"Myst" Leather Journal with Brass Accents
This is one of those projects that I had to try just to see if I could do it. This customer contacted me to create in real life a version of a "linking book" from the fantasy game "Myst" (a game I really know nothing about). Going by his description and some renderings he sent, I came as close as I could. This book took several months to complete. EVERY element was fabricated by hand. The brass dome on the front was shaped from sheet brass with a custom-made mold and a hydraulic metal press (those metalsmithing classes came in handy on this one!). The Roman numeral on the front of the dome was acid-etched and blackened with liver of sulphur before giving the rest of the dome a high polish. The backplate was sunk into a carved recess in the cover. Each metal stud was placed by hand into drilled holes in the cover medallion and the metal corners. The metal corners themselves were each formed by hand out of brass sheet. All of the brass elements were waxed to help prevent tarnishing (but will probably get a bit of an aged patina over the years). This customer originally wanted the book to look "old". After realizing it would take far too long to tear and tea-stain the edges of the pages, he agreed that some aging of the cover by darkening some areas with leather wax would be okay. The only thing I really could not do was the piano hinge that he originally wanted to have running down the edge of the book cover where it meets the spine. Instead, I gave it a similar look with a brass rod wired into the cover along the edge near the spine. The spine was stamped with the customer's name in gold and "I" for "volume I". This book was an enormous amount of work due to all the custom metal pieces that were necessary. Thanks for the challenge Alex!
While I may see to it that this one remains one of a kind, a book like this would cost around $625.