Anyone who knows me in person knows that I love good joke, the more clever the better. I even enjoy being the butt of good intelligent joke. While I’m not sure this classifies as intelligent it surely made me laugh and made my coworkers laugh.

One of my coworkers is very into enforcing the rules. I applaud him for this, I really do, but I more often than not see him with a copy of the General Information Guide than I do any other member of the leadership team. Of course I had to tease him a little about this. I referred to the “GIG” as his bible and this set a series of humor light bulbs off in my head like flash bulbs. Initially I thought to myself “how funny would he look if the GIG looked like a bible?”. That would be pretty funny. Then I thought, I should rebind a copy of the GIG and give it to him. Black leather… At this point I giggled to myself and decided that it d to be done. At this point I had to share my idea with a coworker, she of course found the idea just as funny as I did. I told her that I wished I’d bought the hot foil-stamping machine I’d seen on ebay so that I could emboss “Holy Bible” on the cover. I realized that wasn’t half as funny (not to mention completely sacrilegious.) as it would be f I embossed “Holy GIG” on the cover.

So last night I came home and headed for the studio and put some recycled end sheets on the book, a hinge, book mark and then finally a black leather cover. I stamped the words on the cover and let it sit in the clamps over night. (I can’t wait until I get my book press!)

So please don’t be offended by the following pictures, it’s all in good fun and I’m pretty sure my coworker will love it.

The details:
It’s an 8×8 inch book one-quarter inch thick with a glue binding. The original covers, now the title page and end page are 110lb card stock. The end sheets are recycled from the same material that I made the meat notebooks from. The hinge is made from 24lb paper. The bookmark is a rawhide shoelace. It’s bound in the same manner as a hedgehog. No glue on the spine (hollow/loose spine) and end sheets glued to the cover. In the back end pages I’ve hidden a clear plastic pocket and some post it tabs. It’s a simple fast and dirty way to add a leather cover to just about anything. If I were to do this again I would spend a little more time to sand away some of the inked paper on the spine so that the glue would adhere a little better. I’m afraid that the glue will give up due the plastic-y nature of the end sheets and the water resistant cover of the GIG. The over all effect was not to make a working long lasting book but a visual impact and from the reaction of my coworkers I think it worked.

If anyone would like this done to thr workplace’s “rule” book I’d be happy to do itfor you. Price would depend on the size of the book. One the size of this wold cost about $20.