So Many Candles . . . So Little Cake (part 2)

Back when I worked at CopyMax, one of the services we offered was "padding" paper. You know those tear-off pads of paper, that aren't adhesive like Post-it notes? We'd make those for people. It's surprisingly simple:

1. Get all the slips of paper lined up
2. Put something heavy on top of them
3. Brush the edge with white glue, and let dry
   
4. Repeat step 3 until glue layer is thick enough.

To stabilize the pages of the book, I "padded" all 3 exposed sides of all the book's pages together. This turned everything between the covers into one solid mass that could better support the Jim Beam if the covers of the book were to fall open.

I did this by waking up multiple times Saturday night/Sunday morning, from midnight to 5am.

By 8am the last layer of padding glue was dried, and I was working in Photoshop on the cover. Steve and my wife had scoured the Internet for funny cover ideas, and had come up with some good ones. Ultimately, I went with one that Courtney found:

"So Many Candles . . . So Little Cake"

A quick Google search had turned up one of the images I would steal use, and a Flickr search (better when you're looking for something esoteric that nobody in their right mind would make public) netted me the other:

Yup, that's Flickr . . . images that nobody in their right mind would make public. Handy, though.

Making the book jacket was surprisingly easy. Because I still had the original book jacket, the dimensions were all right there for me. 1¾" spine, 6.375" page width, 3½" inside flaps, 9¼" tall. I laid those dimensions out in Photoshop, gave myself a quarter-inch bleed, and the rest was cake.


(Click for "full" size. Even the enlarged version is reduced from the true full-sized one.)

The front-cover flap is lifted from Jim Bean's website. The quotes on the back are all made up, except for the modified Government warning about alcohol. The piece that took the longest was probably the Oprah's Book Club seal on the cover (the original book was from Oprah's Book Club, and Steve thought it would be hilarious to keep that. He was right.) I didn't even go for photo-realism on the logo, but I got it pretty close:

(Left: Real logo. Right: Mine.)

It looked and felt like a real book jacket. Which is hilarious, because I spent all of 3 hours making it. I doubt the professionals spend a whole lot more time on book jackets than I did, yet I bet they charge a pretty penny for the service.

The finished product:





The gift was very well received. He kinda glanced at it first, said something like "funny title". Then he tried to flip through it, snapped it shut immediately, and said, "Oh! That is a good book. That's a very good book! I will read this book very carefully when I get home!"

Happy 30th, Bob Gaither.

So Many Candles . . . So Little Cake

It was Bob Gaither's 30th birthday yesterday. Being a few months away from 30 myself, I still have leeway to make fun of everybody else for turning 30 (and can get away with calling them old.)

So I decided to have a little fun.

My brother Steve, my wife, and I had lunch at Red Robin on Saturday, and then hit a whole mess of new and used bookstores. We were looking not for a specific book, but for a specific type of book . . . it had to be around 2 inches thick or more, and needed a title along the lines of "Coping with aging", or "Dealing with old age". This was a tall order, as evidenced by the long list of stores we visited.

We'll get to the "why" in a moment.

After about four hours of searching, we had no good ideas (except a $20 new book from Book Bin), and were ready to give up, when I realized "hey, maybe it would be easier to make a new book jacket in Photoshop rather than try to find a book with just the title we want." Courtney and Steve agreed that perhaps I should have thought of this hours ago.

We bought the thickest book on the $2 shelf, made a scheduled stop at the liquor store, and returned home.

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, is almost 600 pages long. That got it to the thickness we needed, but the nature of our plan was such that the difficulty of our task increased with every page long our book was.

Because we were cutting a hole into every single page.

Four hours later (Steve had eventually gone home, I fear out of boredom), I finally cut the last hole in the last page, using the side of a Raisin Bran box as a backing so I didn't mar the inside cover. I had some finessing to do with the edges of some cuts, and had accidentally torn out a couple pages here and there, but it was good enough:

That's right . . . we managed to fit the Jim Beam (the reason for our aforementioned liquor store side-trip) into the book.

So now you see why we wanted a book on "dealing" or "coping". It's a gag gift, and one I'm glad to say we had spent only $2 on (minus the cost of the JB, and of the gasoline used for 4 hours of thrift store hunting).

Exhausted, several razor-blades poorer, and unable to bend my wrists all the way (600 pages is a lot of cutting!) I retired to bed. I still had a Sunday School lesson to plan, and Bob's party was at 1:30 the next afternoon. Sunday morning would be busy.