Just wanted to let everyone know we’re leaving for the New York International Gift Fair tomorrow morning. We’re driving to the show very early, so this is our last goodbye until we return. Of course our staff will still be here, binding books and taking calls. Just Ilira and I are going to the show, so it’s business as usual in the bindery. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some recent fave blog posts as well as some news:

Limited edition Little Lion cover option
We introduced a limited edition cover option on our website. Little Lion is a printed cotton fabric with whimsical, faery tale images of flowers, little birds and of course, a friendly lion. Appropriate for both boys and girls, it looks great as a cover option for our Baby Books, Brag Books and Albums. Visit our online boutique to order.

Little Lion Cover Option

Decor8 Blog
Rag & Bone founder, author and designer Jason Thompson is going to be the guest blogger on Holly Becker’s super popular decor8 blog on Monday, August 18th. That’s me, and I’m excited and nervous at the same time, decor8 gets more blog readers in a day than our little Rag & Bone blog receives in a month! Holly is away for a few months in Germany but lined up a bunch of friends and guest bloggers so look for lots of fun posts and our little day of fame on Monday.

decor8 blog

New York International Gift Fair
We’re excited to be exhibiting in the juried, design-driven STUDIO® section at the New York International Gift Fair:

New York International Gift Fair
August 16-20, 2008
The Studio Section at Pier 92
New York, NY
Booth #35018 - 36018

Visit our new booth location {#35018 - 36018 PIER 92} anytime during the show and cool off with a refreshing iced tea. We’re introducing some GORGEOUS new cover options - beautiful fabrics from Amy Butler, Joel Dewberry and Heather Bailey - new fabric covered Albums, Baby Books, Guest Books and more. So join us for an Iced Tea, our new catalog and we’ll welcome you with a big smile and show off our beautiful new books.

New York International Gift Fair

Some of my favorite recent blog posts:

Ferry Staverman

Beatrice Coron

Lyndie Dourthe

Alexey Titarenko

Trace Paper

Celia Richards

Natalie Quintos Uhing

Suzan Buckner

Franc Grom

Elsa Mora

Enjoy! And we’ll see you when we return from NY - hopefully with lots of orders and new accounts. We’re only back for one day then off to Fire Island so it may be a while. Thanks everyone! And if you’ve read this far here’s a little contest for you: Leave a comment below on this post while we’re away and we’ll pick one commenter at random to receive a $100.00 gift certificate to use at the Rag & Bone Bindery online boutique. We’ll announce the winner when we return. Have a great few weeks!

Jason Thompson
Visit www.ragandbone.com

We’re getting ready to leave for the gift show but I just saw the first batch of our limited edition small journals out in the Bindery ready to ship out to customers. We’re binding them in batches so if you ordered one in the past few days, it’s probably one of these.

I took these photos with my new iPhone - which I totally love. The photos it takes are just *meh*, so I’ll try not to get into the habit of using the iPhone just because it’s convenient.

More Limited Edition Small Journals

Thanks Droolicious for mentioning our new Growth Charts! We sold out of our first run already. The second printing is now available, so if you order online - or visit one of our retailers - we have them in stock again. Cheers!

stacks & stacks of growth charts…

Buy growth charts
Visit droolicious

Take a good look at these receipts and boxes - they look like paper receipts and corrugated boxes, but they’re actually embroidered fabric. Miami, Florida artist Frances Trombly recreates everyday objects through weaving, embroidery, cross stitch, and crochet. Her labor intensive pieces present the process and patience of the artist to visitors to her installations. The contrast between useless commerce waste and art confronts us to question the value of our everyday flotsam & jetsam.

Visit www.francestrombly.com
Via designersblock

Thank you Notebookism for mentioning our limited edition small journals this morning! Notebookism is a regular stop for me on my morning blog reading ritual!

