It surprises me how fast these two years have passed since my wife and I have bought iBookBinding.com. So many things are done and even more things remain on different stages of planning and implementation. Its a great pleasure to work on that project and to have this connection with a passionate and diverse community of bookbinders from all over the world.
“Every book has a biological story to tell. Pigment, DNA, proteins, microbes. Much more than what is written on the page. The big question is with Ancient books—rare and delicate objects—how do we access this buffet of boilogical clues, without damaging them?”
So, my wife is on a business trip to London this week. It is mostly 10-hour shifts of controlling marketing research projects, but she will have some free time on Friday and on the weekend. And I’d like her to bring me back some nice bookbinding souvenir!
There are many different steps involved in the book restoration process. Some of them are about doing something with the book, during others specialists are cataloging and preserving information about the book for future use and research.
This month we retutrn with a new collection of links to beautiful bookbinding-themed Facebook accounts.
Illuminated manuscripts have lots of different creatures depicted on the margins. Some of them are real, others are not. One would be ready to find a knight fighting a dragon on the margins of a Medieval book. Knight fighting a snail? That’s some else!
This January in the capital city of Estonia Alexander Vasin and Natalia Velchinskaya have produced a new course – Tallinn Laboratoria. Alexander and Natalia are creators of many typography and book design courses, both in Moscow and abroad. This time they’ve brought a group of students to study in a local print house Labora Tallinna Paber.
I’ve been to the Netherlands several times, but still never used my chance to visit Zaan mills. Maybe next time I would plan my trip better. This place is full of history and, by the way, there is paper production there.
I have to put a small foreword here. On my free time I watch a lot of woodworking videos. There are bookbinding channels that I follow, of course. But they do not provide as much material. And I work with wood to make the tools I sell at my Etsy shop.
Hi everyone!
I had a really busy time these past weeks. As my day job is at school, I had to attend to several exams for 9th graders.
Almost during all my classes I have to face the same problem time after time: I almost never finish the book I’m making with my students.
“Dürer, born on May 21st, 1471, produced one of the largest prints ever – the Triumphal Arch for the Holy Roman Emperor. Altogether it’s nearly 3 metres tall, and consists of 36 sheets of paper. This colossal image was printed using 195 different woodblocks and was made between 1515 and 1517.
In this behind-the-scenes video, follow the complex conservation involved in caring for this 500-year-old artwork.”
It already has been a month since I’ve started teaching kids bookbinding. We’ve covered Coptic binding, Japanese binding (I’ve told them about Chinese and Korean binding too), and long-stitch binding. This time I decided to teach them something boring. Just to understand how to cover some other topics and, especially, how to teach them separate processes of bookbinding, when a student doesn’t get a finished book at the end of a 2-hour class.
My wife and I had a weekend getaway in Armenia recently. That was a spontaneous decision, made partially because we don’t need a visa to get to the country (by the way, EU and US nationals do not need a visa to visit Armenia, this applies both for tourism and business trips). However, I couldn’t miss a chance to search for some bookish landmarks.
