prop Books

In my experience, theatrical productions LOVE having books in their shows. Maybe it's because the audience can relate to what it is without too much explanation. Maybe it's a good object for an actor to carry and have business with onstage. Maybe it makes for easy set dressing cause books are usually not hard to come by. Or maybe it's all of the above! Aside from dressing or use as a hand prop of little consequence, there are a number of shows that have books of various sizes and uses purposely written into the scripts. I feel for these books. More often then not they are about to embark on a journey that no book should have to endure. Some will make it through. Others, sadly, will not. Here are a few of them when they were newly minted and a little bit about the fates that would befall them.

MAP BOOK

SHOW: Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley
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FATE: Not tragic luckily! Because of its size, almost 3 feet wide when open, this lucky book got to be a table prop that the performers flipped pages in and occasionally picked up and moved around. The cover was made of a thin, almost stretch fabric, with a wood print and a decorative mottled paper on the spine. The interior pages were printed on bond paper with a wide format printer and then glued front to back and sewn into the book.

​TOSSED BOOKS

​SHOW: Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley
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​FATE: These books needed to be involved in a mistaken identity situation. The green book received the least abuse but the blue book would be tossed through the air and meet with the floor at some point. It also needed to look in good to brand new shape in the first act every night. Two books were made of the blue. One to be the "good book" always seen in the first act and then the second to be switched out for the abuse later on. I built all of these books from scratch so they would be similar to each other. All three were to be the same book but two different colours were given to them so they could be associated with their respective characters. All the materials were as light weight as possible, ie paper for the text block and cover board material. I also spent extra time reinforcing the whole book when casing it in to help lessen the chances of a cover board tearing off. The covers where bound in cloth and then painted with tiles and aged so they didn't look too shiny and new onstage. In the end the spine was quite dinged. It fell and hit the floor each show but luckily no covers where lost in a three week run.

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