I have just finished two bindings for the Designer Bookbinders ‘Unique’ exhibition that will be taking place at The Benjamin Spademan Gallery in London from the 5th – 13th July 2024. Both are very different in size, design and appearance but I have enjoyed working on them both simultaneously.
This blog post will feature the larger of the two bindings, published by Incline Press. Incline Press was founded in 1993 and from their workshop in Oldham town centre, Graham Moss and his team specialise in producing hand-bound, letterpress-printed books. The press supports the craft of hand binding and many of their titles can be bought as unbound sheets which is how this book was supplied.
The book contains the famous poem, “Auguries of Innocence”, by William Blake. William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, he has since become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. The poem is from a notebook of his now known as “The Pickering Manuscript”. It is assumed to have been written around 1803, but was not published until 1863 in the companion volume to Alexander Gilchrist‘s biography of Blake.
“Augries of Innocence” is a series of couplets that most Blake scholars and biographers agree were written in no particular order, but just gathered as such for printing. The poem is not an easy text and contains a series of paradoxes which speak of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption. There is a nursery-rhyme simplicity to some of couplets like:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
~ “Augries of Innocence” by William Blake, lines 1-4
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour”
…meaning that you can find universes of meaning and revelation hidden inside the smallest things. It consists of 132 lines and has been published with and without breaks dividing it into stanzas. An augury is a sign or omen and like any of the great works of poetry, every reading reveals new shades of meaning.
The illustrator, Rose Harries, was a stranger to Blake’s couplets until 2007 when she was asked her to spend some time getting to know the poem. She did so whilst walking the streets of Cambridge with her sketchbook, fitting her impressions of the poem with the modern scenes of street-life. The whole book is illustrated with these drawings of street scenes, printed in dark red ink. Her line drawings open the text in a new way, prompting the reader to a fresh view of a complex masterpiece.
Throughout the book are wonderfully free drawings of street scenes in Cambridge including: wandering ducks; umbrellaed people; bicycles; statues; buildings; canal barges and pet dogs. These all have the recurring theme of being printed in just one colour: dark red. My colour choice for the binding was directly influenced by the dark red ink printed on the off-white paper.
I was particularly drawn to an illustration of pigeons (seen in plentiful numbers in any city!) and decided to draw my own composition in the same style as the illustrations in the book. There are a lot of animals in this poem, they are used to symbolise the innocent and the oppressed and also various emotions, qualities, and facets of human behaviour, emphasising how all living creatures are interconnected. I therefore felt illustrating the book in this design was appropriate.
I selected some lovely fair goatskin for the covers, but the piece wasn’t big enough for the whole book so I decided to pair it with a piece of brown goatskin for the spine. I then chose to combine this with orange Mi-Teintes paper for the doublures, plus maroon, and browns to further compliment the colour palette.
I decided I wanted to add some mark making to the orange paper to pattern it for the doublures, a homage to the hand-drawn illustrations. I selected a variety of coloured pencils in colours that would pair well with the rest of the binding: browns, reds, yellows and cream. I drew a faint grid onto the paper and used this as a reference for applying the pencil marks in little dashed strokes, five horizontal dashes per box working in sections down the pages.
I altered each colour randomly as I worked across the line, giving a varied look to each sheet of marks. It was clear on one sheet of paper where I had sharpened my pencil as the little marks became crisper down one whole section of the page! I quite liked this though as it tells a story as to how the patterning was created.
I selected to sew the book onto stubs as some of the printed illustrations spanned the gutter of the pages, so using stubs would allow for better opening of the text block. The book was also made up of just four thick sections, which was another good reason to use stubs. I selected some dark maroon paper to use, but I didn’t have quite enough to make up the number I needed to match the thickness of the sections. I decided to also use some of the same orange paper I had used for the doublures too, and thought it would be fun to pattern these with the same mark-making.
The stubs were sewn to the relevant sections, and then the sections were sewn together onto four tapes. Leather-jointed endpapers were made and attached either side of the text block and then the spine was glued up with PVA between the tapes.
The book was rounded and the top edge ploughed. I kept the deckled edge on the foredge and bottom edge of the pages.
The book was then backed and the spine lined with Aerolinen in between the tapes. The top edge of the book was sanded and then decoration applied with the same coloured pencils I used for patterning the doublures, but applied in a random fashion to this area.
I made up some leather-covered endbands with a vellum core, and added some thread detail as seen in the image on the below left hand side.
I laminated together some boards and cut them to the correct size. These boards were then bevelled on the outer edges and laced onto the text block. I left the boards to dry before sanding the area where the tapes were laced into the boards. I then glued on an extra layer of handmade paper on the outside of the boards, left this to dry and sanded this completely flush. The book was then ready for covering!
When working on the design I drew a small flock of pigeons free-hand, attempting to use the same style of free illustration as inside the book. I chose to have three larger format birds on the front cover of the book, with three smaller ones on the back.
Firstly I tested out the design on a sample board, selecting a small portion of the design to illustrate the 78mm x 124mm area. I embroidered the bird outlines in dark red thread on cream goatskin, to tie the cover in with the appearance of the text block. I varied the weight of the lines by using different gauges of thread to give the appearance of the design being sketched. It certainly takes a lot longer to ‘draw’ with thread than it does to draw with pencil on paper!
In order for the cover design to better tie in with the patterned doublures I decided to add other dashes of complimentary colours (browns, oranges, yellows etc.) with threads to match.
I did the same with the brown leather I had selected to use on the spine. That can be seen here in the below left photograph, with stitches done through the leather. This board is now number 74 in my ever growing collection.
