Reader Spotlight 

What's your first memory of reading?

My mom read to my older brother and I pretty religiously. Even after all these years, I can still hear her sing-song delivery of Miss Nelson is Missing, The Giant Jam Sandwich, Something Queer is Going On, and Professor Wormbog's Gloomy Kerploppus.

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Describe what you do for your 9-to-5 gig?

I'm an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Delta College. I teach Honors sections of English 111 and 112, and I also teach Intro to Film, Studies in Film Genre, and the American Motion Picture. I also do a weekly movie review show called Moviehouse on the campus radio station every Friday morning. 

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What do you like most about your work?

I love being in a classroom with a bunch of smart, inquisitive students and talking about writing, things we've read, connections they're making, insights they've discovered. It is literally one of my favorite things in the world. 

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How did you end up making vintage journals/notebooks? 
I have been an amateur book artist since college, making chapbooks of poetry for friends, occasionally making a book from scratch as part of a class assignment. I have always been compelled not just by the content of books but by the actual physical object itself. For the last several years, while thrifting with my wife, I had been picking up old hardback books with beautiful covers - not because I wanted to read them, necessarily, but because I loved the vintage covers with foil stamping, embossing, quirky illustrations, etc. I couldn't bear the thought of them just mouldering on a shelf at a Goodwill or being recycled once the library sale discarded them. So I accumulated a fair-size stack of vintage books without really knowing what I would do with them. 

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Then at the outset of the covid-19 quarantine, as I had more spare time on my hands, it suddenly occurred to me that I could combine my love for books and book-making with this collection of cool covers I'd accidentally gathered. So I started experimenting and eventually found a way I could reclaim the covers from these books and sew in new, clean, blank pages. I loved the idea of having all the history, texture, and patina of a vintage book but being able to fill it with new thoughts, ideas, sketches, lists, etc. So I made 10 or 15 of them and eventually offered them for sale on Facebook just to my group of friends. Those sold out overnight and I had orders for 20 more the next day. That was over a year ago now, and I've kept pretty steadily busy making them for people from all over the country. I operate almost entirely from my Instagram and Facebook accounts, @bookmark_books. 

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How long does it take you to assemble a notebook? 
There are a lot of steps, but start to finish, if I have all of my supplies on hand and no interruptions, I can make a book in about an hour and a half, all told. I will usually spend a day just folding paper so I have all the signatures I need ready to go, and I'll spend a different day just cutting and prepping covers, etc. Then once I have all the components assembled, I'll choose 5-10 covers and spend a week or so sewing 1-2 books a night. It's an ongoing, rolling process that I really enjoy.