It has been a difficult year. 80% of my life has come to a full stop. But it has been a big help to my sanity that the binding studio is at the end of my garden and so I can work there safely.
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Just before lockdown, I was able to travel to Harrogate where I met the family of a bookbinder who had died and left a garage full of equipment. I was treated with much kindness as I spent a day looking through an Aladdin's cave of extraordinary objects and materials that represented a lifetime in bookbinding. My wife had generously volunteered to drive me there but we had to limit ourselves to what we could fit in a car. There was a treasure trove of old paper sheets - something I am always looking for because it is so hard to match antiquarian paper when restoring older books. And there were a lot of sheets of glazed, marbled paper in the victorian style. These are the closest I have seen to the original 19th century designs. Nobody knows where this binder had got the paper. There was also a heated leather embossing machine for applying gold lettering and designs to spine labels. If you look at my Tools of the Trade page, you will see that I have such a machine, but this one would extend what I could do. I made an offer for everything I could take with me which was accepted. As we left these lovely people kept trying to fit more and more into the car until it was packed tight.
The new leather embosser. A lot of restoration was required but it is up and running nicely now. It can apply a great deal of pressure, more than my other heated press.
I now have a large collection of engraved gilding wheels, which are heated and used to emboss continuous gold designs on the spines and boards of leather bindings. This is one of four boxes that I have.
Most of them have been made specially for me by the wonderful Kevin Noakes, a true craftsman. These three are new arrivals and I haven't had a chance to use them on a binding yet. My intention is to use them to decorate wide raised bands.
I've tried them out on a piece of waste leather. As you can see the designs are quite elaborate. The quality of Kevin's work on these wheels is extraordinary.
Back to actual binding projects: a client had an unbound copy of À rebours by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, and I bound it in an Art Deco style, simple geometric shapes. The client chose the marbled paper and I would have made the same choice.
The hand-coloured title page is a thing of beauty. And the book is full of beautiful engravings.
This is a two volume set of Hudibras from 1835 that I have just finished. The simple 19th century spine design is essentially a dry-run for something I have been planning for a while. The marbled paper is part of the batch that I bought in Harrogate before lockdown.
The edition is not a rare one but I was surprised to find that it was extra-illustrated with a great many hand-coloured engravings representing politicians and other characters from the book, all bound in at the time of the book's publication and each one at the appropriate point in the narrative.
I realise that there is a lot of dark green leather being used by me doing the lock-down. It's my favourite colour of leather, and I make no apology for binging on it in these difficult times! It starts out olive green in colour and then I dye it to a darker green and polish it.
As you will have seen from the Tools of the Trade page, I have a 1st edition/very early issue Pickwick Papers that I have been meaning to bind for some time. I have finally had time to get down to it. Here it is before binding, on the top of the left hand pile.
And here it is with the binding finished. After my dummy run on the Hudibras set, I felt confident that this design would work well. The book is important to me so I wanted to feel secure when it came to the gilding, an exciting, but daunting part of the process.
The marbled paper design will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever seen 19th century bindings. Again this paper comes from that Aladdin's cave in Harrogate. It is a closer match than I have seen before.
For the Dickens 1st edition nerds out there: here is the pub sign showing Veller, instead of Weller, and the footstool with four stripes only. Signs of the very earliest edition. The book is also in lovely condition.
While clearing out my mother's flat, I came across a battered and disbound edition of the Anatomy of Melancholy from 1845 which had belonged to my father. Although it is not intrinsically valuable I remember seeing it around the house when I was growing up so I wanted to preserve it. I gave it an elaborate binding, and even read some of it. In between the pseudo-science it still shows a very good grasp of what depression is and the various forms it can take.
I used the classic marbled paper on the outside of the boards and on the paste-downs, where it had to be backed with antiquarian paper.
A client asked me to bind a three-volume sets of Master Humphrey's Clock, a less well-known serialised book by Dickens. I used the same sort of design as I did for the Anatomy of Melancholy. Master Humphrey's Clock was published in a serialised form between 1840 and 1841. There is a lot of social chat in the book but it does also contain two of Dickens' short novels: The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.
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Martin Feinstein, bookbinder
