This curious speech by Alistair Darling bears listening to twice. If you wish to have the text in front of you, here it is: ‘I do not believe there will be another Scottish referendum in the foreseeable future, possibly not in my lifetime. I’ll tell you why not. Firstly, the public don’t want it. Most … Continue reading A man deceiving himself in the hope of deceiving others

105 years ago today it was Easter Sunday. My father was born. Half a year ago, the arrival of my grand-daughter, Miss Izzy Flaws, put paid to my chances of hitching a ride on the book event of the year, the launch of Shaun Bythell's Diary of a Bookseller. Instead of heading South-West to Wigtown, … Continue reading Ch. 28 – Past, present, future

There is a point in any long enterprise when you realise that the end is not in doubt: provided you continue, you will complete it. This point may come some way before the actual accomplishment of the task – there could be a fair bit of a work to do, another mile to run, but … Continue reading Ch. 27 – Pushing it

With the covers made and stamped and the books sewn, all that remains is is to join the two. The key element in this is the endpaper, which forms the principle hinge, but this is first augmented by pasting a strip of mull, a species of muslin, to the spine, which has first been rounded … Continue reading Ch. 26: Casing-in

The finished covers, as they accumulated, left me in something of a quandary. With their brilliant pillar-box red, they looked splendid as they were - so should they be left like that? The cover of a book has more than one function. In practical terms, it is there to protect the book it contains, but … Continue reading Ch. 25 : Stamping out

My friend Karin of Celestine & the Hare tells me she was put off bookbinding by a tyranically exact instructor ('teacher' hardly seems the right word, since that is something he signally failed to do) who insisted on millimetre-perfect measurement from the outset. That is a great shame as well as a great piece of … Continue reading Ch. 24 – Marking up

You only begin to appreciate the the difficulties of writing history when you try to do it yourself: for the benefit of your readers, you are trying to give an ordered account of something that was far from orderly and occasionally teetered on the brink of chaos. Last August and September I was doing something … Continue reading Ch. 23 – a muddled history – or a history of muddle?

My friend Karin has a book coming out shortly called Bertram Likes to Sew. It's about a water vole who finds that he prefers sewing to more traditional water vole pursuits, like swimming: I'm with Bertram, though aside from buttons, I have only ever sewn two kinds of thing - bow-ties and books. There was … Continue reading Ch. 22 – The Joy of Sewing

Bookbinding is a mainly solitary occupation in which one person can become happily absorbed for long periods of time with any one of its multifarious tasks, but there is one thing for which assistance is required, or at any rate very helpful to have, and that is sorting the skein of thread into manageable portions. … Continue reading Ch. 21 – Helping hands