deFINEd BINDINGS in San Francisco

deFINEd BINDINGS: 26 Bindings of the Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary.

The New England Chapter exhibition, deFINEd BINDINGS, will be on display at Chronicle Books in San Francisco in February.  If you missed seeing it while on view in Boston you have one final chance to view these bindings in person.

The exhibition, you may recall, is a juried selection of bindings on a set book, the Pictorial Webster’s Dictionary.  The book was originally published by Quercus Press.  A trade edition is available from Chronicle Books.

Reception: Thursday, February 23, 2012.  6-8 p.m.

The exhibition runs through February 29, 2012 in the Gallery at
Chronicle Books
680 Second Street
San Francisco, CA

chroniclebooks.com

Image

More Bookbinding Study Opportunities

Following up on our recent promise to do better about keeping you all informed about New England study opportunities…

North Bennet Street School offers another round of courses this summer and there is still time to register!

Bookbinding Courses

Stacie Dolin will teach the fundamental bookbinding course, Cloth Case Bookbinding.  June 27- July 1, 2011.

Martha Kearsley will offer a comprehensive introduction to book repair with The Cloth Case Reback, July 5-8, 2011.  Martha will then teach Sewn Boards Binding, July 9 and 10, 2011.

Two creative, recent NBSS graduates will present a unique course exploring the use of natural dyes in bookbinding.  Paper Dying with Plants runs July 11-15, 2011, and will be co-taught by Arini Esarey and Celine Lombardi.

Jeff Altepeter will offer an Introduction to Leather for Bookbinding, July 18-20, 2011.  This course is primarily focused on leather paring (thinning the leather) and will include plenty of hands-on practice as well as an in-depth discussion of the materials, tools and techniques used in leather bookbinding.  Great for those with basic bookbinding skills or for those that need to pick up long-neglected knives!

Modernizing the Historic Model will be co-taught by Stacie Dolin and Arini Esarey, July 25-29, 2011.  Come explore variations on historic binding structures using modern materials.

Martha Kearsley will be back, August 1-5, 2011, with an Introduction to Boxes and Enclosures.

A one-day class, Embellishing the Cloth Case, will be taught by Celine Lombardi and Anne McLain on August 6, 2011.  This is a great follow-up for students that have taken the fundamental cloth case binding course and anyone else that wishes to add some new layers.

Calligraphy and Related Arts

Maryanne Grebenstein of Abbey Studio will be at NBSS again this summer and fall with her popular courses on Calligraphy and Illumination.  Manuscript Gilding, July 9 and 10, 2011; and then come back for Hand Lettering: Five Styles, August 1-5, 2011, to learn the five basic lettering styles using a broad edged pen.

If you want more than the taste offered in these summer calligraphy courses please check out the Three Month Calligraphy and Illumination Intensive offered in the fall of 2011.

Online registration for North Bennet Street School workshops is available at http://www.nbss.org/workshops/schedule.asp#BOOKBINDING

Garage Annex School

There are some great study opportunities available to you all in the New England area this year.  We apologize for not doing a better job keeping you informed of them, but there is still time to register!  We are passing along the following message from our friends at GAS:

Garage Annex School for Book Arts 
Dear friends:We are grateful to all of you who have registered for workshops recently.Tomorrow we are meeting with the folks from Williston prep school to determine if we satisfy their minimum requirments for the number of lodgers. We are hopeful they may let us use the dorm for the most populated of our summer workshops. 

So, again, if you are thinking of studying at GAS this summer this would be a great time to let us know!

GAS, located in Easthampton, MA, is offering a variety of workshops taught by Daniel Kelm, Art Larson, Nancy Moore Bess, Dea Sasso, and Julia Miller:

Independent Projects
with Daniel E. Kelm, June 20-24

The Book Restructured—Wire Edge Binding
with Daniel E. Kelm, June 27-28

The Ultimate Album
with Daniel E. Kelm, June 29-July 1

Letterpress Broadsides
with Art Larson, July 2-3

The Codex Restructured—Rethinking the Spine
with Daniel E. Kelm, July 4-8

Japanese Packaging: Seeking a Narrative
with Nancy Moore Bess, July 9-10

Book Repair and Restoration for Beginners
with Dea Sasso, July 11-12

Codex C: A Late Sixth-Century Coptic Binding
with Julia Miller, July 13-15

The Leather Intensive
with Daniel E. Kelm, July 17-22

If you register for a workshop and it is cancelled due to low enrollment you will receive a full refund. It’s disappointing when students wait to enroll and then find we have cancelled a workshop because we were short one or two students! If you are planning to come, please let us know.

