Making Books With Kids: 25 Paper Projects to Fold, Sew, Paste, Pop, and Draw

Spread the joy and craft of books in your family with Making Books with Kids. This inspiring collection features more than 25 creative, kid-friendly projects in design, illustration, paper decorating, binding techniques, and more.

Book artist and author Esther K. Smith offers an exciting resource of easy-to-follow instructions supported throughout with step-by-step, full-color photographs and illustrations. Each sequence is accompanied by finished samples and variations as well as the inspiring work of a prominent book artist.

Whether you use these projects independently or as a curriculum for hands-on, family-friendly, bookmaking experiences, you’ll find that the lessons in this book are open-ended so they can be explored over and over--with different results each time! Colorful photos illustrate how different people using the same lesson will yield different results, exemplifying the way the lesson brings out each artist’s personal style.

Making Books with Kids is the perfect book for creative families, friends, and community groups and works as lesson plans for both experienced and new art teachers. Children of all ages and experience levels can be guided by adults and will enjoy these engaging exercises.

Encourage the artistic spirit in the children in your life with Making Books with Kids.

Esther K. Smith creates artists’ books and limited editions at Purgatory Pie Press, collaborating with hand-typographer Dikko Faust and other artists and writers. Her work has been exhibited at such prestigious venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Gallery (London), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Whitney Museum. Esther teaches throughout the United States, Canada, and England, taught Artist Books to adults at Cooper Union for more than fifteen years, and has been a visiting artist working with children at the Museum of Arts and Design and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Esther is also the author of two books on book arts, How to Make Books (2007)and Magic Books & Paper Toys (2008), and contributed a foreword to Little Book of Book Making by Charlotte Rivers (August 2014), all published by Potter Craft/Random House. An active promoter who supports her titles with hands-on workshops, Esther is a fixture at the Brooklyn Book Festival (typically held in September), and has children’s events scheduled at the independent bookstores WORD in Jersey City, New Jersey, and McNally Jackson Books in New York City.