Visit Notebookism

We’re gearing up for our next trade show, so it’s been a little quiet on the blog, but super busy in the studio. The show is the International Gift Fair in New York City. We juried for the design section of the show called Studio® and were accepted (happy dance), but when we found out our booth location, the happy dance ended. We were just outside the bathrooms on the perimeter of the show. We figured it was our first time exhibiting in this new section so probably had to “pay our dues” before getting a better location. But we still requested a booth change. And guess what, we got it! (happy dance again). We have an end-of-aisle booth open on three sides right in the middle of things. So we’re pretty excited.

We’re going to sell our booth (furniture and fixtures) again like we did for the past two shows. If you’re in New York and would like a booth worth of Ikea furniture - only used once - at half price, email us.

We’re introducing three new baby fabric covered books for our baby collection, Baby’s First Books, Brag Books, etc.

These pictures are from last night. We live in a loft above the Bindery, surrounded by other mills. Our daughter said she wanted to “pretty-up the neighborhood” so we sent bubbles into the night for a half hour before bedtime. It looked like a Sony commercial.

I’ll get back to paper & book blogging when we’re all set with gift show preparations!

Thanks! Jason

Every book is a world waiting to explore, and if that’s the case, here’s a book we could all use every so often, Alex Ostrowski’s “The Happiest book In The World”. Alex designed this one-of-a-kind binding for his final year at school and it’s inspired by the subject of Happiness.

In 2006 researchers at The University of Leicester concluded that Denmark is the happiest country in the world and that was good enough for Alex. He ventured to Denmarkfor inspiration in search of happiness and upon his return even attempted to get a block of Bristol [UK] flats to physically smile. No word on the results of the smile experiment but happiness may be closer than we think.

In one way or another we are all looking for happiness. Some people even say that man’s sole purpose for existence is to hunt down and capture this intangible and elusive treasure. In 2006 researchers at The University of Leicester concluded that Denmark is the happiest country in the world. In March 2008 I made the decision to visit happiness, and embarked upon a pilgrimage to find it. My experiences are presented in this book.

Visit www.alexostrowski.com
Via In red Design

Rag & Bone Small Journals are back. [CLICK HERE]
We’re adding limited edition books to our website this year [starting with the Anniversary Journal] and the latest book is the Rag & Bone Small Journal. This is the same small journal we used to sell wholesale in the marketplace. We stopped marketing them in January for a few reasons, one being the cost to you, the end user, after retail markup was making our journals expensive: this size was retailing between $24.00 - $30.00. We can sell limited edition books exclusively on our website without the markup - the good news is that the books are affordable, but we can only make so many.

We’re letting our customers know this weekend via email & on our homepage that Small Journals are available again, but you guys are getting a sneak-peek. You can order by following this link:

http://www.ragandbonebindery.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=678

If you’re on our mailing list, watch for our email blast!

From Our Website:
For a limited time only, we’re making Rag & Bone Small Journals again. This 4.5 x 6.25, handbound journal with deckle edged, bright white pages was the first book I began selling as Rag & Bone Bindery almost 18 years ago. Back then I made them in several different sizes: small, large, square, landscape & portrait, and this was one of the sizes I made the most. It looks and feels great and fits perfectly in your hand, pocket or backpack.

Small Journals are still made in the exact same way as we made them all those years ago: hand-cut pages, beautiful covers and a “scritchy-scratchy” paper that’s not too thick, not too soft and just right for ink, pencil & pen.

These are available for a limited time: We only made 100 sets of pages { bookblocks } and will bind them with any cover option you choose. Once they’re gone, they’re gone! Available in every cover option.

Click here for more information

Thanks Ohdeedoh for mentioning our new Growth Charts this morning! They’ve become a quick best seller, already we’ve sold out of our first printing, 3,000 in two months. We’re thinking of designing additional patterns to match our other baby cover options. We have three new baby covers in design right now which we hopefully will introduce at our next show, the International Gift Fair in NYC next month.

