Grail Diary

[CaptainBeef]

Hi RPF team!
I am new here and currently looking to create my own grail diary from scratch. I intend to had write the appropriate pages and recreate as much as I can (using my design skills such as they are). I would be really grateful if anyone who has done this themselves can offer any advice or reference I could go to to begin. I have purchased the necessary book binding tools. I'd welcome any hints on paper stock, leather supply and insert sources if you can! Happy to share all of my knowledge also where I can. I'm fairly good with a traditional ink nib as well as calligraphy - I have some time on my hands while I convalesce so thought I'd do something challenging and fun!

Look forward to hearing from you and making some friends.

Thanks,
CaptainBeef

 

[Flagg Simmons]

Good to see someone else out there doing this. I started back in Feb. I have done a few already I am only now happy with a set of pages I have for a final version that will be very close to a HERO prop. Good Luck getting yours together. I may not be able to help much but I will do what I can. This site is a real big help refining some of the pages and insert info.

 

[MichaelFuji]

Hi RPF team!
I am new here and currently looking to create my own grail diary from scratch. I intend to had write the appropriate pages and recreate as much as I can (using my design skills such as they are). I would be really grateful if anyone who has done this themselves can offer any advice or reference I could go to to begin. I have purchased the necessary book binding tools. I'd welcome any hints on paper stock, leather supply and insert sources if you can! Happy to share all of my knowledge also where I can. I'm fairly good with a traditional ink nib as well as calligraphy - I have some time on my hands while I convalesce so thought I'd do something challenging and fun!

Look forward to hearing from you and making some friends.

Thanks,
CaptainBeef

Welcome to the forum and welcome to the grail diary journey.
The first and most important source nowadays is probably

Zen Grail Diary Inserts Page

Zen Grail Diary

zenseeker.net

That should get you started.

Other than that:

Learn how to search on Google and on this forum.
There is plenty of information.
You just have to find it.
The research is going to be your friend on this journey.
So learn to enjoy it.

 

[sortalikenew]

ok, i hate most people's reply to questions like these. They always post the same pages with dead links. And then say "search the forum" and the forums have a ton of dead links too. I'm in the process of putting mine together. It's going to be a modified "story" diary. once I have most of it assembled I'll post the photos (somewhere as permanent as possible) and all the people who want to gatekeep the literal HOLY GRAIL, can kick rocks. Send me a pm and i'll email you most of what I have so far.

 

[Pascal Kurosawa]

They always post the same pages with dead links.

I know "hate" is the new "dislike". But always? Zen Grail Diary is not a dead link.

 

[sortalikenew]

I truly don't know how easy it was when you started, but I can tell you it's difficult and frustrating now. I've spent literal days of my life combing through dead links, using the way-back-machine, going to several physical libraries to get high res copies of the pictures from the diary. The ethos of my life is to make things easier for the person behind me. **** was difficult for me, there's no reason it should be the same for you.

Zen itself is not a dead link. But the vast majority of pics that are linked from there are non-existent. Hopefully this year, I'll make a wordpress or tumblr with all the photos that I've found, recreated, upscaled, and invented so that anyone can access it. I'm also going to make a ligature font from the Indy Senior 3 font and screencaps of the handwritten diary.

 

[Pascal Kurosawa]

The search for grail diary sources was never easy and will never be. So, thank you for every information you can share with the community. This is what we all need to keep this hobby alive. But be aware: in 15 years your own sources maybe also will be only ashes and dust.

 

[seanboy360]

Hi RPF team!
I am new here and currently looking to create my own grail diary from scratch. I intend to had write the appropriate pages and recreate as much as I can (using my design skills such as they are). I would be really grateful if anyone who has done this themselves can offer any advice or reference I could go to to begin. I have purchased the necessary book binding tools. I'd welcome any hints on paper stock, leather supply and insert sources if you can! Happy to share all of my knowledge also where I can. I'm fairly good with a traditional ink nib as well as calligraphy - I have some time on my hands while I convalesce so thought I'd do something challenging and fun!

