Apologies!

I realise it is well over a year since my last post, for which I should apologise. But the truth is that nothing much has happened in my bindery recently that merits broadcasting to the world. Still plenty of work, I’m pleased to say, but all of it has been the usual ‘bread-and-butter’ stuff: cloth or leather re-backs, slip cases and the occasional fitted box or treasured family bible. A recent unwelcome arrival is the two volume ‘Imperial Shakspere’ (sic) weighing in at about 10 kilos and with three of the four boards detached.

I’ll use the method set out in the ‘When big is definitely not beautiful’ post.

However, one recent job is perhaps worth describing: an existing customer decided she would like her copy of the little Tauchnitz edition of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ rebound in full leather, leaving the design to me. I thought about it and settled on a simple, naive semi-pictorial design that could have been produced by a prisoner in the prison workshop, utilising the line in the poem ‘that little tent of blue that prisoners call the sky’.

I sent it off and there was a longish silence. I checked she had got it. Yes, but she really didn’t like it. I mean, REALLY.

So I asked her to send it back and I took the covers off, rebound the book in classic late nineteenth century gilt and returned it to her.

Then I bought another copy of the same edition and put my covers on it. It lives on the shelf of my own bindings. And I love it!