Rag & Bone Growth Charts Chronicle your little one’s growth and development throughout the years with a Rag & Bone growth chart. Charming, cute and stylish enough for your modern home. Includes height and date entries as well as places for photographs. Photo mounts are included. Size is 8″ x 40″, measures 26″ to 60″. Available in the Little Birdie patterns only. Growth Charts match our Little Birdie Baby Books!

More Rag & Bone Growth Charts
Visit ohdeedoh

I can’t say why exactly, but I want to walk through a whole forest of these cardboard and thread ‘objects’ created by Dutch artist Ferry Staverman. The pieces are made from a recycled cardboard material and range in size from small table top works to large ‘trees’. Can you imagine a forest of these “trees”? I can and want to live there.

Ferry’s site is in Dutch so I don’t have a lot to say except that I love his work. www.ferrystaverman.nl

Visit www.ferrystaverman.nl

Scottish Bookbinder Hilary Leckridge, from the “A Yen For Paper” blog created this handbound concertina book titled “Livre Mysterieux” { Mysterious Book }. I love the yellowed paper and the way the covers and pages look like found ephemera. Hilary has an etsy shop where she sells her handbound books and creative cards.

Concertina books are a great first book if you’re interested in bookbinding. They’re similar to Accordion books and can be made without too much bookbinding experience under your belt, or glue or many tools for that matter.

“Le livre mysterieux” - A little book of ochre painted pages, collaged with illustrations and “mots” from very old French books, purchased in the book village of Montolieu. Loosely speaking it is about life’s meaning for me - about searching, finding, becoming, changing perspective etc etc. I really like the way this little book evolved, I don’t usually have a fixed idea of where my projects will lead - this time I was happy with the result - it is visually pleasing to me.

Read more about “Livre Mysterieux” at Hilary’s blog.

Hilary Leckridge at Flickr
Hilary Leckridge at Etsy
Hilary Leckridge at Typepad

The current issue of Ampersand is now available. Ampersand is the quarterly journal of the Pacific Center for the Book Arts and contains “articles about all aspects of the book arts, from historical commentary to profiles of working artists to practical how-to tutorials. The informative articles are generously illustrated with photographs.”

Ampersand is a paid periodical, current and back issues are available for $15 (includes shipping in US, California addresses will have sales tax added) or $18 to non-US addresses.

The Spring 2008 issue is now available. In this issue:

• History of the Book / Broadsides
• On Collecting / Coveting Type
• Influences
• Doing Business / The Public Record
• Exhibitions / Conceptually Bound
• Influences
• Tools / A Studio To Go
• Doing Business / Getting Permission

Book artist Emily Martin answers the question “Is there an (artist’s) book that has particularly affected your own work?”.

Visit Ampersand

I first thought this was a clever art project, but in reality visitors can borrow “people” from the traveling “Living Library”. This is a real project presenting actual people to visitors at libraries and various festivals around Europe in an attempt to cut through prejudices and present people as, well, people, not the stereotypes we interpret them as. You really can “borrow” a person for 30 minutes, albeit simply to talk to them, about any subject. I assume the conversations are both humorous and serious - what would most Americans ask a “Muslim” who is represented by one of the people on loan?

Each person has a biographical identity, or “book title”, with not-so-flattering subtitles such as “‘Muslim’ (Preconceptions: ‘bearded’, ‘oppresses women’)”, which ask us to immediately confront our simplified preconceptions of certain groups of people.

The Living Library is an innovative project designed to promote dialogue, reduce prejudices and thereby encourage integration.The main characteristics of the project are to be found in its simplicity and positive approach.

There’s more on the Living Library website.

Visit living-library.org
Via www.nouse.co.uk

Green Chair Press, located in Burlingame California, creates & sells an eclectic mix of collectable paper goods from wood-type collage prints to letterpress printed coasters to flip-books to miniature books to a bookmaking kit and more. I especially like the “Good Read” flip book - we all do that!

Green Chair excels at Letterpress, Type and Bookbinding - three arts we love here at Rag & Bone!