Please visit: www.GarageAnnexSchool.com for all the details.

Please keep in mind that Daniel offers private instruction at GAS too. The possibilities are nearly endless with a customized curriculum! If you would like to discuss this, he can be phoned at 413-527-8044 or emailed at daniel.kelm@mac.com.

We look forward to seeing you here at GAS.
Greta Sibley, Co-director
 
____________________________
 
Greta D. Sibley
Garage Annex School, Inc.
One Cottage Street #5, Room 5-03
Easthampton, MA 01027
studio: 413-529-0070
fax: 413-529-0071

Reminder of Dominic Riley Artist Talk

Design Matters: the creation of contemporary fine leather bindings
An Artist Talk by Dominic Riley
North Bennet Street School, Boston
Thursday, October 21, 2010
6:00-8:00 pm

With the advent of the Arts and Crafts movement bookbindings became works of art in themselves.  Dominic is one of a small number of bookbinders working today who create unique Design Bindings for collectors.  This lecture shows a range of these contemporary bindings, explaining how each design grew from a response to the text and illustrations of the printed book. 

Dominic’s design bindings are in collections worldwide. He is a Felow of Designer Bookbinders, and in 2008 he won both first prizes and the Mansfield Medal in the DB competition.

This lecture is free and open to the public, but please email workshop@nbss.org to reserve a seat.

This event is co-sponsored by North Bennet Street School and the New England Chapter of GBW.

Intermediate- Advanced Bookbinding Classes

There are a few upcoming study opportunities in the New England region especially for those of you with some experience.  We draw your attention to the following courses with two fantastic binders and teachers, Peter Geraty and Dominic Riley.

The Garage Annex School in Easthampton, MA will host Peter Geraty for “Vellum Binding Over Boards” in September.

Dominic Riley will be at North Bennet Street School in October to teach “The Classic Leather Binding” as well as a two-day workshop on hand tooling WITHOUT gold leaf.

Descriptions of all three workshops below, but please see the two school’s web sites for more information and registration.  www.garageannexschool.com and www.nbss.org.

From GAS:

Vellum Binding Over Boards with Peter Geraty
September 18–19, Saturday–Sunday

If Vellum Binding Over Boards is an intriguing yet intimidating prospect, come get over the fear of working with this beautiful hygroscopic material by attending Peter Geraty’s two-day workshop. You can read the workshop description below.

Please join us this September in the Garage Annex School‘s spacious classroom here in Easthampton, MA.  

Vellum has a mystique and a mind of its own. The mystique we admire, the mind we must work with!

Warped boards and broken hinges are evidence of vellum’s unruly nature—and these flaws are common in both historic and new bindings.

The hygroscopic quality of this wonderful material allows it to expand and shrink as the environment changes, so unskilled use of vellum can lead to disappointment. On the other hand, the strength of vellum makes it an ideal material for bookbinding, and its successful use important to add to your skill set.

During this workshop you will learn how to create a vellum binding over boards which will accentuate the beauty of vellum and compensate for its tendency to wander.

The style known as floating board (in which the vellum is glued to a thin upper board) allows the vellum to expand and contract with less warping of the boards. There is no way to stop vellum’s movement but we devise effective ways to work with it.

You will construct a Dutch style (laced-on case with a French groove) vellum binding. Over the course of two days you will sew the textblock, hand sew endbands, make the vellum cover and case it in. Throughout, we will discuss the nature of vellum, how it is made, and look at examples of vellum bindings.

There is an expectation of intermediate skills in bookbinding to take this workshop. If you would like to discuss your qualifications or have any questions about the class itself please feel free to contact Peter at pgeraty@praxisbindery.com.

You may enjoy visiting Peter’s web site: www.praxisbindery.com.

From NBSS:

The Classic Leather Binding with Dominic Riley
Mon-Fri, Oct 18-22, 2010, 8:30am-4:30pm

Experience the pleasure of working with beautiful calfskin and learn the fundamentals of decorative blind tooled covers. This intensive master class will introduce students to the Cambridge Panel, a classic (and luxurious) English leather binding popular throughout the eighteenth century, and which is very useful for creating handsome ‘period’ bindings. The sections will be sewn on raised cords, using the sewing frame, traditional ‘made’ endpapers will be sewn on, after which the book will be trimmed, rounded and backed. The edges will be sprinkled and polished, two-color headbands sewn on, and the cords frayed out and laced into boards. The book will be covered in a smooth calfskin, and particular attention will be given to careful and accurate paring using the English knife and spoke shave, ensuring a neat fit over the binding. The leather will be pasted out and applied to the book, taking care shaping it over the raised bands, forming the headcaps, and making neat, simple corners. The binding will be decorated in the Cambridge Panel style, which first involves sprinkling with leather dye using an ingenious template to create the classic paneled effect. Then, using a few tools and working to a traditional formula, the covers will be enhanced by some very handsome blind tooling. The endpapers are then put down, and the binding is polished and waxed. Traditional craft bookbinding experience recommended. Experience with leather and knife sharpening also recommended. The tuition includes a fee for leather and other materials, but students are expected to provide their own hand tools.