Look forward to hearing from you and making some friends.

Thanks,
CaptainBeef

I am also in the early stages of making my own grail diary; I am using the pdfs from Celeste Conway posted on this site back in 2019; they did a ton of great work, and I'm just adding pages as I find them to make it closer to the movie prop. Here's the link in case you haven't seen this: Beginner's Grail Diary (Printable Pages + Inserts)

 

[seanboy360]

ok, i hate most people's reply to questions like these. They always post the same pages with dead links. And then say "search the forum" and the forums have a ton of dead links too. I'm in the process of putting mine together. It's going to be a modified "story" diary. once I have most of it assembled I'll post the photos (somewhere as permanent as possible) and all the people who want to gatekeep the literal HOLY GRAIL, can kick rocks. Send me a pm and i'll email you most of what I have so far.

How's your grail quest going? I am nearing the end of putting all my pages together, when I came across this thread. I agree with you that the "quest" is much harder now as more than 50% of the pics & links on Zen Seeker and COW are broken links. I'm happy to share any pages I have with anyone that needs them.

 

[Flagg Simmons]

I have seen that one and was able to use a few things from the PDFs but his dad was doing a very different type of build. There is some good stuff in there. I had a hard time finding the Zepplin ticket that was printable. If you have a good image of that I would be interested to see it.

 

[Darthbauer]

How's your grail quest going? I am nearing the end of putting all my pages together, when I came across this thread. I agree with you that the "quest" is much harder now as more than 50% of the pics & links on Zen Seeker and COW are broken links. I'm happy to share any pages I have with anyone that needs them.

Not only are those links old and not working but I feel like there’s been new pages and different orders discovered as well. Once you have everything together, seems like a quick project but it’s getting everything together not so much with as much as you start second guessing things

 

[victorc]

Hi, anyone have a link for how to sewing a grail diary for dummies? I really appreciate any help.
I want to replicate my Serenity diary and I love the book binding, sadly Mr Serenity don’t ask my messages and is not around in the forum anymore.
Thank you.

 

[Darthbauer]

Hi, anyone have a link for how to sewing a grail diary for dummies? I really appreciate any help.
I want to replicate my Serenity diary and I love the book binding, sadly Mr Serenity don’t ask my messages and is not around in the forum anymore.
Thank you.

 

[victorc]

Great, thank you very much…

 

[mikesprops]

Hey RPFers, I've just started the grail quest to build a diary aswell. Here's a top tip that no one seems to have mentioned here yet. The original source books that were used by the prop master Keir Lusby are:

The Grail: Quest for the Eternal: Quest for Eternal by John Matthews

The Flowering of the Middle Ages by Joan Evans

Palimpsests : The Backs of Monumental Brasses by John Page

Books of Hours and Their Owners by John Harthan

A History Of Architecture On The Comparative Method - Sir Banister Fletcher

The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist by J. Romilly Allen


The first two are the ones to get, as they have the majority of the images that were used, but there are some sections in the others also used according to people on Club Obi-Wan. I've just ordered the lot and once I've made some high res scans of the source material I'll happily share it to stop people needing to hunt down the books.

Another great source for the original pages is a book called From Star Wars to Indiana Jones : The Best of the Lucasfilm Archives, which contains good quality photographs of the original hero prop from the Lucasfilm archives. As I find more sources I'll happily include them in this post to hopefully help people along the path.

Mike

Edit. Some good online resources are obviously zenseeker although it does have lots of dead links as previously mentioned, it really is a great compliation of all kinds of resources and has a lot of the detail that you're looking for, but it lacks the photos of the individual pages so it's really challenging to figure out exactly what it's talking about

Zen Seeker's Error Page

Club Obi-Wan has some great stuff, including a list of all the inserts and a list of all the pages and their order, but again lacks any kind of high resolution images of the original prop pages (as far as I can see). However it does have lots of images of other fan created diaries, that can be great material to work from.

