via Daily Prompt: Fishing –

Last week I took my Trout Fishing Diary to the book binders. It’s a long story.

A few years ago, during a fishing holiday on the River Wye, I chatted to Bob Brookes in the bar of the Red Lion at Bredwardine. Bob showed me a leather bound book which contained photographs of huge carp and barbel he’d caught. It was a lovely book, full of memories and Bob was justifiably proud. Fast forward to January 2016. I wanted to keep a diary of my trout fishing and decided to use technology. After several false starts I designed and built a website using WordPress.  Other design tools are available but they are not as good. I kept the diary going throughout the season. The website made it easy to write a short story about each trip and to add a couple of photos.

During the year I  was worried about the security of my diary and made regular backups. I also thought about printing a copy, just to be on the safe side. I remembered Bob’s beautiful book and thought about having a printed copy professionally bound. I researched different types of book binding, paper and book designs. I decided to keep the design of the book close to that of my website. I sourced high quality paper, edited the text for consistency and printed each page. In my wanderings around the internet I found Otter Bookbinding in Midhurst. I visited their workshop to discuss the binding and left the text block with them. About a week later the book was ready for collection.

It’s the only copy. It’s not for publication.  It’s a permanent record of my online diary that will exist long after I and the website have decayed. It contains 238 pages and about 250 colour photos.

Many thanks to Bob for the inspiration. I will attempt to repeat the process next year.