Back in 2023 I was commissioned to bind a miniature book for a regular client, Neale Albert, who asked whether it would be possible to include one of his flower photographs on the front cover of the book. The book was a minature book called, ‘Shakespeare’s Rainbow’ by Deb Rindl, with the colours of the rainbow painted on different concertina folds. Each colour represents a quote from a Shakespeare play as follows:
Red for Macbeth: “…for spilt blood…”
Orange for King Lear: “…for the wheel of fire…”
Yellow for Much Ado about Nothing: “…for Italian sunshine…”
Green for Othello: “…for jealously…”
Blue for Henry V: “…for royal veins…”
Indigo for The Tempest: “…for darkening skies…”
Violet for Romeo and Juliet: “…for young love…”
The author and designer of this book, Deb Rindl, creates three-dimensional artist’s books, often featuring sculptural qualities and intricate details like cut-outs and screws. A graduate of Camberwell College of Arts, her work is held in major collections, including the V&A and Tate, and is noted for its architectural and tactile nature. The finished book was going to have a special hidden compartment to live in, within a specially commissioned architectural piece named ‘The Neale Albert Museum of Art’, made by Gosling Design Ltd.
Gosling Design Ltd is a UK-based company founded by Tim Gosling that specialises in bespoke furniture and luxury interior design, known for its exquisite craftsmanship and international projects. The company creates custom pieces for private clients and commercial projects, including notable works for hotels, headquarters, and super yachts. There is an interesting blog post on the Tom Gosling website, written by Neale Albert, about how the idea for this museum evolved, showing more pictures of the hidden compartments built into it to house miniature books.
“So, I asked Tim to make an art museum. The facade of my museum is based on the facade of the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art. The roof opens, and has a triple angled glass skylight. It is made of English sycamore.
The inside has removable and adjustable walls on which to hang paintings.
Within the museum is a miniature sculpture which Frank Stella made for me, and paintings by Vermeer (“The Art of Painting”) and Renoir (“Luncheon of The Boating Party”). Plus, a collector’s cabinet containing miniature photographs made for me by two photographer friends.
One of the finest pieces in my museum are four Piero Della Francesca paintings, portraits of Federico and Battista Sforza and on the reverse the Triumph of Battista Sforza. The paintings are set in a miniature frame which is a copy of the real frame, which is in the Uffizi in Florence, Italy.
Outside waiting to get into my museum are two lines of art lovers in silhouettes of my friends, me, Margaret, Tim, Steve and Hachi. There are three secret drawers containing miniature books about paintings. There is even a secret drawer within a secret drawer. The Albert Museum of Art is the favourite piece which Tim has made for me.
This year Tim is going to design a binding for a book based on the ideas of George Fields from 1817 and the Regency period. The book links colour with musical notation. The binding will have a cover made of stained glass.“
The box that Tom Gosling and his team made to house the Shakespeare’s Rainbow binding was made from Sycamore wood with stained glass. The design was inspired by George Field’s Analogous Scale of Sounds and Colours – an illustration from another book which is also housed inside the box. Below you can see six images of the box in construction (images credited to T Gosling Ltd.).
When asked to take on this commission, I was given the maximum dimensions this book could be in order to fit into this hidden compartment in the museum. The pages of the concertina itself already measured 80mm (H) x 50mm (W) x 10mm (D) and the maximum size the finished binding could be to sit in the sliding drawer you can see in the below right image was 90mm (H) x 65 (W) x 18mm D), so not a lot of room to add a cover and also make a box. There is a fabulous post on Tom Gosling’s Instagram page here showing images of the prototyping of the miniature stained glass window in this Chromatic Colour Box, creating a wonderfully intricate hand-crafted piece to beautifully emulate George Field’s illustrations.
The orange dahlia on the front cover was to be made to match the flower photograph Neale sent me as closely as possible with the use of embroidery threads, sitting on a black background (see the image at the top of this blog post). I first cut out a series of orange leather onlays, which were pieced together and cut to shape before sticking them down onto a piece of 0.8mm thick black goatskin. I worked on a sample board alongside book cover, so I could test out the appearance before applying it to the actual covering leather (below left image).
The back of the leather was then back-pared ahead of starting on the embroidery. I first added some acrylic paint to the onlaid leather surface to add some colour variation, and then embroidered the outlines of each of the petals (below centre image). Stitches were then built up using a variety of orange, red, pink and white threads to vary the tones of the petals over the whole of the flower. Once this base colour was applied, I then added the flecks of red on top, using red polyester thread (below right image).
