I have made a fair few giant journals in my time as a bookbinder and I thought they were huge at A3 size but recently, I had the absolute pleasure of making the most epic book to date in terms of scale and proportion. It's the largest book I have ever bound and needed an entire XL leather cowhide for the cover alone. That is huuuuuge!
It was going to be used as a family scrapbook and will be a beautifully sentimental keepsake full of family history and memories. I do wonder if it could be the biggest leather journal in the world?
Weighing in at over 8kg, you can see I struggled to hold it up for longer than a minute. Genuinely monumental.
I do often wonder who, what and how the journals I make for you are filled and sometimes clients tell me interesting stories and sometimes they don't. All I know about this particular one is that it was for a milestone birthday and it was going to be filled with photos and handwritten memories. What a delightful memory keeper it will be.
GIANT SCRAPBOOK - A2 SIZE
A book this size requires me to work with A1 sized paper. Definitely a challenge.
My client wanted map pages interspersed inside and we managed to source a map large enough to use for the title page.
BOUND BY HAND
100 pages were hand bound into the leather cover but it can easily accommodate more.
CUSTOM EMBOSSED WORDS ON THE STRAP
My client wanted a custom embossed line of text. We agreed to put it on the tie strap. I had palpitations about trying to emboss on the actual cover as the embossing is done by hand and leaves little room for error. On a piece of this scale, the sensible option was to put the text on the tie strap.
The other extra large journals I make look tiny in comparison. You can see what the A3 ones have been used for here: