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

Never mind God - do I exist? I don't mean that feeling – familiar enough to some of us – that you have somehow become invisible to those around you, nor am I suggesting that I might be a figment of your imagination (a kind of reverse solipsism) – rather I am concerned with the … Continue reading The (limited) meaning of existence

Ream cutters, as their name suggests, are intended for cutting reams (500 sheets) of paper at a time. A powered electric guillotine will do the job but cost you thousands of pounds. The cheaper end of the manual cutters starts upwards of £500. It was not a cost I could see being absorbed into my … Continue reading Ch.19 – Gargantua the Chinese guillotine

One thing I will certainly do if - indeed, when - I repeat this exercise, is to keep better records. I did set out with the notion of doing a real-time blog, but in the event the large and varied amount of rapid learning I had to do in planning and making the books was … Continue reading Ch. 17 – The Friday the car blew up

I mentioned yesterday that the prospect of doing something repeatedly - in my case, a hundred times - shifts your perspective: you ask not only if you can do it, but also if you need to. My brief course at Robert Smail's had produced a pair of blank notebooks that were pleasing to the eye … Continue reading Ch. 16 – Rounding or backing? – mulling it over

My estimable friend Jackie Morris, artist and illustrator, writer of books, friend of bears, has some questions she would like us to answer (you can find more details here - http://www.jackiemorris.co.uk/blog/a-survey/ - including the prospect of prizes if you so incline). Here are the questions: If you could see through someone else’s eyes who would that … Continue reading Eight questions

As soon as you know that you are making a hundred of anything, you look at it in a different way - that question you ask at any point is not simply 'could I do this again (or indeed would I want to)?' but rather 'could I do this again a hundred times? would I … Continue reading Ch. 15: Economy of effort and material