38
39
Leathersellers’ Review 2024–2025
Heritage Crafts highlights the lack of training facilities across the UK as “a very real concern” for bookbinding. “Where there were once college courses with well-trained teachers from professional backgrounds, these have now mostly closed down,” it states. “Apprenticeships, traineeships and internships are few and far between.”
Tom McEwan leads a workshop in partnership with Designer Bookbinders at his studio in West Kilbride
Sim Orme’s binding of Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Bookbinders create a unique binding for each of the six shortlisted works of fiction. In 2023 McEwan’s binding of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (that year’s winner) featured an abstract, geometric design in turquoise and deep blues, in hand-dyed goatskin, embellished with foil and carbon tooling, with transfer-printed edges. “There were some very tense, explosive — literally — incidents in [the story], so the design I came up with reflected that element,” he says. In terms of decoration, “There’s so many different techniques you can use,” says Orme. “You can do onlays, inlays, you can sculpt the leather, then you’ve got all the gold tooling — a really old method to create an embossed cover.” The result is a so-called “fine binding”, made to the highest levels of hand craft. A single book can take four to six weeks from start to finish, suggests McEwan. Orme concurs: “It’s such a lengthy process — it takes forever.” Similarly, Orme’s route to becoming a bookbinder was a “very long process over about ten years,” and while the available Book Arts degree course was creatively wide- ranging — their final project included a “leaflet/pamphlet”, an “origami tessellation” and a “kind of meta” wire-bound
book — it wasn’t grounded in the training required to enter bookbinding as trade. Orme learnt this via roles at a number of binderies, from London’s Wyvern Bindery and Bookworks to George Bayntun in Bath, together with the Queen’s Bindery Apprenticeship Scheme at Windsor Castle (a scheme that has since ended). More recently, a grant from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) was a turning point. “I’ve been able to learn from bookbinders around Europe and the UK to really hone my skills towards fine-binding – including gold tooling in Paris, gilded edges in Wales, and geometric box-making in Ascona.” When we speak, Orme is about to head to Rimini, Italy to work alongside bookbinder Luigi Castiglione for a week, practising full leather binding. In London, the place at Cockpit is supported by a Leathersellers’ Award and has enabled the establishment of Orme’s own atelier, SO Studio. “These grants have all been instrumental to my education and growth in bookbinding, which otherwise is almost unattainable in the UK,” says Orme. “There’s so many bookbinding jobs being advertised out there, but there’s a lack of bookbinders in England at the moment.”
“There’s certainly still plenty of people working in bookbinding either professionally or at a hobby level across the UK,” says McEwan, who has experienced first-hand the contraction of a craft industry. After studying sculpture at Glasgow School of Art he became a die-sinker, a job that involved hand engraving on to metal to make intricate moulds. “I did that for 20 years but new computer-controlled technology came in and gradually took more and more work away from me,” he recalls. He retrained in bookbinding. McEwan refers to his preferred way of working as “design bookbinding”: taking apart an existing book — “it could be newly published or from a few hundred years ago” — and then “responding to it in an artistic way,” he explains. The book is re-sewn, the spine can be shaped and the page edges can be trimmed and decorated, often with gold leaf finish, but “there’s also ways of printing onto the edge of a book”. The cover, meanwhile, is generally leather, often goat skin or calf skin, which McEwan buys in its natural form “so I can dye it to the exact colour and tone I want it to be.” One high-profile commission McEwan has worked on is the Booker Prize; every year Fellows of the Society of Designer
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator