Altered Books: In the Beginning

Altered books have become popular as a display art form. Not only is it visually appealing but also extremely tactile which appeals to the touchy feely in all of us. These artistic tokens have been popping up in gift shops and curios with themes like, Mother, Sister, Best Friends, and Love decorated with purchased ephemera so there are lots of sophisticated Victorian women in hats, botanicals, lace and buttons everywhere. Cool looking but not very personal. Here is how to make your own personalized version.

First off I needed to get one of these old hardcover books that I wouldn't feel bad about destroying. Library sales, yard sales, relatives doing seasonal cleaning, and the local consignment/antique shop turned up a plethora of the poor abandoned things. The key is to choose the ones you take home with you wisely.

First thing is to consider the size of the book. Can you recover it with paper sizes that are available to you? Some of the larger coffee table books are too large for the 12"x12" standard scrapbook paper. This means additional cost for materials and most likely some searching for anything special. Of course you may luck out and find one with a dust jacket covering wonderful decorative papers you may not want to change. Be sure to check the corners and the ends of the spine. If any of these is crumpled or wrinkled too much it will make recovering operation more challenging. Minor wrinkles and bends can be smoothed out but anything too dog eared will most likely cause similar distortion to whatever you use to recover.

Take into consideration the number of pages in the entire book and in the booklets contained in the spine. You want both pretty thick, as you will be pulling some of the pages out and adding embellishments. Every photo you glue in is probably the thickness of three or four book pages. The more pages and booklets the more you can remove without compromising the overall integrity of the piece. Be careful that the book is not too old and brittle. If the pages are coming apart in your hand or if the corner pierces through when you fold it over it's not a good choice. Even though you'll be gluing pages together the brittleness will stay. You'll be able to bend and break several pages at a time once they are glued.

Now that you have this gargantuan book with all these pages you may be wondering how you are ever going to fill it up. You're not, at least not every page. Start by going to the middle of the first booklet, you should be able to see the threads holding the booklet in the spine if you're on the right page. You will be able to remove sets of pages; meaning the left and right page is one full sheet. Start pulling them out careful not to break the threads. To determine how many to pull out you will have to assess how many pages are in the front half of the booklet. I like to glue about five or six pages together to create one keeping in mind that I will be gluing at least two pages from the left side of the booklet to four pages from the right side thereby sealing up the space I am removing the pages from. This will prevent the full sheets pulling against the threads and tearing with the weight of the additions I make later.

Please note these books are most likely not acid or lignen free like your usual scrap book supplies. You may want to use some archival products (sprays and wipes are currently popular) to remedy this.

Once you are done pulling pages from all of the booklets you are ready to glue. Modge Podge and foam brushes are your best friends. I like full contact adhesion to prevent the pages from having air bubbles between them. That's not to say there won't be some wrinkles here and there but I like those, they add character. You may like the idea of air bubbles for texture; if so you'll have to experiment to find out how to make them, as I only did it by accident my best guess is there was a spot without glue and some wrinkling involved.

With a foam brush I evenly and thinly apply Modge Podge to the entire right hand page being sure to get out to the edges. Then I flip the left page down onto it and carefully smooth it out working from the spine to the edge. I flip the now glued pages over to the left and smooth them over again to form them to the pages and spine in front of them. I continue this process until I have my desired thickness, usually five or six pages, all the way through the book.

My book started off with 600 pages. When I was done gluing it was only 24. I allowed a drying time of one week in a warm place to be sure everything was properly hardened and dried. Adding too much wet glue could cause everything to ooze and stick together where it wasn't meant to.