulating book structures, and the instructions are clear and easy to follow, with excellent diagrams and full-color photographs of the steps as well completed examples. The book structures she guides us through are simple enough for beginners, yet, as her examples show, are also sophisticated enough to be used by seasoned veterans of book arts. Highly recommended!

This book makes even a defiantly non-crafty person like me want to plunge right in. I love books and intriguing treatments. This book offers the support needed to turn wishes into finished projects. The range of possibilities covered is broad enough to appeal to many different tastes. The Jacob's Ladder book is lots of fun, as the star book. The accordion album is a very attractive and manageable project and one of the most useful. This book covers basics like pamphlet binding, portfolios and slipcases. The instructions are clearly written and are supported by excellent photographs that really make it easy to understand what's supposed to be happening. And the Gallery of Ideas -- photos and descriptions of additional, more elaborate variations of each project -- get your mind cranking with the possibilities. Yummy. An excellent book -- not just for the bookmaking crowd, but useful for teachers also. This summer, my daughter attended a camp where they wrote poetry in the afternoon and learned bookmaking (much of it based on this book) in the afternoons, and the kids loved it.

I have a few other books on this subject, but this by far is the most thorough and in-depth one. The pictures are amazing - step by step. I recomed it highly for beginers and even experienced users.
There are some unique ideas in it! I can't say enough...BUY THIS BOOK!

This book is really good to follow instructions and to figure out what supplies you will need and shows you how to create something but giving you basic instructions which are good. It's isn't too wordy and you can follow unlike other books I've purchased. If you are a beginner you will enjoy looking through the pages and creating projects.

This version is just so strange. It looks like it is made up of cheap black and white photocopies of the original book by the same name with a publishing date of July 2000. I'm not sure what the publishers were thinking by making this sad edition--a lot of detail of the photos are lost.

This is a very basic book, underwhelming, in fact. The projects mostly involve folding, sometimes - gluing, only one or two of them are actual sewn books, and even these are the simplest possible. While that would be desirable for a parent who needs safe and simple projects for their kids, an adult who wants to make progress in bookbinding would feel frustrated.
One review mentioned that the instructions are overdetailed - that's complete truth! If you need to measure 1" from the top and 1" from the left, these actions will be explained in 4 steps minimum, with big pictures and loads of text.

The step-by-step photos in this guide are absolutely fabulous. Literally each step of the process is shown in a separate photograph, which makes it very easy to keep on the right track and to check your work.

I agree with some other reviewers that the projects in this book are a little more simplistic than in some other books and I actually chose to buy a different book (Creating Books & Boxes) and take this one back to the library. However, the simple nature of the projects in this book do serve to make the art and craft of making books feel within reach and I'd definitely highly recommend it to the beginner.

This books is full of visuak instructions that show each and every step for each type of book covered. There are some very interesting styles in here that are possible for any level of bookmaking.

The projects in this book are more basic than in other books I've seen. There aren't any unique or remarkable designs and those that were interesting, I have seen done much better in other books. Also, I'm the type of person who likes to look at a project, figure out how to do each step, and do it my own way(feels more fulfilling at the end when you do succeed!). Hence, I found that this book was much too hand-held and at times the steps were so minutely set out, that I lost track of the 'bigger picture'. However, I would highly recommend this book to beginners.