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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.” In the 1990s Victoria Stevens got her start in bookbinding with an “old-fashioned apprenticeship” with a trade bookbinder in Dorset, followed by a qualification in Book Arts (Bookbinding) from the London College of Printing, a course that closed in the early 2000s. She used them to move sideways into book conservation — preserving books rather than making or remaking them — first at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, then in Oxford College collections. She has worked on books, archives and manuscripts such as Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, T.E. Lawrence’s undergraduate thesis and Jane Austen first editions. “The people who have created, used, and possibly abused an object is as interesting to me as the actual form,” she says. “Keeping that human element in a book is really the thing I’ve come to appreciate.” For the past year, Stevens has been the subject leader tutor for books and library materials at West Dean, a college specialising in arts, craft, design and conservation, with sites in West Sussex and London. As well as offering heritage conservation studies up to MA level, in 2023 it added a two- year Foundation Degree focused on teaching traditional hand bookbinding skills. The students graduating this year can go on to specialise in conservation, through a Graduate Diploma, or continue with bookbinding through an additional top-up year to gain a BA qualification. “That’s where you really start exploring your creative, design side of your book binding,” says Stevens. “It’s very unusual; I don’t think there’s another full- time bookbinding course in the country.” At West Dean, where the courses are being bolstered by donations of surplus leather through the Leathersellers’
Left and above: Bookbinding students at West Dean
“I really want people to see this not as a hobby, it’s not a chichi little crafty thing, it’s a true profession to which you can add your personality, your ability to create, your imagination.”
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