A Catalogue of Treasures – part II

Having settled on a design the first step was to block the title on the front cover. I am fortunate to have an old Mackay blocking press, acquired at the auction of the contents of the bindery of a retiring bookbinder in Hereford more than 20 years ago. Not only does it have a large ‘chase’ (the frame in which letters or blocks are held for impressing on leather or cloth covers) but the ‘head’ can be raised or lowered to accommodate a variety of thicknesses of book.

I have some 36-point Times Roman brass type which fills the width of the design nicely so with that stamped through gold foil the rest of the design can be set out:

starting with the curved lines. The position of each is marked with the point of a bone folder through the paper design. The complete shape looks pretty good. Then the small tools can be added before the important flower head tooling.

But that presented a problem as the chosen tool was too detailed to make a clear impression on grainy morocco leather:

A possible alternative tool, bottom left of the picture above, is just too wide to fit in to the framework of curved lines. So the best available tool was used – one has to be prepared to adapt designs in the light of both the tools available and the characteristics of the materials used. Another adaptation was to leave out the short straight lines around the edge of the design – I decided they just were not necessary. So the final result is this:

And it goes on the shelf next to the Cobden-Sanderson binding shown in the first part.