lb101: Logbooks and trail journals, O My! (part I)

So you’ve had a couple weeks now to play around with rubber stamp carving, and I’m going to assume that you have created fabulous masterpieces (or at least ones that don’t suck, in your own estimation).  And now you have stamps ready to be letterboxes.

The next step, once you’ve picked a location (which I’ll talk about next week, most likely), is to make yourself a logbook to go into the box with the stamp.

Just like with stamp carving, these things don’t need to be ornate and elaborate.  They CAN be, of course.  And some of them are mind-bogglingly complex and intricate and beautiful.  Those are the boxes that you find and you sit down with the contents and lick them for a while because they’re so pretty.  (That could, mind you, be just me.  Ahem.)

But also like stamp carving, if the thought of having to learn a whole new set of skills is making you weak-kneed and avoidant….skip it.  I’ve seen boxes where the logbook is nothing more than a $.79 mini-notebook, and they are just as much fun as getting the ones with the coptic-bound, hand-made papers, gilt-edged and perfectly-book-pressed logbooks.  The point is:  you found the box.   Everything else is just a bonus.

So what do you need for a basic logbook?  We’ll go from the simplest ones to the more elaborate here:

1.  The easiest, and probably most common when I was letterboxing before (when handmade logbooks were few and far between, really…), are those aforementioned $.79 notebooks, spiral-bound with wire, roughly 3″ x 5″.  For some boxes that are smaller, they’ve been sheared down at one end to fit, even.

For these, you can just put it in as-is, with an inscription on the inside front cover that says what your box is, the location or the date placed, and your contact info.  (Which should really be in all logbooks, just so finders can contact you to give you status updates or praise you for a fabulous box.  Seriously.)

Alternately, you can decorate the cover somewhat — either with the stamp image or collage or both, or paint it to match some part of your box theme…the possibilities are endless.

Here’s an example, from one of my Seattle boxes, now MIA and probably gone, due to construction (so I’m not giving any image spoilers, since it’s good & gone)….

2.  One step up from the mini-notebooks is mini-sketchpads.  They’re usually a little more expensive, but have a bit thicker paper to withstand all the crazy stamping that people do with crazy dye inks.  For example:  (same spoiler thing — box is history, probably abducted by kids.  Sigh.)

For that one, I used the initial pencil sketch from whence the stamp came, and put the story of the box’s title around it, since the words on the box were a direct quote/tagline that needed (in my mind) some explanation.

3.  A few MORE ways you can do the small spiral binding, if you want to be a little more handmade, but don’t want to go with any commercial options:

•     Collect your pages and covers and have Kinko’s punch and bind them all.  It’s not too costly, though will be more money than the buy-them-off-the-rack options, for sure.
•     Buy a spiral binding machine.  (Be aware that a COMB binding machine is not a substitute.  Pages tend to come out of short comb-bound things, in my experience.)  It’s expensive — right around $200 USD — but if you plan on attempting to be the next Wanda and Pete, it might not be a bad investment.  Figure that 200 letterbox placements with $.79 logbooks would just about pay for a machine, after all.  And then you can bind your personal logbooks, too.  (I have one, can you tell?  Love it.  Lovelovelove.  But it’s definitely a toy.)
•     Use a hole punch, evenly spaced down the length of the loose pages, and bind them with either jumprings (for jewelry) or keyrings without fobby bits.  (Or WITH the fobby bits, if you’re feeling creatively inspired and have room in your box.)

This is getting longer than I thought it would, so I think I’m going to split this into a few different entries, just to make it simpler.  Next week, then, I’ll go over things like sewn and/or saddle-stitched bindings at home, and some creative ways to make a stapled book that doesn’t look like the ones you might have made in fifth grade.  And I’ve got some FABULOUS links to bookbinding sites with simple instructions, and a couple of people on Flickr who have shown off their Mad Skillz to inspire you.

Stay tuned!