A Bit More About Books and Binding

A bit more about the bookbinding course we took yesterday… Dominic Riley’s workshop is in the Lake District, not too far from where William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived for a while. Dominic was asked by the Wordsworth Trust to restore some of his notebooks. Wordsworth was editor of the local paper and had access to all kinds of machinery for binding, but after taking them apart, it was clear that the notebooks had been made at home: they were rough-cut, had no formal backing, and didn’t need a press. They were super-sturdy, though: they open flat and can take a lot of pounding in the constant drizzle. The Ideal Sketchbook.

Who knows if these books were made by Dorothy on their kitchen table? Dominic suspects they were: in his words, “Wordsworth didn’t seem to do much.” He and Dorothy walked, though. (The results of one of these walks was a poem called the Leech Gatherer, about which Seamus Heaney has much to say, and which has put me in a slightly more charitable frame of mind toward the Lake District Luminary, but I’m still betting he wasn’t sewing signatures on tapes at the kitchen table.)

Running between the I-80 traffic and the wedding I found in the bottom of a drawer the first sewn book I ever made, sometime in the early 1990s in Cambridge, Mass. I took it with us to the wedding and used it to record blessings offered, at the request of the now newlyweds. I filled it. I can’t imagine a better use for this book…