making alphabet books

Over the past few weeks I have been experimenting with making small artists books,  building on some work I began last year during my Foundation course.  I've been lazy about recording things recently, so what follows is an attempt to catch up with the autumn's work.  First up, alphabet books.  

While pootling around looking at blogs a while ago I came across the web-site for a wonderful international blog called A Letter a Week and decided I would have a go at making some alphabets of my own.  The first one I attempted was entirely made up of letters cut from newspapers, both lower and upper case.  I mounted these on 3" square sheets of cartridge paper, and then mounted these, in turn, onto larger squares of black paper, folded and creased .  I glued each folded letter sheet to the next, creating a 26-section folded book.  It does not photograph very well, and is easiest to see when you can pick it up and flip through the sections.  Not very special, but a good way to get my book-making juices running again after a gap of almost a year. 

My second alphabet consists of 26 3" square sheets on which I have created images of the 26 capital letters, drawn in sepia or black dots.  These are held in a coptic-bound book, each signature being a single origami-folded envelope, just big enough to hold one of the dotty letters.  I rather like this one, my Book of Letters, because of the pun on "letters" and "envelopes".  It is a better size and scale than the first book, and is nice to handle.  You have to pull out the individual letters to see them properly, but there are hints of each one showing through the open top triangle of each envelope.

Thirdly, I decided to mount the letterpress alphabet book which I had printed during a Letterpress course at UWE in July 2011.  This was a mammoth typesetting and measuring exercise, done on the last afternoon of the course, and almost abandoned because of lack of time. Thanks to Angie Butler, we got the type set up and printed, but apart from cutting the finished printed sheets into strips, I had not, until now, worked them into book format.

The result, now, is a very simple folded accordian book of all 26 letter prints (each one using an upper and lower case example of each letter).  I had intended, when i made the original print, to do 26 accompanying small drawings (or possibly rubber-stamp prints) of simple images to illustrate each of the letters, but so far this is still just an idea).