Poetry Class Final: Book

Such a busy time finals are! Well I'm back and just before Christmas too. Not really any x-mas special this year, but I will be sharing my final project for my poetry class - a book we had to make. There are many crazy and crafty ways to make a book, but for something where I would put my poetry I wanted to keep it simple.


I used a black textured cover and off white, parchment style paper with an old looking, imperfect typewriter font that I felt gave my poems "texture." My friend helped me find the fonts at FontRiver. This site has been around for years and I've used it in high school as well, it's addicting looking for fonts. Anyways, download them for free here and if you use a PC, you find the "fonts" folder in Windows and just place your fonts there and they should show up in Microsoft Word. Easy, eh?

The two fonts I used are Underwood, and Telegraphem for headings and such. To make the book, my friend and me got a bone folder, and awl, some spray adhesive, and nice papers. Some other things that come in handy are and exacto knife, Alvin cutting mat, t-square ruler, and metal ruler preferably.





From there I began crafting, the page size is 7" x 5.5." For the document, my friend helped me create it in Microsoft Word. I would prefer to use Adobe InDesign since you can have an easy book setup to create your book, but it was not available to us at the time. The new Word worked surprisingly well in my opinion.

Anyways, we used the 12 page book template and set up our page sizes and margins we desired from there. Printing was simple, you set it up to be manually printed double sided, let everything print, then stick all the pages back into the printer the exact same way it came out. In other words, you don't have to change anything.

After that, I cut down my page sizes, and used the handy bone folder to fold everything in half, then the awl to poke 3 holes in the spine, then I just winged the saddle stitch through my first booklet and the second, then through the inside cover. I then glued that to the outside, nicer, textured paper. For the title I would have like to have hammered the letters in and made the title indented, but being out of money for this, I embossed it instead (which is pretty much the opposite of indenting something haha). Oh, and I have a thing for vellum, I love using it in projects, so I decided to incorporate it in my book as the title page for each poem.

So with this book finished and even though the measuring was a little off, I'm still proud of my beautiful book and plan to make more in the future, probably with a section of my pictures.