I started keeping a blog in 2005 on a platform called Live Journal. It was called Moving Music and was about my move from Fort Lee, New Jersey to Pittsburgh. At the end of the year, move completed, I began blogging at Typepad so that I could add photos and changed the name to Fat Old Artist. My friends said I wasn’t fat, which I was–much fatter at that time; that I wasn’t old–Ha Ha. No one said anything about the artist part; that was the one I wondered about–am I really an artist?

I haven’t moved from Pittsburgh but the blog moved to WordPress and the name changed to Studio Ruthe after I found a link to the blog on a site about fat lady porn. Sometime in 2013 I stopped writing much about my life, started writing about the books and changed the name to 100 Books Before I Die. Pictured above are books number 104 to 110–the blogs in book form through August 2012.

This has been a big lesson in book creation. Translating content from simple chronology to double sided pages in signatures is not easy. Each book has five signatures with six folios in each signature–a total of 30 leaves and 120 pages. This is an arbitrary size that worked out pretty well. Signatures are sewn over tapes and open almost flat. My technique improved with each book. If I make 4 or 5 more (which won’t happen), I should be an expert. The last one opens beautifully, but I didn’t get the spine glued straight. Two more books are in the works. One continues from where this left off and awaits more content. The other will have a different format and be about the books.