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Leathersellers’ Review 2024–2025
F
rom their Deptford studio, a space run by social enterprise Cockpit, Sim Orme is looking back at how they became a bookbinder. It’s a career trajectory that began at Camberwell College of Art, and “Well, I think…” Orme starts, then pauses. “OK, so, the trashy story is that basically I had a bit too much fun on my [arts] foundation year and I didn’t quite get into the courses I wanted to. There was a rumour going around that the Book Arts course [at London College of Communication] was super easy to get on – and that was where I ended up.” For Orme, though, a craft struck upon by happenstance has become an enduring passion – one that has encompassed roles at London binderies, creating books for major artists and galleries; led to time spent at the Royal Bindery at Windsor Castle; and enabled learning of traditional techniques such as edge gilding and gold tooling. Orme’s current projects include a “one-off compendium of the Buried Zine, a publication that explores heavy metal music” and a “book with photographer and musician Marie Roux, whose current work is a personal survey of different gardening practices.” The craft of book construction – binding sheets of paper with needles and thread, then enclosing them in a cover – is believed to date back to the 1st century AD. Early surviving examples include the 7th century St Cuthbert Gospel at the British Library, clad in tooled red goatskin, and the texts of the Egyptian Nag Hammadi Library, generally dated to the 4th–5th centuries and housed in Cairo’s Coptic Museum. But it was after German craftsman Johannes Gutenberg built the first known mechanised printing press around 1440 that bookbinding boomed and leather covers became a creative canvas for decorative processes such as tooling and stamping. Today, of course, the vast majority of books that pass through our hands are mass-manufactured, glued rather than stitched together, and covered in cardboard rather than bound in leather. “There’s no need now for industrial bookbinders, so it’s more of a craft activity — even shifting towards being an art form,” says Tom McEwan, who set up his own bindery in Irvine, on the west coast of Scotland, in 2013. “There’s always new materials coming along and new structures being devised, so bookbinding has become quite fluid, almost dynamic.” Heritage Crafts, a UK-based charity set up to support and safeguard traditional craft skills, deems bookbinding to be “currently viable.” This means that it has sufficient numbers of practitioners to transmit its traditional skills to the next generation, unlike those considered “endangered” or “critically endangered” such as the related craft of fore-edge painting — creating an image on the book’s exposed page edges. In the UK, the craft is also supported by two active guilds: the Society of Bookbinders and the Society of Designer Bookbinders.
“There’s no need now for industrial bookbinders, so it’s more of a craft activity — even shifting towards being an art form…”
Left and above: Sim Orme in their studio
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