This weekend was very tiring and intense. But these two days were among the most inspiring and wonderful working days of the year. All because I participated in the Book Arts Fair in Leiden (Netherlands.)
We are almost ready for the Boekkunstbeurs — the book arts fair that is organized but the Dutch printing and bookbinding guilds every November in Leiden. Last year we took part in that event and it was amazing!
The launch of our new section punching tool was a blast! First, it was warmly welcomed by our Instagram followers, and then the orders just continued to come every day! Here are only a few of the recent orders.
The easy answer to the question "How to repair book spine with duct tape?" is that you just never, and I mean it, never use duct tape and most of the other types of tape on books and documents of at least some value.
We continue our series of inspiring bookbinding projects with several new objects. All these books (not only books) are quite different, but the thing that unites them is that there is something special about every single one of them.
Identifying the origins of a manuscript is a notoriously subjective art, one that requires an impressive visual memory and an exceedingly trained eye that can quickly spot the telltale details which hint at certain artists, periods, and locations.
It is estimated that during the peak of the Great Purge in the USSR some 680,000 to 1,200,000 people were killed by NKVD. An average investigator in Moscow had some 30-40 political cases per month. And sometimes they were bored.
This vintage Russian magazine about printing was published for only two years, but it already gave me a lot of insights into the epoch. This time we share the second issue of the first year of publishing: December 1901.
This is the spookiest time of the year, and we have some scary bookish things to share with you! Well, some of them are more fun than spooky, but that's probably the main idea of all this pandemonium.
This post is heavily influenced by an article by Christian Alschner published in 1984. He starts the article by recounting the reasons for the scarcity of the original girdle books as the overhanging leather was often removed by librarians.
So, here is the first book I ever bound. While the top photo is quite dramatic, check the other images to see some mistakes I made. The spine is stitched because I recycled the leather from a jacket and wanted to cover the old holes.
Now available at our shop: a holder for Tombow glue. The idea was suggested by one of our customers. As it appears, Tombow glue has a huge fandom for its two options of the application. Especially the "pen tip".
This album is a collection of newspaper cutouts with cartoons by the Dutch artist Jo Spier. From 1924 to 1939, he worked in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and authored a plethora of illustrations about everyday life.
A practical guide to bookbinding that includes multiple projects aimed to help to master the basics of the craft. Softcover, 1931. Limp cloth wrappers, 8vo, 48pp.; multiple illustrations and schemes.
I have been asked to "Just do a workshop" ... "locally, so it need not be a special thing" ... oh yes... and that four-letter word beginning with F or f that professionals dread... "for free"! After all, "it's just bits of paper, isn't it?"
