The Harrington Bindery

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 m...

Recently I took up a project for a carpenter friend of mine that includes a matched set of books. One will be used as his personal sketchbook, the other a portfolio. As I was working on the design and layout of the portfolio I realized I didn't have a very good method for making guards consistently. ( side note, the method described below is one I came up with organically by working at my bench. Considering the ease in which it makes perfectly sized guards I'd be surprised if I was the first to come up with it but I wasn't able to find any other instructions online to describe the technique I employed.) Tools needed: Knife - olfa, x acto or sharpened bench knife Slightly sharpened bone folder Steel rule set - I found them to be an indispensable tool here. Cutting mat The basic idea is that three dividers/rulers can be used so that no manual measuring and marking will be needed in the making of the guards. In this example I am making ½” guards; strips ...