The Harrington Bindery

I determined that a Springback album I was making for the carpenter wasn't going to work. At all. But thats okay. After this was determined I was able to pull off the covers, spring, and spine linings.  See that Here.  What I was left with was the sewn block that had an exaggerated round with no swell and also sewn in end bands.  I chose the Springback structure for this project because of its inherent ability to throw the pages out and allow them to lie flat with full access to the gutter. It is able to accomplish this without forgoing spine liners, hard covers or other design and strength elements that I wanted or needed to include for a pair of books this size. Part way through this project I read an article about the K-118 structure and further research led me to write  a bit about it and start sewing together a text I had to serve as my introduction to the style. What struck me about the K-118 structure originally, besides its natural flexibilit...

A project I have been working on over the winter and coming into the spring is a set (pair?) of books, one a sketchbook and one an album. The pieces are part of a trade I set up with a good friend and master carpenter in exchange for a proper bench in which to bind books on. The idea at first to was have a twin set matching in style and decoration. The two were worked in almost parallel but the sketchbook was the first to be ready for covering material and besides a necessary modification of the spring, you can see it here. It caused no issues and functioned pretty close to what I expected. The album is made from the same one hundred percent cotton paper as the sketchbook. Its construction features the use of loose guards sewn alternating with the full folios in a ratio of 3:2. The intention to create a spring back led me to sew the pages to four stations of double 1/2" linen tapes. Once the sewing was complete the levers were formed with card stock, paper and the sewing suppo...

I made this small spring back travel journal on commission as a gift for an incredible photographer / visual artist. Her long time assistant approached me awhile back and asked several times for me to make this piece. Its pages are 24lb Mohawk Superfine and its covered in a beautiful piece of alum tawd goat. I was able to find a turn of the centenary map of Brooklyn and located both the home and studio of the artist's and worked the map in as the end papers of the book. No matter how far she goes she will have a piece of home with her.

I have been working on a logo because I really want something that can be stamped in or on finished books. This is a vector I created from a photograph of a spring back book I made in the late fall last year.

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...

Hand sewn linen thread endbands on single layer parchment cores. I now love parchment for this purpose because it is very hard wearing while remaining very flexible. 

The thought of re-using newsprint wasn't something that came to me naturally. For me the cost was low enough, supply easy enough to come by and the city offers a very easy and reasonable recycling program. But, as I often do, I took a class. Tireless comparison of their and my own working practices usually offers a few key revelations. It was here that the idea of simply recycling all that newsprint got called into question 'just let it dry and use it again'. I don't dismiss an idea because I had never done it that way before nor do I embrace an idea because that's 'how its done'. However I gave it a shot, and the results were disastrous.  I use straight PVA, straight Methylcellulose, straight wheat paste and a variety of different strength mixes of the three. In the end some combination of moisture and pressure had reactivated the dry adhesive residues and caused the newsprint to be nearly permanently adhered into the book. After hours ...