Visit the Green Chair Press shop at Etsy, and read about how the name came about over at www.greenchairpress.com

I couldn’t decide which of Beatrice Coron’s beautiful paper cuts to post, so here are a whole bunch, they’re so beautiful, intricate and narrative. Most of these images come from Beatrice’s “Personal Cities” paper cut series.

Personal Cities began with the idea of imagining a city that would contain the essential elements of one single person’s life. Coron asked friends to describe the kind of city they would like to call home. She then made a paper-cut image of each person’s wishes, developing the concepts to their visual potential.

Beatrice was born and raised in Lyon, France and has been living and working in New York City since 1984. She has designed book covers and even furniture and welded & cut gates and iron fences, which is a natural extension to her paper cutting work.

There is so much more to explore over at her website, so do check it out.

View more of her work at www.beatricecoron.com

Our Limited Edition Anniversary Journal is going fast! We only have 25 left [as of 07/18/08], we sold 75% of our inventory in the first day, so my guess is they’ll be gone by the weekend. Now we’re inspired and excited to make even more limited edition books, maybe limited edition covers too [We’re thinking of Sandi Henderson covers]. Thanks everyone!

See the Anniversary Journal here.

Ilira and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary Saturday. We spent the morning making 250 bagged lunches with Faye to deliver to Crossroads. It takes a long time to make that many lunches. Fortunately we have a manufacturing background to take advantage of and a fridge to hold them all. We dropped off the lunches in the morning, then went to the circus! The Big Apple Circus - they really do a great job. One of the performers almost got hurt, they keep-it-real at the Big Apple.

We had dinner at Julian’s and ran into former Rag & Bone production manager Mary. I am so bad with the camera. Dinner was delicious and photogenic, but I didn’t take a photo of Julian’s, our delicious dinner or Mary. I don’t know what my problem is.

After dinner, we checked into the Renaissance Masonic Temple Hotel. It was a “Staycation” Anniversary night. The view of the State House was pretty cool. The hotel was a little fussy, but beautiful. After check-in, we headed downtown to see our friends What Cheer? Brigade parading through downtown Providence. Again, I took a bunch of photos walking down the street, but when they stopped and put on the show at the Arcade, I was too busy dancing (is that what you call that??) to take photos.

Anniversary Journal
In the spirit of Anniversaries, we’re re-introducing the Rag & Bone Anniversary Journal for a limited time. We only made 100 or so of the printed insides, so they’re available in any cover option, but when they’re gone, they’re gone.

See the Anniversary Journal here.

Making Sandwiches

Lot’s of sandwiches

Faye Helps

View from the Hotel Room

What Cheer? Brigade

What Cheer? Brigade

Polite Police

Anniversary Journal

See the Anniversary Journal here.

The irreplaceable Ben left us for Graduate Studies at Berkeley this weekend. He’s driving across country and beginning school in the fall. We’re going to miss Ben, who was always ready with a quick fact about any and every subject as well as book suggestions and new CD’s. We will miss Ben’s steady skills at the workbenches here in the bindery, as well as his iPod on the stereo.

Leah only started four weeks ago, but has picked up on the Rag & Bone vibe and new bookbinding skills faster than anyone in recent memory. Training has been a breeze and Leah brings a fresh eye to product development and a cheery smile to the studio.

Bye Ben!

Hello Leah!

We went to Tanglewood last weekend and stayed overnight in an old farm turned bed & breakfast. We planned to see Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion but mostly just watched the kids running around on the grass falling all over and on top of each other. We pitched a table & four chair, spread out the blanket under a big Maple tree and spent the evening drinking wine on our feet while running all over the grounds with Ian & Faye. We caught snippets here and there of Garrison Keillor in the background.

There’s a hedge maze on the property and I think I spent most of the evening lost in there with Faye. She found a way to climb inside one of the hedges a dozen feet up to get a look for the way out.

We wandered the little stores in Lenox, Mass.

Below is the barn we stayed in. This is where we had breakfast.

Click here for more details!
Visit the Rag & Bone Bindery Online Boutique