Introduction to Hand Tooling with Dominic Riley
Sat & Sun, Oct 23-24, 2010, 8:30am-4:30pm

A thorough introduction to the art of hand tooling—in blind, with carbon and with real gold foil. A feast of tips, tricks and techniques. Hand finishing on books requires patience, skill and much practice, and handling gold leaf can present endless frustrations to even the most accomplished bookbinder. This class will show students how to execute neat, pleasing finishing without using gold leaf, thus concentrating on the fundamental skills necessary to achieve good lettering and decoration of spines and boards. The class will concentrate on five techniques: blind tooling on leather; tooling with carbon paper to achieve a solid black result; freestyle carbon tooling on leather or cloth boards using the one line wheel; tooling titles with real gold foil, using a template to ensure accuracy; and tooling gold lines using a fool-proof guide. All these techniques have been developed or learnt by Dominic over the years in various binderies, where, for reasons of expediency, finishing with gold leaf was not practiced. The alternatives, as you will see, are very impressive! The tuition includes a fee for materials, but students are expected to provide their own hand tools.

Conference

The annual conference of the Guild of Book Workers, with the grand title of “The Seminar on Standards of Excellence in Hand Bookbinding” probably sounds a little daunting to those not familiar with the event.  The conference is held each year at different places around the country, and is in fact a highly social as well as highly educational.  The conference is a wonderful opportunity for the annual cross-pollination in our wide-ranging field of “book workers.”

In addition to the formal presentations there are tours, social events, a banquet with an entertaining auction– and one of the best reasons to attend might be the vendor room which will be packed with temptations.

The conference topics offer something for everyone, with presentations on traditional bookbinding, book arts and book conservation.  There are frequently presentations that cross disciplines, and the variety is part of the very structure of the Guild of Book Workers.

This year the conference is in Tucson, AZ.  October 14-16, 2010.   There is an extraordinary group of presenters (see below), and we know the local host committee has worked hard to put on a great event.  There is still time to register, and you can do so online for the first time this year.  See the Standards page on the GBW site at http://www.guildofbookworkers.org/events/se-main.php

Standards Presentations 2010

Michael Burke – Byzantine Binding
Michael Burke started his working life as a chemist researching the transformation of coal into oil. He later worked in occupational health with asbestos. Michael studied bookbinding with Dominic Riley and paper conservation with Karen Zukor. He was involved in establishing the bindery at the San Francisco Center for the Book, and edited Gold Leaf, the journal of the Hand Bookbinders of California.

Michael lives in the Lake District, England, where he teaches bookbinding at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal and at Society of Bookbinders (SoB) events across the UK. He is a past chair of the North West and North Wales region of SoB. He has taught for diverse book arts groups across the USA, including Los Angeles, Seattle and Salt Lake City and in 2007 he taught at Paper and Book Intensive in Michigan. Last year he travelled to São Paulo to teach for the Brazilian group ABER. In recent years Michael has been researching the structures of ancient and medieval bindings. Michael will demonstrate the making of a medieval Byzantine binding. This leather binding is unique in that is bound from the boards to the center, resulting in a natural rounding of the spine, at which point the two halves are joined.

Nancy Ruth Leavitt – In Search of Content, the Joys and Challenges of Creating the Book Form
Nancy Leavitt is a calligrapher specializing in unique hand-lettered and painted manuscript books. Leavitt’s interest in the hand-lettered book developed as a result of her studies in the U.S. and Great Britain. Her work resides in many prestigious collections and she has received several grants from the Maine Arts Commission for research into her craft, including quill cutting. She lives, works, and sings in Stillwater, Maine.

Like an engineering project, a book is a complex three dimensional design made up of many parts. Content is the central idea of the design and narrative is how it unfolds, how the story is revealed and concealed. Our goal as bookmakers is to intentionally integrate all aspects of the design to strengthen the structure, form, and content of our works. Through demonstration and example, Nancy discusses her rigorous yet playful method of researching, compiling data, developing, and realizing materials for her manuscript books.

