I’m trying to close some browser tabs that I’ve been carrying along for at least two months, and I just can’t click the little x on this one without mentioning it. Scott K. Kellar, bookbinder and conservator? Does some really lovely work. Go look.

Earlier this week, Miss Sheila Ryan, archivist extraordinaire, drew my attention to the 2008 winner of the award for Best Online Archival Exhibition, as reported by Kate Theimer at ArchivesNext.com: “Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1815–1930: The Art of Books,” created by the University of Alabama, University Libraries, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries.

It has taken me so long to blog the news because this collection is sick—sick, I tell you: more than five thousand books, in various states of decay. Some are fabulous; some are homely; it would take weeks to look at them all. Every time I thought I had a good selection with which to illustrate this post, I’d find twenty more that I love.

The only problem with this archive? You can’t bookmark specific pages within the collection, as you have to have a valid session ID. And if you let your browser sit idle for too long, your session times out. Maddening! If anyone can find a way around this, please let me know. I’ve been dumping covers into Flickr so I can find them again.

More samples after the jump . . .
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Apparently Paris was a hotbed of elegant bookbinding, back in the 1920s:

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Bridget sent a link to a sweet article from Adirondack Life about Jack Fitterer, a book restorer and binder in upstate New York: Page Turners: The art and craft of bookbinding in Indian Lake.

The earliest volume they’ve mended is a 15th-century prayer book with minute channels chewed through the pages by generations of actual bookworms. “Wormholes get little patches of Japanese tissue,” explains Jack. Repairs like this are visible, and he says, “Everything doesn’t have to be pristinely restored. It’s possible to over-restore things. Our goal is to keep a book’s integrity but make it something a modern person can touch and even read.”

It’s a short article with few photos, unfortunately, but there is the promise of more goodies at the Fitterers’ site (“under construction”):

In the future, this page will present a series of reflections on Books and Bookbinding. Some of the topics will include “How does restoration affect the value of a book?”, “How should I best store and display my books?”, “What repairs can I do myself?”, “Should I use leather dressing on my books?”

Keep an eye on it.

A very fine resource got written up on the Craft: blog the other day, and I expected to see it all over the interdesignweb within hours. Since such ubiquitization does not yet seem to have occurred, I hereby draw your attention to the Indiana University Libraries’ photolicious Making a [Casebound] Book. This article is just one small part of the utterly nerdtastic Repair and Enclosure Treatments Manual, which is all about the care, feeding, and restoration of books.

This, FYI, is a tuxedo wrapper:

My favorite part of the manual, though, is this gem of an unanswered query, on the tuxedo wrapper intro page:

criteria:

The criteria for this enclosure are…

…OK, what ARE the criteria for this enclosure?

Clearly, the question to ask yourself is, Where will this book be going? Mrs. Post prescribes a Tuxedo for the following forms of social engagement:

1. At the theater.
2. At most dinners.
3. At informal parties.
4. Dining at home.
5. Dining in a restaurant.

Remember: “If ever in doubt what to wear, the best rule is to err on the side of informality. Thus, if you are not sure whether to put on your dress suit or your Tuxedo, wear the latter.”

Now you know.

Ampersand Duck has put up a pithy post about planning a printed publication, which is addressed to “aspiring artists and performers”—e.g., your friends and mine, who’re often asking if we can just help them design this little tiny promotional card or booklet or brochure, and then sticking us with an impossible deadline and budget, as well as worthless art and copy. And here is her story of why she was inspired to write the piece.

Sometimes you might get hit with poorly thought-out projects even at your day job, though of course I’ve never encountered such misfortunes myself.

I recommend that you write your own version of Ms. Duck’s how-to to address your own typical quick-and-dirty undertakings, and keep it handy to give to those talented friends when they inevitably ask you for help.

Here is a short-run signed gift edition whose case stamp (right foreground) I got to design (I did the interior, too; not worth showing).

The vermilion endsheets, as you can see, are the best part. The headbands have yellow and white stripes. The red pigment on the title is deeper and more lacquerlike than it looks in the photo.

It’s not at all inspired, I’m afraid, but the author said he’s happy with it, and that’s what counts, right? The jacket design for the non-gift edition (left) is by Jamie Stafford-Hill (the stamped one has a clear acetate dust jacket); I don’t remember who did the illustration. I originally tried to make a simplified version of the whole illustration into a two-color stamp, but it just didn’t look good. So after too many days of fiddling around in Photoshop, I finally went with just the gold dome.

The result won’t even make it into the Guild of Book Workers Best of Late November awards. Sigh.

WWLWHD? What would you have done?

Yay! I just received fellow DrawMonaut Elizabeth Perry’s selected days: 2005,

and not only am I looking forward to poring over the content, but also I’m very glad to have satisfied my curiosity about the printing. Because selected days is printed by online POD outfit Lulu.com, and I was very interested in seeing what the quality would be like.
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Man, oh, man. Sheila (”my” Sheila?) just pointed Cooper Renner to a page of book bindings at A Caballo Artes del Libro, who got them from the Guild of Book Workers 100th Anniversary Exhibition site.

The Billy Budd one. By Jerilyn Glenn Davis. I’m in love with it.

Farmers by Sarah Creighton is also very nice.

Claudia Cohen’s Schriftgiesserei im Schattenbild.
To Remember Ray Frederick Coyle, by Jeannie Sack.
Livre D’Amour, by Peter Geraty.
De la Dominoterie à la Murbrure, by Joanne Margretha Sonnichsen.
Spaces, by Catherine Stanescu.

The page is still loading, and I think I’m hyperventilating . . .

(And I’m now even more disappointed by the staid case stamp I just did for a gift edition of one of our books. BO-ring!)

I’m procrastinating on two (already overdue—why rush?) freelance projects by catching up on reading teh entire intarweb. It was thus that I saw Ampersand Duck’s two fascinating, awesome, very thoroughly illustrated posts about rebinding a beat-up Georgette Heyer novel: part 1, part 2. So. Very. Cool.

Mistress Duck lives in Canberra, Australia, so if my visitor logs are correct, most of us can’t go take a class with her teacher, who sounds like a treasure. But if you’re in New York, the Center for Book Arts offers tons of delicious-sounding classes. Those near Boston can go to the Massachusetts College of Art , and you Bay Areans can go to the San Francisco Center for the Book. I’m planning to take French at FIAF this fall, but maybe in the spring I’ll try to get into Bookbinding I.