With the flower applied to the front of the book, the question then was: what should I to add to the back?
The content of the artist’s book combines simple rainbow colours, painted in squares using watercolour ink onto watercolour paper, with quotes taken from Shakespeare plays. When researching previous publications of Shakespeare, I came across the work of John Austen, who was a British artist and prolific book illustrator, prominent in the early to mid 20th century. He is recognised for his evolving style, which began with a strong influence from the Art Nouveau and Aubrey Beardsley aesthetic and later shifted to an Art Deco manner.
He created notable set of Art Nouveau black and white illustrations for a 1922 edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, published by Selwyn & Blount. His work is known for its heavy iconography, fine lines, and distinctive aesthetics, featuring dramatic elements like skulls, masks, and swords and in researching his work I found and interesting blog post with some good examples of his illustrations. The title text on the cover, and the shapes on the back of the book were inspired by this Art Nouveau look, with the back cover design chosen to appear like stylised quote marks to tie in with the quotes within the book.
The shapes I devised for the back cover were cut out of thin leather in the seven colours of the rainbow in different sizes. They were glued down onto the black goatskin, using a tracing paper template to get the correct positioning (below right image). I then used a whipped running stitch to outline the shapes with thread of corresponding colours, and also to add stems to them. I additionally added a split stitch on top of the onlays to add further colour and texture to the back cover.
The nature of miniature books means that they don’t have much weight to them. I therefore decided to use brass sheet inside the boards of the book to give it a more weighted feel. I used this brass sheet in combination with a half-round piece of dowel for the spine of the book, to give the appearance of a rounded spine. To join the spine dowel to the brass, I used Lascaux glue, which is an archival, water-thinnable acrylic adhesive that is great for sticking porous to non-porous materials. This range of glues are known for being light-resistant, non-aging, and elastic and allowed me to stick a single piece of linen to hinge these materials together and make up the cover of the miniature (below left image). On top of the linen, I then stuck a piece of Zerkal on each board.
Black leather can be troublesome to work with, as it can be hard to see the markings on the suede side of the skin. I wanted to embroider a title to the spine of the book, so I first wrote it onto a piece of Japanese tissue (in reverse), which was then stuck to the back of the leather using paste and left to dry. I then used the seven colours of the rainbow to sew each letter in the word ‘RAINBOW’.
Once all the embroidery was done on the black goatskin, it was time to stick the leather to the case for the miniature which I did in three stages:
- Firstly I added two temporary card spacers inside the case: one as a hinge spacer; and the other to keep the boards level (see the below left image). The outer surfaces of the book were then covered in the leather, with the turn-ins left unstuck until the rest of the leather was dry.
- Secondly, the spacers were removed and the leather was cut and turned in at either end to cap the ends of the dowel (see below centre image).
- Finally, the turn-ins were stuck down. As the embroidered flower was designed so that it would wrap around the front board of the book, I did the turn-ins at the corners differently on the front and the back boards. The back two corners were mitred and edge-pared, and when they were turned-in they were gathered together. Whereas on the front board, the turn-ins were done so that the front leather turn-in flap with the flower embroidery was left un-mitred so that it could wrap around continuously from the front and onto the inside of the board (see below right image).
The inside of the spine was then lined with leather, which was cut long enough and profiled so that the ends of the dowel could be capped with this same piece of leather (see below right image). The spacer was put back in when gluing the leather into the joints, to ensure it was stuck down well here.
Continuing on with the rainbow theme, the inside of the front board was patterned with strips of patterned rainbow-coloured papers. These were butted together and glued down in position.
Due to the fact that there was limited space allocated to where this book would live in the miniature museum, rather than making a box for the binding I decided to make an open-ended slipcase which would hold it closed flat, adding protection, without adding too much to the over dimensions of the object.
The book was able to to slide in and out freely and I added a thumb hole section to both sides, to allow the book to be gripped. This also allowed a small section of the cover design embroidery to be seen whilst the book was in the slip case. This detail added extra complication when covering the slipcase but I felt it was an important feature. The edges of the slipcase were all wrapped in thinly pared black leather, with the inside and outside lined with the same patterned rainbow-coloured papers as used on the book.
If you want to see more images of the finished binding, please visit the Fine Bindings section of my website here.