This blog post is about the second of two speculative bindings I made for an exhibition that took place at the National Library of Scotland during August this year. The binding is a miniature book titled A Dream of Wings, which contains a succinct write-up about The Wright brothers who were American aviation pioneers celebrated for inventing, building, and successfully flying the world’s first engine-powered, heavier-than-air airplane.
I have been a Fellow of Designer Bookbinders since 2023. Recently, the society presented Festival Bindings, an exhibition showcasing new and recent works by both Fellows and Licentiates. The display featured handcrafted pieces from 32 bookbinders, most of which were available for purchase. The event ran from 10th – 29th August 2026, coinciding with the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the Edinburgh Book Fair. The other of the two books I presented was copy of, The Songs and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, of which I have already written a two-part blog post detailing how that binding was made which you can start reading here.
The exhibition itself took place in the former boardroom at the National Library of Scotland’s main building in Edinburgh, which is now used as a lecture hall and temporary exhibition space. The room is located on the ground floor, to the left of the main entrance hall, opposite a permanent exhibition and two galleries holding temporary exhibitions.
The permanent exhibition space is called Treasures which displays a diverse collection of rare early printed books, medieval manuscripts, maps, video installations, letters, and historic passports. It also has a copy of The Gutenberg Bible, which is one of only around 20 complete surviving copies in the world. Printed around 1455 in Mainz, Germany, by Johannes Gutenberg, it is the first major book in Europe printed with moveable type.
I purchased The Dream of Wings miniature book online a couple of years ago, and it has since been awaiting its turn for a custom binding. The volume explores the lives of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the American aviation pioneers credited with inventing, building, and piloting the world’s first successful motorised airplane. On December 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, they achieved the first controlled and sustained flight in history.
The text brings their ingenious contraptions to life, detailing the arduous journey toward a functional flying machine – a quest marked by the rise and fall of aeronautical societies, celebrated successes, and hard-won lessons. The author, Tom D. Crouch, is a renowned aeronautics historian and curator who has published numerous books and articles focused on the history of flight technology.
The original book was a case binding, bound in marble-effect printed paper with a gilt aeropolane on the front cover.
The book was easy to pull, and I opted not to reuse the marbled endpapers in the new binding.
Instead, I patterned the papers using blue printing ink and a hard roller, selecting a shade to match the blue leather intended for the new binding’s cover. By applying the roller in multiple directions, I achieved a layered effect that I found particularly pleasing.
The book is all about the Wright brothers and their flying machine, so I decided to create the design as if the cover was part of a blueprint of the aeroplane. The 1903 Wright Flyer was made from wood and fabric with a 12-horsepower gasoline engine. It was designed for control, featuring a 40-foot wingspan, spruce wood frame, and wing-warping for roll control.
I first worked on a sample board for the design, made smaller than my standard boards so that it better matched the format of the miniature binding’s cover. I embroidered outline of the aeroplane they built, simply in white thread on blue leather to match the appearance of a blueprint. A blueprint is a detailed technical drawing or photographic print that maps out an architectural, engineering, or industrial design. Historically, it served as an exact, reusable copy of a master design, allowing builders and engineers to accurately manufacture parts or construct buildings.
The pattern was pricked through a tracing paper template to mark where the sewing holes needed to pass through the leather. I then used a combination of Gutermann polyester thread, and thinner gauge Seata Reale 100% silk, both in white to apply the stitching.
Miniature books are small, fully functional books, typically defined as being no more than 7.5 cm in any dimension. The bindings can feel insignificantly light and can be difficult to forward due to their small size. For this reason, I opted to rebind the sections onto a concertina stub to aid the opening of the pages, and also use brass inside the boards of the book to add a satisfying weight to the small book. Miniature books are also difficult to round and back, so this structure uses a half-round piece of dowel in the case to give the appearance of a rounded spine.
In November this year I will be teaching this structure for the first time as part of the Designer Bookbinders and Society of Bookbinders Joint Workshop Series. The subject of this workshop is a bit of a mouthful: “Miniature Case Bindings Made With Weighted Brass Boards and a False Round Spine”, but all the details are relevant to what I will be teaching during the course and the book the participants will leave with!
When asked to run a joint workshop, I suggested this structure as it is one I really enjoy doing. Although I have made quite a number of books this way now, it’s not something I have taught as a group class before, so this blog write up is the start of the preparations required for that class in November, which I will build upon over the next couple of months to create a step-by-step guide for those booked onto the course.
