BOOKS

A LEAF OUT OF THEIR BOOKS

Pure love for books and the art of bookmaking is the driving force behind bookbinder Glen Calleja and publisher Zvezdan Reljic. Veronica Stivala falls in love as she reads between the lines.

So, what makes a book?

Glen Calleja

Bookbinder & founder, Kotba Calleja

Is it the pages between two covers? Is it text or pictures or just paper? It was these questions that set bookbinder Glen Calleja on his journey of bookbinding. “I loved books and alternative book structures and poetry, the weirder, the sexier to my eyes,” he muses. He admits to at one point being curious, “perhaps a little pedantically obsessed by ‘what makes a book?’” The book, he notes, is a powerful symbol of authority and power, a political symbol that one can wield for all sorts of ends and purposes. You can also use it to validate morally dubious choices and injustices. “I wanted to engage with it and see where it takes me,” he asserts.

Calleja found a teacher: Ms Lori Sauer, who runs thebinding redefinedcourses in the UK and started learning the basics of traditional bookbinding with the aim to deconstruct the book, “for if you can make a book you can also dismantle it and therefore, be able to conduct autopsies of the power they represent”.

This passion grew into a fully-fledged business some five years ago, and Kotba Calleja is now synonymous with bespoke and unique books and paper products.

At the heart of Kotba Calleja’s identity lies the pride it takes in experimenting with contemporary materials and design principles while using age-old techniques. They use traditional skills in tandem with modern binding solutions. What does that mean? To Glen, that often means that the book is treated as a platform for thinking rather than a container of knowledge. “The book structure speaks about itself; a metastructure as it were. If it’s a sewn book, then it shows the sewing on the outside, just to give you a little example,” he explicates.

This, he confides, doesn’t mean that exposing the sewing is anything new to the world of traditional bookbinding, far from it. Using a technique to create a reflection about the book’s structure itself is, however, a more contemporary conceptual preoccupation. It’s another facet of his interest in deconstructing the book structure as a locus of power. Furthermore, mixing contrasting materials, say organic paper with acrylic rods as spine supports, gives the book a bold new identity that wouldn’t have been possible a few decades ago.

Kotba Calleja’s portfolio features a wide variety of books from journals with a cloth and patterned paper covers, a hardcover journal with collaged wooden covers, a pamphlet journal with handmade paper covers and exposed sewing to a photo book with a cloth spine, to name just a few. Speaking about the binding process, Calleja reveals how some elements of the process are always the same. The more ambitious projects may involve considerable technical challenges, and such projects come with severe labour pains which, by time, one learns to expect and accept. The process starts by looking at what the book is intended for, who will be using it and where it will be used. From there on, they decide on the structure and create a few designs on paper.

I loved books and alternative book structures and poetry: the weirder, the sexier to my eyes

It comes as no surprise that no one project is the same, but Calleja generally tries to commit for three to four weeks for conventional book structures. For some others, the process is more open. It can take several months, especially when sourcing unusual materials that may need to be imported from abroad or encounter unexpected challenges in the prototyping process.

Does Glen have any books he is incredibly proud of?That’s a secret, he discloses bemusedly. “I will tell you that my favourite book is the perfect book that I will never manage to make the book which I aspire to achieve whenever I am at my workbench.” →

The thing dreams are made of

Zvezdan Reljic

Publisher, Ede Books and Ede Artisan Books

“Paper, the thing dreams are made of.” Publisher Zvezdan Relijic has coined an apt quote for his trade. While he always starts with an initial idea, it is the paper that guides his creative process: “they show you how they take ink, how they fold, which glue they like, how they pierce, which thread... ideas just start coming as if the paper is teaching you...”

Ede Artisan Books is a sub-branch of Ede Books, a small local publishing house. Ede Artisan Books are small handmade editions of books and are, in Reljic’s words, “a testament to Ede Books’ continued commitment to craft, or traditional printing and bookbinding”.

The idea for these books came about during a Covid-imposed quarantine, while Zvezdan was engaged in daily online correspondence with authors who had already collaborated with Ede Books and was getting in touch with others who started sharing short stories and poems online. “Publishing, like many other industries, was stalled because of the pandemic and is still in a terrible situation, so the urge to start something new was the only way forward,” he confides.

To quote the publisher, “Ede Artisan Books are not just stitched, bound and trimmed by hand, but are made with by-products of fruits and nuts. These natural raw materials are saved from landfill and used to make these distinctive papers.” For this, Zvezdan adds, he has Chris Galea to thank, his paper supplier at Arrowswift, who always has some very distinctive paper on offer. “He showed me some samples of these beautiful paper types, and that was it for me.”

Zvezdan graduated from the Graphic Arts School in Belgrade long before computers started being used in publishing. They had a printing house as a part of the campus, so in four years they had to go through all the relevant stages and departments, from prepress to finishing… and bookbinding was one of them. During these years, Relijic also learned to print on offset presses, and after college, he worked as an offset printer for a few years.

They show you how they take ink, how they fold, which glue they like... ideas just start coming as if the paper is teaching you

Silkscreen printing then became his immense love, and he set up a small silk screen printing venture. A semi-automatic machine and a darkroom served as his office for several years before leaving the country for Malta.

Technically, his diploma states, ‘Reproduction Photographer’—a job quite close to the occupation of ‘litho-film planner’, which is a pre-press job that has since become obsolete with the advent of computer-toplate technology and PDFs. It was Reljic’s job in Malta in the early 90s, before the industry made the complete switch to desktop publishing.

Speaking about the process of making handmade books, Reljic reveals how every single book is different. “The common thing is that you have preparation, printing and binding/finishing. Any of these three parts can take from a day to weeks—it all depends on what you are making.”

For the small artisan books, when the inside pages are printed (if they are text-based he prints them on his laser printer), he folds spreads one by one into sections; same with the cover, which needs to be folded separately. He then sews them with a needle together and trims every book with a scalpel on three sides. “Every part is important.”

Does he have any books he is incredibly proud of? “I love them all,” he reveals, adding that “I mostly notice the things that don't come out ‘perfectly’ and that bugs me, but realising that people love them—particularly the ‘nonperfect’ ones—really feels good.”

Veronica is a freelance writer and editor. She won the IGM Award for her work on Ethical and Positive Disability in 2016.