Designer Bookbinders is a prominent society devoted to development of the bookbinding craft. Every year The Bookbinding Competition takes place. This year’s Competition results were announced last Friday, November 11th.
In celebration of Archives Month Smithsonian Institution Archives has posted two videos showing how old and sometimes fragile books are being digitized to allow wider public to access them on the web site.
I’ve decided to make a follow up to the previous post. I wrote that sometimes it is hard for me to set a “fair price” on my bookbinding and book repair work, while I understand that bookbinding is a very special sort of work that shouldn’t be undervalued.
A recent discussion at the Facebook account of Huhu Hu (a bookbinder from Quzhou, China) has made me to analyze myself and to think about how I interact with my clients. It all started as a call for a bit of advice on repairs and restoration of a cloth-covered book (you should probably read that too), but soon we were talking about the rates and prices for bookbinding services.
iBookBinding.com is launching a campaign at Patreon. This platform allows people to support makers, bloggers and other creative people with regular donations (small or large, you choose).
Check the Awagami Factory Facebook account for more interesting videos after watching the video below! =)
I know that methylcellulose is often used in paper and cloth conservation processes. I also know that a PVA-mix with methylcellulose is in use by bookbinders — that mix allows lengthening of the time of drying of the PVA glue. I’ve even used the mix myself while I was studying at the American Academy of Bookbinding. However, since the time of my study I still haven’t bought any methylcellulose here in Moscow.
One of the things I’d like to add to my bookbinding schedule is a course on the Medieval bookbinding styles: Carolingian, Romanesque, Gothic, etc. Even girdle books, I suppose.
I’ve been selling this simple sewing frame for almost two years now. Initially it was even simpler. I wanted to have a cheap and fast in production sewing frame to give to my students at Bookbinding 101 class. Production cost for the version 0.1 was $15-20.
Book Title: Francisci a Mesgnien Meninski LEXICI Arabico Persico – Tvrcici (Tomus Qvartvs)
I love my students. They are smart. They are creative and inventive. They listen (and do not listen) and they always try to do their best. Yesterday I had another wonderful class, and I’m in a wonderful mood once again =)
My bookbinding workshop now is located in the same room with my woodworking workshop. This offers some benefits and has its drawbacks. The one major problem is omnipresent wood dust. It is the reason I want to make map cabinets for my bookbinding materials as soon as possible.
I have to confess to a strange experience that happened to me lately. I’ve been making a portfolio folder for a new client recently. Everything was fine. Folder was covered with bookbinding cloth and a layer of paper over the cloth.
This is just a fast update on how the iBookBinding.com looks like. I had to make some changes to WordPress and installed plugins lately. These changes were due very long ago, but as it always happens to be, when you start with some small updates, a working day later you find out that you have to change almost everything.
Check this video. Narration is in Chinese, however, the footage is almost self-explanatory.
