In the summer of 2026, during one of the many heatwaves, I completed two speculative bindings for an exhibition that took place at the National Library of Scotland during August. I have been a Fellow of Designer Bookbinders since 2023, and the society was invited to put on a display of bindings by both Fellows and Licentiates which was titled, Festival Bindings.
The National Library of Scotland is the nation’s largest reference library and a legal deposit institution holding over 30 million items, including rare manuscripts, maps, and digital archives and is a stones throw from the Royal Mile. The exhibition ran from 10th – 29th August 2026, and coincided with the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the Edinburgh Book Fair. I went to Edinburgh for a couple of nights from 23rd – 25th August to help invigilate whilst the display was on. The city was absolutely buzzing with colour, street performances, posters, flyers and crowds galore!
The first of two bindings that I had on display in the exhibition was a copy of The Songs and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, published by Duckworth and Co, Covent Garden, London, circa 1915. This book is an acclaimed example of the Golden Age of Illustration, highly sought after by collectors for its extensive visual design. The book is illustrated by Charles Robinson, a prolific British book illustrator and watercolour painter who became one of the leading figures of the Golden Age of Illustration. Known for his whimsical, intricate, and heavily Art Nouveau-influenced style, he decorated over 100 books, primarily fairy tales and children’s literature.
For this book, he created 12 full-page colour plates mounted on paper, protected by captioned tissue guards. He also drew numerous full-page and text-embedded line drawings, tinting many with a delicate pale green wash. Every text page is also decorated with wide, pale green borders featuring stylised floral and abstract Art Nouveau motifs.
It is not very often that I work on speculative bindings, as I am busy enough with commissioned works, but I was keen to get this binding completed for submission to the Festival Bindings exhibition. I bought the original book a few years ago, not knowing exactly what exhibition I would complete it for as I had been working on it gradually alongside other projects.
I chose it as a worthwhile book for rebinding as the text block offered a lovely visual starting point through the original illustrations by Charles Robinson. Rather than treating the illustrations as something separate from the binding, I wanted the outside of the book, the decorated edges, the doublures, and the box to feel as though they belonged to the same lyricism and ornament. This post follows the binding as it developed: from the earliest structural decisions through to the final presentation box.
As I ordered this book online from images on a screen, when it arrived in the post I initially spent time with the physical book to assess its scale, paper, illustrations and margins. The original 1915 edition featured a red cloth board cover with gilt titles on the spine and blind-stamped decoration on the front cover.
The endpaper illustrations in this edition were full-page pictorial line-block drawings created by Charles Robinson, rendered in a distinct turquoise ink, but I did not choose to retain these in the new binding.
With fine binding, the first stage is always an assessment of the text block. The structure has to support the book sympathetically. A decorative binding may look visually complete on the outside, but if the book does not open well, if the boards pull against the spine, or if the materials are fighting the text block, then the binding has not succeeded.
The 12 tipped-in colour plate were created using a production method where full-colour illustrations were printed separately on premium, heavy art paper and manually affixed (“tipped-in”) to the book’s standard text pages along one edge. The illustrations were each based on a descriptive caption from within the book, printed onto tissue guards in letterpress. The issue with the guards was, due to the very lightweight nature of the paper, they were very creased, dog-eared and damaged around the edges so I decided to remove them from the binding and mount the captions directly below the tipped-in plates.
As the tissue paper wouldn’t allow me to cut out the captions and stick them down directly onto the page with out glue leaching through, instead I cut out windows in pieces of blue paper (the same that I then used for the endpapers), which could be glued around the outer edge of the letterpress printing, leaving the paper directly behind where the words were with no adhesive on.
There were a few challenges to overcome with doing this: the plates were all slightly different sizes throughout the binding; they were stuck on in slightly different places on the page; and also the captions were all slightly different sizes. I therefore adapted the windows to work on each individual page – each one was a little different. The below image also became the inspiration behind the binding design, which I will come to later in this blog post.
The pages with the tipped-in plates on them were themselves tipped onto other sections in the original binding structure, and were vulnerable to coming off (see below left image). I therefore opted to totally pull them off the sections, and tip individual thin strips of the same blue paper used for the captions onto their spine edges, so that they then had something they could be sewn into the text block onto, once the strip was folded and hooked around the section.
I made a decision that I wanted to deckle the bottom and side edges of the text block, and plough and decorate just the top edge. I used a French paring knife to carefully deckle the desired edges (see below right image), working my way through the pages on both the front and back faces of each to give an even-looking deckle.
The early stages of forwarding a book are so important. The eventual appearance of the binding depends on choices made long before the leather goes on: how the sections are prepared; how the spine is shaped; how the boards are attached; and how much movement is built into the structure.
The grain direction of the paper was running the wrong way, so I opted to sew the text block onto paper stubs. 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, musical scores 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. Where rounding and backing of a book sewn on stubs is desired, it is necessary to make individual stubs for each section so that they can still move independently of one another allowing the text block to have its spine shaped.
This is a technique I regularly teach now, and I often create stub bindings. The stubs are folded and then sewn to the book sections – I used the original sewing holes where possible to attach the sections to the stubs using a multi-holed pamphlet stitch.
