Bookbinding: An Endangered Craft

The Company continues to support the endangered craft of hand bookbinding by commissioning fine bindings from established bookbinders and by fundingprizes in the Open Choice category of the Designer Bookbinders’ Annual Competition. The Company also continues to fund and support The Queen’s Bindery Apprenticeship Scheme, now in its second year of taking apprentices.

The Open Choice category of the Annual Bookbinding Competition is where craftspeople choose their own titles to bind. First prize in 2017 was awarded to Richard Beadsmoore for The Book I’ve Read Before by Charles R. Ballard (1890, reprinted 1972). It is poem about the joy of returning to a favourite book instead of the countless new ones vying for attention, so the design plays with the idea of the circular ousting the linear. The cover is stone veneer, the staples 18ct gold, and there is gold and palladium (a soft silver-white metal similar to platinum) tooling. Second prize went to Tracey Bush for Dusk (2016), a limited edition artist’s book. Through seven hand-cut wreaths, one can glimpse large British Moths printed from original drawings by the binder. It is sewn together in a double concertina, 160 cm in length, and bound in black Lokta (handmade Nepalese paper) screen-printed boards.

Richard Beadsmoore's award-winning binding, with stone veneer and gold staples.

Tracey Bush's delicate design, which won second place.

Two new bindings were commissioned from leading bookbinders during 2017,and two bindings from our rolling programme of commissions have beenreceived recently.

Jenni Grey's mixed-media bookbinding, resting on its custom display stand.

Photography by Anthony Belfield.

Jenni Grey completed her second commission for us, a beautifullydesigned and illustrated book examining Chris Ofili’s artisticdevelopment, written in 2009. To reflect the unsettling quality ofOfili’s work discussed in the book, Jenni chose taxidermy eyes. Her useof glass seed beads echoes the way Ofili uses mapping pins, and herdesign stemmed from the idea of interlaced fingers of pale and darkskinned hands. The boards are covered in grey linen to enhance thebrightness of the lime green beads. The spine is cherry wood, covered inlizard skin with acrylic end caps; the box, which doubles as anexhibition stand, is constructed in stained tulipwood and dyed ashveneer.

The evocative bookbinding and box by Julian Thomas.

Julian Thomas MBE, former Head of the Conservation Section at the National Library of Wales, has created a suitably macabre design for The Great Plague: A People’s History by Evelyn Lord (2014), also with an accompanying box. His preparatory work and drawings illustrate his reactions to the vivid descriptions in the book. His overarching emotion was of an oppressive and threatening blackness from above, hanging over everything, conveyed by colouring the upper half of the goatskin cover black, graduating to dark red at the bottom. The crosses refer to both the holy cross and the warnings painted on the doors of plague-affected houses, with the bumpy embossed grain of the leather used for the binding acting as a reminder of the buboes associated with bubonic plague.