There are many bookbinding methods, and many hybrids of bookbinding methods, and while I have ones I like the look of and ones that don’t thrill me, I really want to try them all at least once. The palm leaf book, for example, is one I couldn’t see a useful purpose for, but I wanted to make one some day.

It’s always bothered me a little to throw out excess photos. Back in 2005, new to this digital photography thing, I took all the snaps from my UK/Paris trip to my favourite photography shop to get them processed. They had two pricing structures: one with photo retouching and one without. I assumed retouching meant levels and contrast and such, and since I’d done a course on such things a few years before I decided to do it myself.

What they meant was cropping. Since this was my first go at having digital photos processed, I didn’t know that the images were a different proportion to the photo paper. So when I got my photos back, heads and feet were chopped off.

When I pointed out that ‘retouching’ and ‘cropping’ are quite different things, the woman at the shop went all defensive and snarky, and it was quite obvious this had happened many times already (so why weren’t they warning customers? Going to small local shops might be more expensive, but the trade off is supposed to be good service.). That’s when Paul pointed out that Harvey Norman had processing for about a quarter of the price, had helpful staff, and their computers prompted you to select how your images would be cropped. Needless to say, I never went back to the camera shop.

I had to get about 70 photos reprocessed. We also wound up culling quite a few when we put our trip album together. What to do with the old photos? Well, looking through my bookbinding books recently, I hit on an idea.

What can you make out of an out of date road atlas and left-over holiday photos?

Well, you cut up the photos into strips and cover two pieces of card with pages from the atlas.

Then you drill holes and thread them all together into a palm leaf style ‘memory book’.

The order of the photos is random, and there are no captions. Some of the photos are quite abstract once cut down into strips. But each of them reminds me of a moment during that holiday. Being small, you could slip this in your pocket, unlike the big album we have of the trip, which is a bit big to leave out to flick through at leisure.

I’m now tempted to make one from the leftover photos of our Canada trip last year. Or take deliberately abstract photos, perhaps in black and white, so make an ‘arty’ version. I can see the appeal in the palm leaf method now. It’s a very simple and novel way to make a book. (Pun not intended!)