Club Obi Wan - Login

Indy Magnoli's website has some good low res images that'll help you figure out what each page looks like, though they are too low res to really read and recreate the pages directly from.

Henry Jones' Grail Diary Replica

Propstore had one of the Hero Diaries in 2010 on display at San Diego Comic Con, which they scanned and put on an iPad. There's some poor quality images of those pages in this video:

Propstore recently sold a B Diary, and so they've got some good quality photos of it's cover and some interior pages:

https://propstoreauction.com/lot-details/index/catalog/319/lot/88886

Adam Savage on Tested did a video going through this diary:

Propstore also sold some individual production pages:
Venice Library Pages: INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) - Production-Made "Venice Library" Grail Diary Page
Grail Cup Pages: INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) - Production-Made "Grail Cup" Grail Diary Page
Two Map Pages: INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) - Pair of Production-Made "Maps" Grail Diary Pages
Knight Crossing Invisible bridge pages: INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) - Production-Made "Knight Crossing Invisible Bridge" Grail Diary Page
Adam Savage on Tested did a video going through these pages:

Propstore also sold a job lot of photographs of the original hero prop, which they've uploaded low-res images of:

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989) - Grail Diary Reference Photo Set

p classl1desctextwhitespan stylefont-weightboldThis lot will be auctioned on Wednesday, June 30th. The auction will begin at 900am PDT and lots are sold sequentially via live auctioneer tune in to the live streaming broadcast on auction day to follow the pace. Note other lots in the auction may...

propstore.com

This is a great thread with some good info about inserts:

Grail diary

Hello, As many other already did, I want to create my own version of the grail diary, based from what can be available, using as many old and original items as possible, even not accurate to those used in the movie, for exemple, the french nott won't be a replica, but a real french note, same...

therpf-f28a.kxcdn.com

Perhaps we should all work together and create some kind of PDF full of reference material, like the Lightsaber Guidebook

 

[beowulf573]

Great links, I've been (very) slowly accumulating notes and files to use to make my own hero prop. I'm currently planning on starting small, weathering an AliExpress cheap prop, maybe printing the Celeste files to bind and make my own inserts for, then finally do a v3 with hero accurate pages either hand drawn or digitally traced to a higher resolution. We'll see if I live long enough to actually do this, I still haven't finished my full sized astromech.

One thing I have not come across is a good reference for the paper types to use for each insert. I bought a roll of this paper to use for the wrapping. I'm going to try to get a stamp laser cut in my office makerspace and print labels, but I'd like to find better paper to print the stamps on.

One note on Club Obi-Wan, the web site moved from indygear.com to indygear.net a while back. If you come across a dead link, you might be able to just edit the url to .net.

 

[mikesprops]

That's a great tip. I had no idea about the URL Change. I think the way you're going about it is probably a really good route to go down. The third version I build of something is usually the best one.

What I've found after looking into the paper for a little while now is that different versions of the prop used different paper. Some used laid paper with a cross hatch pattern, some used laid paper with a weave pattern, some used egg white copy type paper, I don't have specifics on that, perhaps someone else could chime in with more info there. I think the main key is that if you want a diary with 270 or so pages and you want to keep it about an inch thick you need to stick with paper that has a weight of about 100gsm.

 

[Darthbauer]

That's a great tip. I had no idea about the URL Change. I think the way you're going about it is probably a really good route to go down. The third version I build of something is usually the best one.

What I've found after looking into the paper for a little while now is that different versions of the prop used different paper. Some used laid paper with a cross hatch pattern, some used laid paper with a weave pattern, some used egg white copy type paper, I don't have specifics on that, perhaps someone else could chime in with more info there. I think the main key is that if you want a diary with 270 or so pages and you want to keep it about an inch thick you need to stick with paper that has a weight of about 100gsm.

Correct. The only ones that used substantially thicker paper were the B props and they had far less signatures and inserts in them but still looked just as thick as the hero.