Kerstin Öhman    Sweden

Here you can look at 3D image of the book

Title:   Birch leaf book / There's a handwritten poem in the book: "Där björkarna susa" from the poetry collection "Skymningslandet" by Viktor                     Sund (1915)

Style:  A stub binding with a handwritten poem.
           My inspiration is the birch tree (Betula pubescens), with its white stem and fresh green leaves. We have one just beside the porch at our                       cottage in Sweden, just north of Stockholm. In the early spring we deeply regret having the tree there, dusting its yellow pollen everywhere.               But it’s all forgiven and forgotten in the summer: The breeze makes the branches and twigs dance and the leaves twirl. The birds love to hide             in the greenery. Another species, the Mountain birch (Betula pubescens subsp. Czerepanovii), is extremely resistant to cold winters. And in                 Sami culture the birch tree is of very big importance.
           I wanted to capture the beautiful shape of the leaf with its veins. In my head I heard a song they played on the radio when I was a child in the             1970’s: “Där björkarna susa” by Hootenanny Singers. The title indicates the sound you hear from the birch trees when the wind blows.
           When researching the song, I found out that the lyrics is a poem written by a Swedish-Finnish poet and teacher, Viktor Sund (1891-1966). It               was published in his poetry collection Skymningslandet (Dusk lands) 1915. Music by Oskar Merikanto (1868-1924) in 1916. Almost 60 years             before I first heard it!
           The shape is cut out by hand. Green Harmatan vegetable tanned goat skin. I have wet tooled the leaf veins, first with a blunt tip followed by a             pointed tip, to get a shadow impression.
           The covers are lined with Japanese paper. The doublures and the white papers are my handmade paper (pulp made of linen and some cotton).             A few words of each verse from the poem are written on each page and a leaf of Japanese paper marks the end of a verse.
           Doublures and Japanese paper coloured in green.
           The bookbinding method is a stub binding.
           Kerstin Öhman is a bookbinding student (third year) at Leksands folkhögskola, Sweden.

Size:   200 x 140 x 10 mm

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Contact information:   Instagram: bindgalen_bokbinderi