I found a pleasing map online of Kitty Hawk Bay, where the test flights took place, that was the inspiration for the overall colour scheme. I had some Satogami papers that well matched the palette of the map, so chose to use green, blue and yellow versions of this paper to create a concertina stub for the binding. This map was also used to decorate the doublures, which will be explained later in the blog post.
Stub binding is a bookbinding technique that involves sewing book sections to narrow, folded pieces of paper, called stubs, instead of sewing the sections directly together. While not necessary for all books, stub binding can be a good solution for various problems.
Stub bindings are the perfect solution to binding books which are printed in the wrong grain direction, books with overly thick sections, miniature books or books with illustrations that cross the gutter. The stubs allow each section to open freely and perfectly flat, also ensuring that no adhesive touches the actual book-block.
The method I used was to create a concertina, and I carefully scarf-jointed the three different papers together so that the colours changed in the valley folds. Extra single sheets of coloured paper were tipped onto the first and last sections and a guard strip around spine edge of the central section to neaten it up. The three sections were in turn sewn to this concertina using a pamphlet stitch.
After the sections were attached to the concertina, the folds on the opposite side were glued together.
I attached additional bifolios to each side of the text block and wrapped the entire text block in previously prepared patterned paper to serve as endpapers. Finally, I added a small, leather-covered endband to the spine.
I was then able to work on the case for the binding. The remainder of this blog post is presented in bullet points to outline the process involved. This serves as a foundation for a more comprehensive handout that will be provided to students in November.
1. Cut the brass to size:
– I used 0.5mm thick sheet and the panels were cut with a piercing saw to a size of 54mm (height) x 53mm (width)
2. Prepare the spine dowel (below left image):
– Cut a piece of half-round wooden dowel to the same height as the brass boards (54mm)
– The dowel measures 7mm wide at the flat side.
– The flat side of the dowel was temporarily fixed with masking tape to some strips of greyboard in a vice, to allow for the next stage to take place.
3. Add extra thickness to the wooden dowel with watercolour paper (below right image):
– The flat side of the dowel needs to be the same thickness as the boards, covering materials and text block combined, so layers of 300gsm watercolour paper were dampened and them glued onto the dowel
– Strips were cut to the same height as the piece of dowel, but wider so that they could be held with a bulldog clip whilst the glue dried.
4. Trim the overhanging watercolour paper layer flush with the flat of the dowel:
– Using a scalpel, the overhanging watercolour paper is carefully sliced off to the flat of the dowel.
5. Sand the trimmed paper to level out the flat of the wooden dowel:
– To neaten the flat of the dowel where the watercolour paper had been sliced, it was sanded.
6. Checking width of dowel before adding linen:
– It is important to keep measuring the width as layers are added using a thickness gauge
7. Cover the outside of the half round dowel with a piece of Zerkall (below left image):
– Once the desired width was achieved (in this case two layers of watercolour paper were required), the whole dowel had a layer of Zerkall paper glued around it.
8. Add a spacer for the joint (below right image):
– I cut a 1mm piece if Gemini board to the same width and length as the flat of the dowel and temporarily fixed them together with little pieces of masking tape at the ends.
– This was then affixed with maskign tape on the greyboard in the vice.
9. Adding the linen joint (below left image):
– A long piece of linen was cut to the same height as the spine dowel, and glued onto the round of the dowel using PVA glue.
– It was fixed in place with a large bulldog clip whilst it dried.
10. Joining the brass boards onto the spine dowel with linen (below right image):
– I glued some Zerkall to the outside faces of the brass using Lascaux glue, which is a type of glue that allows paper to be stuck to non-porous materials.
– I made up a false book block using pieces of board, which was placed between the brass sheets.
11. Making up the case (below three images):
– I affixed the brass board in place on the false book using a piece of masking tape.
– PVA glue was applied to the outside of the board, and the linen was rolled down onto the surface and stuck in place.
– Once dry, the excess linen was cut off at the edges of the brass boards.
12. Cutting the leather to size:
– At this point, I was able to cut the covering leather to size, which I had had split to 0.5mm in thickness.
– I could then mark on the reverse of the leather the pattern I wishes to embroider.
13. Embroidery of the leather (below two images):
– I applied the embroidery stitches to build up the design.
14. The case is ready to be covered with the embroidered leather (below two images):
– The covering leather was mitred atthe corners (this is usually something I would do ahead of the embroidery).
– Initially, the boards and spine section of the leather was glued to the case with PVA and left to dry, and the turn-ins were left unglued.
15. Working on the turn-ins (below left image):
– The long edge of the turn-ins were cut in line with the inner board joint, then glued around inside the boards.
– The short edges were also turned in, and pushed flush at the mitred corners.
16. Tiny turn-ins down the board joints (before left image):
– Little bits of leather were turned in down the spine joint and glued with PVA.
17. Turning in the leather at the head and tail of the wooden dowel:
– The turn-in materials was cut into little triangles, and glued around the rounded profile of the dowel at the head and tail.
– The overhanging leather was trimmed to meet the inner flat edge of the dowel once dry.
18. Attaching a leather joint to the text block (below left image):
– A piece of thin leather was stuck and secondary-sewn to the text block, this piece was left overlong.
19. Profiling the head and tail of the leather joint piece (below right image):
– The text block was placed in the correct position inside the case, and the rounded profile of the spine marked onto the inside of the leather joint leather.
– This was then cut to shape and carefully edge-pared.
20. Casing in (below left image):
– The text block was glued into the case using the profiled leather joint.
– The head and tail of the leather wee glued down at the ends of the wooden dowel to conceal the trianuglar turn-ins done when the case was initially covered.
– The leather joints were stuck down and mitred in against the turn-in leather at the inner board coners.
21. Infilling the inside of the boards (below right image):
– The inside of the boards were infilled with a piece of watercolour paper, followed by a piece of Zerkall that was cut slightly smaller than the size of the boards.
– The paper was sanded flush in preparation for the doublures.
22. Preparing the doublures (see below two images):
– Pieces of the coloured Satogami paper were cut to the correct shapes and glued together, with some edges overlapping, using a tracing paper template as a guide for positioning them.
23. Adding linear detail to the doublures (below left image):
– The linear detail that was present on the map was embroidered in both grey and black thread to give some textural detail.
– I also used a fine black pen to add some further outline onto the paper.
24. Tooling the doublures (below right image):
– Here shows the back of the sample board with some carbon-tooled numbers applied to the doublures.
– Small handle numbers were used to stamp the depth markers of the water onto the blue areas of the map.
A wooden box was made to house the binding in. I opted to create a little red flag to accompany the book, which was used to keeo the box closed. A red flag was raised as a warning as the Wright brothers did their test launches.
This little binding was displayed for two weeks at the National Library of Scotland, and I flew up myself for a couple of days whilst the exhibition was on to invigilate. Whilst I try to take a lot of images of my bindings during working on them, and also multiple different angles of the finished books – nothing can compare with seeing and handling a binding in person. In the exhibition it was at least possible to walk around the cabinets and see the bindings from more than one angle which is am improvement than just seeing images on a computer screen, but of it was not possible to handle the books due to them being in display cases.
Whilst I will take the next few weeks to prepare further notes and examples of the structure ahead of the course I am teaching, I am excited to reveal that I have been loaned some rather wonderful equipment to trial out.
James Oliver, from Olive and Oak, runs a studio renowned for producing some of the world’s finest handmade bookbinding equipment.
James Oliver is a self-taught maker, musician and artist who arrived at designing and building bookbinding presses and equipment via joinery and furniture making. In 2007, he set up Olive and Oak with the aim of creating top quality equipment – every example being itself a functioning piece of art.
Using various sustainable hardwoods and lathe-turned steel elements, each press is lovingly hand-crafted, bringing together the two disciplines of joinery and engineering. Special attention is applied to not only the finishing, but the balance, calibration and functionality of each piece, ensuring that the bookbinder, book artist or conservator receives a product that both does everything that is expected of it and is a pleasure to use.
Originally London-based, James and his workshop relocated to the North of Portugal where the natural surroundings of mountains, rivers and forests continually provide ample inspiration. Like in nature, a design is never completely finished; new challenges, new ideas or even a change of perspective can offer an improvement, an evolution.
I have received a rather exciting shipment of some miniature equipment to test out and use including: a mini Pygmy press with plough and boards; a nipping press; a finishing press; and a sewing frame. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to trial these and I you will see lots of pictures of this kit in action over the coming weeks…
More images of the finished binding can be seen in the Fine Bindings section of my website.
