This website is devoted to pleasure and is published with the hope that you can spend a few moments here and find interest and enjoyment. Nothing is for sale and no service is offered.
Binding books is, in many ways, just another curious hand craft expected to fade and die: an end anticipated and forecast for some years. Yet it continues to confound sceptics and persists with vigour. Beautiful work is produced by binders, amateur and professional, in the Americas and Europe. Now, of course, even the book as we know it is pronounced doomed; this is the age of the internet, ebooks and ereaders. And so this site is launched in enemy territory as a small gesture of resistance, Canute-like, hoping to stem the tide of progress for just a little bit longer. However, even as I peer above the trench wall, my tin helmet firmly clamped to my head, I admit being conflicted on this subject; I too have concerns for the future of printed books but admit to some enthusiasm for modern technology. I have just finished the new translation (Pevear & Volokhonsky) of War and Peace; the book weighs three and a quarter pounds - its a wrist-breaker. In my Ereader it has no discernible weight.
The tools used by artisan binders have remained unchanged for centuries. The illustration is of Roger Payne (1739-1797) using a press similar in design to its modern counterpart above. All aspects of the craft are still performed by hand, using only water soluble adhesives. The emphasis in everything we do should be the long-term conservation of the text. It must always be about the text - a beautifully bound book with inspired decoration is a joy - but it must be complimentary to the text.
The book below - Persian Stories from the Arabian Nights - is a limited edition, hand printed by The Allen Press in Marin County, California. It is in sheets, ready for binding. A future project.
The books produced by Lewis and Dorothy Allen - one a year and limited to one hundred and forty copies - were printed damp on their 1846 model Columbian or an 1882 Albion hand press. This text below is the 1980 volume. Sadly, this unique Press has ceased to produce the annual volume. The books they printed are beautiful editions and a challenge to a binder to do the best work to match the beauty of their texts.
