About books and such

When I was little I was obsessed with whodunnits and other stories of spies and adventure. I vividly remember how books could be cleverly hidden switches to open hidden doors or contain concealed handguns. I realised that I wouldn’t be able to create a lair hidden behind a mechanical bookcase, but I did try to make myself one of these:

It turned out this was much harder than I had anticipated. I can’t remember which of my father’s books I ruined, but I gave up after having cut through maybe twenty pages with a rusty utility knife.

Now, thirty years later I’m approaching this from a different angle. Rather than using an existing book and scoop it empty, I’m making an empty ‘book’ from scratch. For this, I’m using my lovely little Bambulab A1 Mini, which I again fed with one of my own TinkerCad designs:

My tiny printer wasn’t big enough to print the whole border in one go, so I had to print each side separately. My colleague who got me into 3D printing suggested I use swallow tails to connect the separate pieces and I have to say it worked out really nicely! What I like about the 3D print is that the layering actually looks like book pages, although I’m not sure how well you can see it in the photos below.

One side note: I forgot to make a photo of the orange section printed out. The idea is that it is not glued to the book cover, but that it slides between the other borders. The idea is that it adds stability when the book is closed, but that you can remove the miniatures more easily after you take the section out. I will include it in future photo!

There was one unfortunate accident, however: I managed to botch up refilling my filament spool, which came loose when printing…

I’ve tried rewinding the damn thing myself, but it tangles up hopelessly. I think I’ll just use it to make smaller individual prints or something. Luckily I had yet another refill that I did manage to install correctly.

For the next step I ordered some book binding supplies from a small book binding shop in Amsterdam. I love that the glue came in an old glass jar for vegetables!