Today's video is about using graphite to decorate the edges of books.
Graphite produces a polished, almost metallic look to the edges of a book which goes particularly well with a book
that's been covered in black book cloth or has a dark theme to it.
I'll be following an approach that I learned from Fred Pohlmann in a workshop.
It's a bit different to another technique which seems to be more common that Peter Verheyen has described for me.
And I'll talk about Peter's approach later, but I've struggled to get that to work.
In Fred's notes, he says to use somewhere between a ratio of one to three to one to eight for egg white to water for
the glaire.
I've settled on a one to six mix.
So my hens, their small eggs typically come in at about 25 milliliters.
I just measured that one.
It was a bit less. So I'm going to mix that with 140 milliliters of water.
It makes more glaire than I'll use.
I use the small eggs and keep the large eggs for the kitchen.
I just mix the egg white with the water, give it a bit of a shake, but I don't want to turn it into meringue.
And then I let it sit overnight.
The next day, I strain that through a hanky.
I always put a knot in the hankies that are used for straining things like glaire.
The knot does tend to come out in the wash, but I do notice when I go to blow my nose, especially if I've been straining
glaire.
I go wash it out the glass jar, and then I'll transfer the strained glaire back into the washed jar.
I'll keep it in the fridge and I can use it for up to a week.
Some people keep it longer until it goes smelly, but I prefer to mix up fresh glaire.
I've been using this Generals' art graphite and I mix it a half a teaspoon of graphite to one teaspoon of glaire.
This may seem like a strange ratio, and it does put down a thick layer of graphite, but it works for me, and I'll
explain a bit later why.
And I like to mix this up about an hour before I'm going to use it.
It just seems to allow the graphite to mix with the glaire better.
So I'll do it before I start doing the edge preparation.
I'll prepare the edge of the book, just like any other edge decoration technique.
I'll start by talcing it; fan out the book and put some talc on it to stop the pages from sticking.
And then I'll put the book between gilding boards.
I'm padding out the shoulders, because I've rounded and backed this book.
And then I will give the book a light sand.
The paper I've used here is really nice paper.
It's Mohawk Superfine.
And I cut it with the plough, and it really didn't need scraping with a cabinet scraper.
I did get a little bit of tear out at the spine of the book, but I'm hoping that won't be very noticeable after putting
the graphite on the edge.
So now I'm going to put down a layer of graphite with a soft bristle brush.
The trick to this technique is to not overwork the edge.
Try and put down the layer of graphite in one or two strokes.
You don't want to put down too much graphite.
You don't want it to build up too thick, because if there's too much graphite on the edge, it will flake off.
This is the most critical step in the process.
Just getting enough graphite down that it's opaque but not building up too much graphite.
Wait 5 or 10 minutes for the edge to dry.
And then Fred's instructions say to use a finger to rub the graphite into the edge.
You will end up with a black finger for about a week.
So I prefer to use the flesh side of a piece of leather.
If you're not happy with the result at this point, if there's some white showing through, you can touch it up with
the graphite glaire mix, wait five or ten minutes again and then buff it again.
Now it's time to use the agate burnisher to burnish the edge.
I like to think of this first go as setting the graphite.
So it's just a light burnish.
Go over the edge two or three times and then start adding beeswax and start burnishing it slightly harder each time.
I feel that burnishing with the beeswax is a really important step.
It seals in the graphite, and it stops the edge from shedding graphite in the future.
In the method described to me by Peter, he uses a thin paste size.
So he gets a starch paste, makes it thin I think, he says, like thin cream.
And then he uses a soft rag dipped in the, in the paste size and dips that rag into
powdered graphite and then rubs that on on the edge.
And he does this repeatedly and builds up the graphite on the edge towards the level of opaqueness that he wants.
He also described sprinkling some graphite on the edge directly and then rubbing it in with the pasted rag.
However he does caution about clumps forming and these falling off later when you open up the book.
And that's what I find - I using Peter's technique, I always end up with pieces falling off the edge of the book.
Now, I'm sure if I'd seen Peter to do it, then I'm sure I could replicate it.
Peter has been doing some live demonstrations on Facebook, I think it is.
So if you'd like to see Peter's approach, I highly recommend dropping him a line and suggesting he does a live
demonstration. I'd certainly be interested in seeing it.
The second edge I'm going to demonstrate is a rounded fore edge.
Now, I haven't shown the preparation of a rounded fore edge previously, though this one's fairly straightforward.
There's not much stepping in the edge.
And I'm just going to use a dowel that's been wrapped in a bit of paper towel to produce some padding on the dowel.
And then I'm going to wrap that in some fine sandpaper and just sandpaper the edge with that.
Obviously, the edge isn't perfectly round, so the padding on the dowel helps the sandpaper conform to the shape of
the edge. I didn't plane the edges of the gilding boards because I'm not using a card scraper.
I'm not going to really be touching the gilding boards.
I did use some thick gray board that's narrower than the book to protect the shoulders of the
book.
Burnishing the rounded fore edge is different to a flat edge.
I'll start by rubbing the graphite in with the piece of leather instead of my finger, as before.
I'll set the graphite by using the flat burnisher, but I'm being very careful to not push down on the edges of the
leaves. I start at the bottom of the curve and then go up the sides.
So I'll do it from each side.
And I'll do this once or twice just to get the graphite well set on the surface.
Now I'll swap to a dog's tooth burnisher, which, instead of going across the book, go you use lengthwise, and by
rotating the burnisher, you can conform it to the curvature of the area that you're working on.
I had no idea how to use one of these burnishes until I saw Fred using it.
And since then I've been hooked.
It produces a really nice result.
I picked up this old burnisher second hand.
I'm not sure where you would get one new.
I did get a dog's teeth burnisher from Hewit's, but the shape just doesn't work as well as this one.
And now add the wax and continue to burnish until you get the edge that you want.
It's really hard to see in the video.
However, I am ever so slightly rotating the burnisher each time I go back and forth, moving it up the edge so that the
whole edge is polished.
I want to finish by demonstrating another couple of techniques for taking a graphite edge a step further.
Now, I've never used these techniques on an actual book, but the first especially I will one day because it's pretty
cool and that's gold tooling over the graphite edge.
So prepare the edge the same as before.
So I've put down the graphite, rubbed the graphite in, and then burnished the edge.
Now, because I will be tooling onto the edge, I don't want to get any wax on the edge at this point.
So I have cleaned the agate burnish with a solvent.
In this case, it was just ethanol.
Before I started preparing the edge, I did get my finishing stove out and picked a center tool or finishing tool that
I'm going to use on this edge.
So I've got that tool heating up on the stove at the moment.
And I'm also going to use gold foil, real gold foil, not fake gold foil.
This is much more expensive than fake gold foil, but I think if the foil is going to tarnish, it's going to tarnish
on an edge where there's a lot more atmosphere can get underneath the surface coating.
Now, if I was doing this on a real book, I'd be a lot more careful about lining things up and tooling.
Now, gold foil, real gold foil, wants a cooler tool.
So this is below a sizzle.
And I'll just make a few impressions with this tool.
With any gauffering technique, you really don't want to dent the edge too much, so you have to be careful with the amount
of pressure that you use, especially rocking a tool like this, which has sharp edges.
I do rock the tool, I think just there a little bit too much and made a dent that was a bit deeper than I would have
liked. But overall, I was so impressed with the result.
I wonder why I haven't used this on a real book in the past.
The last thing I'm going to demonstrate is a bit different.
It's something that Fred Pohlmann demonstrated in his workshop and it's using a ballpoint pen that's run out of
ink. Fred said to use the thickest ballpoint pen that you can get.
And, of course, the ball on the end means that it glides over the surface nicely and it's hard.
So it makes an impression.
Again, you don't want to press too hard.
And I'm trying to do a diamond pattern, that being a bit of a joke in that it's carbon graphite, diamond.
They're not very even.
If I was trying to do it on a real book, I might make a template with tracing paper and then press through that.
This last part, and I don't know what I was thinking, was supposed to be like a cracked glass edge, like it had
shattered or something.
I'm sure someone that's more artistic than me could do something really interesting with that.
I also meant to burnish with beeswax before doing the decoration, if you can call it that, with the ballpoint pen.
That's graphite edges done for the week.
I hope you've enjoyed the video and as always, really appreciate you hitting the big thumbs up button.
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If I can sort out my computer problems, then next week's project will be this rounded and backed Bradel binding.
I hope everyone's staying safe, and until next time, cheerio.