Martha Little – Book Forensics: Interpreting Evidence of Structure
Martha Little has been a bookbinder and book conservator since 1976. She was Book Conservator at the Yale University Library and Head of Conservation at the University of Michigan Libraries, and is now in private practice in California. Her early training was with Jane Greenfield, who incorporated a study of historical structures and the making of models into the work day, and with Roger Powell in England, whose powers of meticulous observation will always be an unattainable standard. Martha took part last year in a condition survey of manuscript books at the National Library of Egypt in Cairo, where she learned that two people can look at the same detail and see two different things. 

Every book conservator accumulates knowledge of some of the small details that are clues to a book’s invisible or lost structure. A remnant of a leather strap may lie in a board; extra holes suggestive of an earlier sewing may be apparent in the folds; raised areas where the covering material has become worn reveal where cords are laced in underneath. Martha’s presentation will examine more ways of interpreting physical evidence when examining a book, in order to determine how it was made and what materials were used. She will bring old books to look at and discuss; recreate evidence though different means to see which interpretation seems more plausible; demonstrate some simple tests to identify materials, and show how the knowledge of the observer can both help with and get in the way of seeing what’s there.

Jeffrey S. Peachey – Late Eighteenth Century French Binding Structures
Jeffrey S. Peachey is the owner of a New York City-based studio for the conservation of books and the inventor of conservation tools and machines. He is a Professional Associate in the American Institute for Conservation and a previous chair of the Conservators In Private Practice. For more than 20 years, he has specialized in the conservation of books and paper artifacts for institutions and individuals. A consultant to major libraries and university collections in the New York City region and nationally, he has been the recipient of numerous grants to support his work. A well-known teacher, Peachey also provides conservation-focused guidance to students in art, bookbinding and conservation programs.

This presentation will focus on the structural aspects of a typical 18th century full calf French binding by comparing contemporary descriptions in bookbinding manuals, examining extant bindings and experimenting with reproduction tools and equipment. In some respects, this structure is the end of utilitarian leather binding–50 years later the cloth case begins to predominate. Some features of this binding style include cutting the boards with a pointe, ploughing the edges in-boards, four variations of transverse spine liners and sprinkled cover decoration. Primary texts include Diderot’s Encylopedie (1751-1780). Gauffecourt’s Traite de la Relieure des Livres (1763) and Dudin’s L’Art du Relieur-doreur de Livres (1772). Specific conservation concerns for these structures will also be discussed.

North Bennet Street School Workshops

North Bennet Street School has just published a new workshop catalog and updated the course listings online at www.nbss.org.

Coming up fast:  Todd Pattison with “Rebacking Bookbindings,” on March 20-21, 2010.

Also beginning in late March is a 5 Saturday run of “Introduction to Cloth Case Bookbinding” with Amanda Nelsen, and a three-day class from Stacie Dolin on Photo Albums.  There are a variety of courses on bookbinding, calligraphy, and marbling being offered from now through the summer from new visiting teachers and regular workshop instructors.

A few highlights include “New Oriental Bindings” with Monique Lallier (in collaboration with the American Academy of Bookbinding) and Katherine Beaty will offer a class on Islamic Binding.  Pop-up artist Paul Johnson is back with a new lecture and a couple of classes.  And for all those that have requested more conse rvation oriented courses there is “Tips and Tricks for Book and Paper Conservation” with Renate Mesmer in August.

Register online at www.nbss.org or contact the workshop coordinator, Jourdan Abel at workshop @ nbss.org

Please watch this blog for New England Chapter lectures from several of the instructors above!

Garage Annex School 2009

The following is forwarded from our friends at the Garage Annex School in Northampton, MA.  An interesting line up of workshops for 2009 and a new six week “summer institute.”
We are pleased to announce that the 2009 workshop schedule is now live on our newly revamped web site at garageannexschool.com  Please visit the site and browse through the workshop program. You may also be interested in our new Summer Institute. 
 
The subject of the 2009 Summer Institute is leather bookbinding, including design techniques such as leather onlay and dyeing, gold tooling, and stamping. Students will produce full leather bindings as well as a series of models at various stages of completion. This is a six-week, full-time curriculum of study. Students should expect to work some evening and weekend hours. Because the Summer Institute will welcome up to twelve students for the six-week period we have arranged to provide meals and lodging at the residential housing of nearby Williston Northampton School.
The GAS Summer Institute is fully described on its own web page at:
%d bloggers like this: