Lakewood Resident Builds Book By Hand

Kids come up with some goofy stuff.

For Lakewood’s Michael Gill, his son Eliot’s original superhero Clamboy and his daughter Grace’s Big Sister Kitty were just goofy enough to inspire the former senior editor at Cleveland Scene to use his talent for writing to create a children’s book.

“Naming (the characters) and drawing a few pictures was as far as it went for them, but I just grabbed those names and started writing stories that used those characters,” Gill said.

Turns out, he was good at it.

Cleveland's William Busta Gallery, 2731 E. Prospect Ave., is hosting a release party Friday from 6-9 p.m. for “Common Household Rhymes for the Modern Child,” a 32-page children’s book Gill wrote, illustrated, designed, printed and bound entirely by hand using a letter press and woodblocks at Cleveland’s Zygote Press.

“I figure I’ve cranked that press over 12,000 times,” Gill, 47, said.

Here’s how he did it: First, using a sharp gauge like a chisel, he carved the entire scene for a picture onto a wooden block, and cranked a blank sheet of paper through the press to create the outline. Then he would use the outline to create a separate block for each color in the picture, and continue cranking the sheet through, color-by-color, until the scene was created.

Now, multiply that by 17 illustrations per book, and then 100 copies of the book.

“It really makes you appreciate technology and advancement,” Gill said. “When you do these old print techniques, you can’t stop yourself from trying to find ways to make it easier, which of course is the same urge that brought us to computers and desktop publishing.”

As labor-intensive a project this has been – he spent nearly three years working on the book after taking a letter-press printing class at Zygote Press in early 2009 – it’s also provided Gill with some philosophical reflection.

“It made me think of how powerful the urge is for people to disseminate their words,” he said. “You think how easy it is now, but if you had to do all this to give somebody a story, you’d think pretty hard about the story.”

Even though he could have created the book using software on a computer in a matter of days, Gill said the extra effort and the finished, tangible product was worth the years of work.

“People don’t have fondness over computer files,” he said. “People are still collecting vinyl records from the 1930s, and the data isn’t corrupt, the software hasn’t changed, and it still sounds just as good as when Duke Ellington played it.”

Copies of the book will be on sale for $200, Gill said, and will be featured in the gallery through Jan. 28, 2012.