A New Leaf

Heritage Crafts, a UK-based charity set up to support and safeguard traditional craft skills, deems bookbinding to be “currently viable.” This means that it has sufficient numbers of practitioners to transmit its traditional skills to the next generation, unlike those considered “endangered” or “critically endangered” such as the related craft of fore-edge painting — creating an image on the book’s exposed page edges. In the UK, the craft is also supported by two active guilds: the Society of Bookbinders and the Society of Designer Bookbinders.

“There’s certainly still plenty of people working in bookbinding either professionally or at a hobby level across the UK,” says McEwan, who has experienced first-hand the contraction of a craft industry. After studying sculpture at Glasgow School of Art he became a die-sinker, a job that involved hand engraving on to metal to make intricate moulds. “I did that for 20 years but new computer-controlled technology came in and gradually took more and more work away from me,” he recalls. He retrained in bookbinding.

McEwan refers to his preferred way of working as “design bookbinding”: taking apart an existing book — “it could be newly published or from a few hundred years ago” — and then “responding to it in an artistic way,” he explains. The book is re-sewn, the spine can be shaped and the page edges can be trimmed and decorated, often with gold leaf finish, but “there’s also ways of printing onto the edge of a book”. The cover, meanwhile, is generally leather, often goat skin or calf skin, which McEwan buys in its natural form “so I can dye it to the exact colour and tone I want it to be.”

One high-profile commission McEwan has worked on is the Booker Prize; every year Fellows of the Society of Designer Bookbinders create a unique binding for each of the six shortlisted works of fiction. In 2023 McEwan’s binding of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (that year’s winner) featured an abstract, geometric design in turquoise and deep blues, in hand-dyed goatskin, embellished with foil and carbon tooling, with transfer-printed edges. “There were some very tense, explosive — literally — incidents in [the story], so the design I came up with reflected that element,” he says.

In terms of decoration, “There’s so many different techniques you can use,” says Orme. “You can do onlays, inlays, you can sculpt the leather, then you’ve got all the gold tooling — a really old method to create an embossed cover.” The result is a so-called “fine binding”, made to the highest levels of hand craft. A single book can take four to six weeks from start to finish, suggests McEwan. Orme concurs: “It’s such a lengthy process — it takes forever.”

Similarly, Orme’s route to becoming a bookbinder was a “very long process over about ten years,” and while the available Book Arts degree course was creatively wide ranging — their final project included a “leaflet/pamphlet”, an “origami tessellation” and a “kind of meta” wire-bound book — it wasn’t grounded in the training required to enter bookbinding as trade. Orme learnt this via roles at a number of binderies, from London’s Wyvern Bindery and Bookworks to George Bayntun in Bath, together with the Queen’s Bindery Apprenticeship Scheme at Windsor Castle (a scheme that has since ended).

More recently, a grant from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) was a turning point. “I’ve been able to learn from bookbinders around Europe and the UK to really hone my skills towards fine-binding – including gold tooling in Paris, gilded edges in Wales, and geometric box-making in Ascona.” When we speak, Orme is about to head to Rimini, Italy to work alongside bookbinder Luigi Castiglione for a week, practising full leather binding. In London, the place at Cockpit is supported by a Leathersellers’ Award and has enabled the establishment of Orme’s own atelier, SO Studio.

“These grants have all been instrumental to my education and growth in bookbinding, which otherwise is almost unattainable in the UK,” says Orme. “There’s so many bookbinding jobs being advertised out there, but there’s a lack of bookbinders in England at the moment.”

Heritage Crafts highlights the lack of training facilities across the UK as “a very real concern” for bookbinding. “Where there were once college courses with well-trained teachers from professional backgrounds, these have now mostly closed down,” it states. “Apprenticeships, traineeships and internships are few and far between.”

In the 1990s Victoria Stevens got her start in bookbinding with an “old-fashioned apprenticeship” with a trade bookbinder in Dorset, followed by a qualification in Book Arts (Bookbinding) from the London College of Printing, a course that closed in the early 2000s. She used them to move sideways into book conservation — preserving books rather than making or remaking them — first at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, then in Oxford College collections. She has worked on books, archives and manuscripts such as Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, T.E. Lawrence’s undergraduate thesis and Jane Austen first editions. “The people who have created, used, and possibly abused an object is as interesting to me as the actual form,” she says. “Keeping that human element in a book is really the thing I’ve come to appreciate.”

For the past year, Stevens has been the subject leader tutor for books and library materials at West Dean, a college specialising in arts, craft, design and conservation, with sites in West Sussex and London. As well as offering heritage conservation studies up to MA level, in 2023 it added a two year Foundation Degree focused on teaching traditional hand bookbinding skills. The students graduating this year can go on to specialise in conservation, through a Graduate Diploma, or continue with bookbinding through an additional top-up year to gain a BA qualification. “That’s where you really start exploring your creative, design side of your book binding,” says Stevens. “It’s very unusual; I don’t think there’s another full time bookbinding course in the country.”