Current Projects

This week saw the completion of a long term project for an illustrator friend of mine (pictures etc. to come soon). Now, reinvigorated, I have started work on a design that I have been turning over in my head for a couple years now. A small, pocketable, hard wearing, hand bound notebook. A book that is created without compromise, where the best materials and best techniques meet.


First, I choose parchment for the cover material. Though not necessarily a familiar material for me it offered many seductive promises, archival, reliable, indestructible. The more I read the more I realize that a great number of medieval books that have survived intact are covered in the material. It offers warmth and richness while being hard and durable. Plasticity while containing an attitude, indomitable will. Working with it has been a pleasure, stone that can be made mailable with moisture then desiccated back to stone once again.

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Why I Love the K-118 Binding Structure

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The K-118 binding structure is a hand bookbinding technique that I started experimenting with about a year ago. It promises reliable, easily opened books without 'Backing' the mechanical folding of sections of pages onto themselves at the spine. It uses oversized parchment spine liners that are glued, worked into the spine and subsequently interlaced with beveled cover boards. I find that at this point in the process (as shown) the book is very stable, the last picture above is an early example of this binding style I attempted, put aside, then promptly forgot about only to rediscover it last weekend - a year later. This is due in part to the fact that all of the structural components of the book are already in place. To say it a different way, the covering material is not counted on to be structural, though I have found that particularly thick leathers (4 oz+) will undoubtedly impede the opening slightly. Is it an exaggeration to love the K-118 style? For me, I don...
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