Once the sample board was complete, I began to work on the book covers. I photocopied my drawing of the pigeons onto tracing paper and used this as a template for pricking the design through. The holes were quite easy to see once they were all done, as you can see below with a light behind the piece of leather.
I built up the design using threads of the same colour but varying weights. When it came to applying the thickest gauge thread, I opted to couch it with a much thinner thread. Couching is the method used to attach a thread or group of threads to fabric when they are too thick, too highly textured or too fragile to be stitched through the fabric. A second thread, normally finer, is used to stitch over the couched thread, thus anchoring it to the fabric. The name comes from the French word coucher, meaning to lay down.
I used the pricked holes as a guide, but made additional sewing holes to further build up the linear design. Rather than tying any knots in the threads on the back of the leather, I cut the ends short and frayed them out before securing them with glue. This ensured there wouldn’t be any unsightly lumps and bumps visible under the leather.
As with the sample board, I added extra dashes of thread around the dark red pigeons at the end to add detail. I used three strands of the six-stranded embroidery skeins and waxed them with beeswax before using them to create the stitches.
Because the design of the book meant that there were three panels of leather covering it, there was going to be a bit of stitching going around the cut edge of the cream leather. I cut little notches into this cut edge for the thread to catch into when it was passed from the front to the back. The last things I added were some pigeon toenails!
I wanted to add a title onto the book, so photocopied the title page and worked out the spacing of it given the length and width of the spine. I also needed to consider the size of the letters based on what I could achieve with the threads. I pared a piece of the cream goatskin and backed it with lens tissue to stabilise it. I then pricked the outline of the letters using a needle pricker to mark where I needed to do the stitching.
I used the thinnest gauge of dark red thread I had to work around the letters with running stitch, before then whipping the stitches with the same colour thread to consolidate them.
Once the title was sewn, the label was stuck onto the brown goatskin strip that was going to cover the spine. I drew a grid onto the back of the leather and worked stitches onto it in the same way I had patterned the paper doublures. I wasn’t sure whether to have these stitches all over the brown leather but chose to just do the spine section as I wasn’t sure how having stitches at the boards joints would affect the opening and closing of the book. The spine was then ready for covering.
It’s pretty rare I have two books to cover at once with both of the I made for the ‘Unique’ Designer Bookbinders show having embroidered detail sewn onto the spine leather before covering. It was therefore absolutely crucial I get them lined up in exactly the right place. The leather on the skin side was dampened using a water atomiser before pasting out the back of the skin with three applications of paste allowing for it to penetrate in. I also applied some PVA glue to the text block at the joint area to ensure good adhesion.
The leather on the back was marked to help me with the placement, but I also kept a keen eye on the front of the leather and where the decorated panels fell on the spine. The leather was turned in at the head and tail into a hollow which I triple checked is split to allow for the turn-ins before starting the covering process! I then formed the endcaps and finally breathed a sigh of relief and allow them to dry between blotting paper and boards under a light weight.
This style of cover design meant that I could cover the boards separately, which also allowed me to work on more manageable size pieces of leather during the process.
It’s never an easy choice to use fair coloured leather, you have to be even more careful than you usually would when working on it not to mark the surface in any way. I was also very mindful only to use biro when marking the suede side as I have learnt from my mistakes on previous books when pen lines have bled through from the back of the skin to the front due to the ink getting wet during the covering process
I dampened the front of the skin with water sprayed from an atomiser and then applied three coats of paste to the reverse of the skin, letting it penetrate in after each application. You can see in the below right photo how the colour of the leather on the underneath changed after it was dampened, with it almost returning to the colour it started as by the time it had completely dried.
The book was left overnight to dry out between blotting paper sheets, boards and a light weight. I changed the blotting paper regularly to draw out the moisture. The following day I removed the capping that had been stuck around the pages to protect them and began the process of sticking down the leather joints and infilling the boards.
The inside of the boards were infilled with a piece of watercolour paper, followed by a piece of Zerkall that was cut a few millimetres smaller that the overall size of the boards. Both of these layers were sanded flush to remove any lumps and bumps before the surface was ready for the edge-to-edge paper doublures to be stuck down.
The front doublure differed slightly to the back one, in that half of the spread has the dashes appearing to fall off the page to try and tie them in visually with the random dashes of coloured stitches I had used on the covers of the binding.
Time to sign the book! For my bindings I use a little tooled paper label that gets stuck into the binding after completion. I have two tools: one with my name on it and another with a bi-plane that “pulls’ my name along with an embroidered line of thread. The beauty of this is that I can change the thread colour depending on the colour theme of the book which also applies to the paper too. I usually use black ink to stamp the detail but given they are hand tools I could of course use foil or gold leaf if desired.
I generally stick this little label onto the bottom left corner of the back doublure, as I did in this binding, but if the book is small it has been stuck onto the reverse of the endpaper. Why the bi-plane? Years ago I had a set of rubber stamps, one of which was a bi-plane that I used to embellish letterheads, envelopes etc. This then made its way onto the header of my old website, plus my wedding invitations were little bi-planes made from origami that were pulling streamers along with all the details of our wedding!
The book was then complete but no fine binding is really complete until it has it’s own box to protect it. Of course this also allows for more opportunity for design elements to tie it in with the look of the book. For this book I made a clamshell box, covered in a cream linen-looking book cloth but I wanted to add a dash of colour. I therefore decided to add stitches to the outer wall of the box, each little thread had the cut end feathered out and glued to the reverse of the cloth behind where the stitch was on the front to conceal them.
Here’s a little glimpse of the completed book and box. To see more images please visit my website here.
Here are some images taken at The Benjamin Spademan Gallery where my book was displayed in the summer, along with 32 other books by Fellows and Licentiates of Designer Bookbinders.
