What Is This Blog?

I recently made a major switch in hosts for this blog because I was looking for a more seamless way including videos within it and I wanted to start an account that was exclusively THB (The Harrington Bindery) related things. It brought up some of the questions that still linger for me about my motivations.

The basis of this blog is rooted within my frustrations of learning the craft of bookbinding without having a master to teach me. I started to teach myself over a decade prior as a means of making containers for the photographs I had taken, the ones that gave me a voice and I had become so attached to. When I was just beginning a friend of my older brother's had recently graduated from Pratt and come back to our home town. In her education she learned about the craft of bookbinding. We met and over many successive weeks she taught me the methods she knew and gave me my first book on bookbinding:  The Craft of Bookbinding by Manly Banister. And while we spent many hours giggling over his name; his book was solid, descriptive and easy to follow.


Through the years it hasn't been easy learning new styles and techniques, the most reliable source of information is still tied up in book form. I took classes where and when I could fit them in to my schedule and neither my undergrad or grad schools offered any classes in bookbinding. When I was able to take some classes I ended up with instructors that couldn't answer the questions I needed, they had knowledge of the craft but not necessary understanding. By default I developed a brute force bench learning technique, trying structures again and again modifying certain elements slowly to see how they effect the final book. I supplemented this when I could afford it with purchased books on bookbinding but for the most part my main source was (and still is) the Internet.
So what is this? Its my attempt to not complain about the lack of good book binding information on the Internet and instead do something about it. Its a journal of technique and craft, successes and major failures. Its about loving paper and books, and trying to start a small bindery in my free time.

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