The stub binding gave me a way to manage the physical character of the book while preserving a sense of elegance. I wanted the finished binding to feel refined, not bulky, and the use of stubs helped me create the right balance between function and form. I chose to use a combination of pink and blue paper to make the stubs, alternating the colours attached to the central sections to give a dual-colour block in this area of the book spine. Thirty one stubs were required to create the correct thickness for the sixteen sections, and the below diagram shows their placement.
The stubs were then sewn at the spine onto four 8mm tapes, with some extra stubs not sewn to sections added to make sure the stub area was the same thickness as the sections all combined. Making paper stubs requires careful measurement. Even small inaccuracies can accumulate, and because the stubs become part of the rhythm of the book, they need to be consistent. The spacing, thickness, attachment, and folding all matter. When done well it allows the book to open seamlessly.
Once all the stubs were sewn, leather-jointed endpapers were also attached to either side of the text block. The endpapers are the width of the sections plus the width of the folded stubs. The text block was then knocked up at the head and spine and PVA glue applied to the flat spine area in between the tapes. It is important not to put glue across the tapes at this stage, as they need space to move during the rounding and backing process.
The great thing about this type of stub binding, is that the book can still be rounded and backed. The book was hammered into a rounded shape with a backing hammer, the width of the shoulders were marked onto the waste sheet, and then the text block was placed in between metal-edged backing boards and the book was backed (see below left image). I first manipulated the sections into shape using my thumbs, followed by a Teflon folder, only then moving onto using the backing hammer at the end of the process.
I then ploughed the top edge of the book, and sanded it flat ready for the application of the edge decoration. The text block has to be prepared carefully so that the edges are smooth and ready to receive the decoration. Any unevenness in the paper can interrupt the finish.
Edges can completely change the character of a book. They are sometimes treated as a secondary detail, but in a fine binding they offer a wonderful opportunity to extend the design beyond the covers. When the book is closed, the edges become part of the exterior; when it is opened, they shift back into the physical structure of the text block.
For this binding, the edge decoration was designed to sit in harmony with the rest of the book and was inspired by the distinct turquoise/cyan colour palette of its ornamental features. I chose to create a pattern of little circles which was based on the background of the small decorative illustrations seen throughout the book.
The book must be held securely, and the surface has to be worked with patience. I mixed up paint to the correct cyan tone and hand-painted the pattern onto the book edge using a very fine brush. I find decorated edges particularly satisfying because they reveal themselves slowly. Depending on how the book is held or opened, the edge may appear as a strong visual plane or as a subtle flicker between pages. It adds another layer to the experience of handling the binding.
I was then ready to sew endbands at the head and tail of the spine. I opted to create a double-core endband with the primary core made from a strip of vellum laminated to leather, and the secondary core a piece of cord stiffened with PVA glue. I used a combination of cyan and pink thread to create the overall colour palette of the endbands, to match the pattern of the paper stubs.
I then added little extra stitches of thread into the endband for more visual interest. Once complete, the spine was lined with a piece of archival Kraft paper, and then a layer of leather.
The boards were laced on and then the excess spine lining material was trimmed to the length of the endbands, taking care not to nick the endband thread whilst cutting this material back. In the below image, the binding is on the bottom of the pile.
The original illustrations by Charles Robinson were central to how I thought about the binding. Illustrated books offer a particular challenge because the binding must sit in conversation with another artist’s visual language. It should not compete with the illustrations, and it should not ignore them either. I wanted the binding to feel connected to Johnson’s illustrations without simply copying them onto the cover.
I was particularly drawn to the colour palette of one of the plates in the book and could envisage a design based on this. The illustration (shown earlier in this blog post) was of a female, seemingly floating over a stylised rose bush, against a blue background, wearing some floaty fabric. I could immediately see myself creating the stylised roses through the use of leather onlays and embroidery, and I loved the combination of the colours in the illustration.
The accompanying caption for this illustration is a famous stanza from the play Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act 4, Scene 3):
“On a day – alack the day!-
Love, whose month is ever May,
Spied a blossom passing fair
Playing in the wanton air.”
Leather offers a beautiful natural surface, and I selected a grey-blue goatskin as the ideal covering for this binding. My process always begins with a sample board to test colours, techniques, and embroidery details; this piece became the 78th addition to my growing collection. Although I lack “work-in-progress” images for the sample board itself, the methods used will be thoroughly detailed in the description of how the binding was worked on.
Once I was happy with the design idea, it was time to work on the covering leather. The beauty of this design was that I could be quite freehand about where I placed the colourful leather onlays as I wasn’t working to a fixed design drawn onto paper. I thinly pared the onlays from green, pink, purple, black and dark blue leather and freehand cut the shapes. The covering leather was prepared to the correct size for the binding, and then the onlays wre stuck down with PVA glue and back-pared on the reverse. The leather was then ready for the application of embroidery.
The embroidery was one of the most time-consuming and delicate parts of the binding. Embroidering leather is very different from embroidering cloth. Leather does not behave like fabric: it does not easily close back around the thread, and every hole made by the needle remains part of the surface. This means that the stitching has to be planned carefully, because mistakes are not easily hidden.
Before beginning the final cover, I considered the thickness and quality of the leather, the type of thread, the needle size, and the density of the stitching. The leather needed to be fine enough to work as a covering material, but strong enough to withstand being stitched and then used in the binding process.
Each of the onlay shapes was outlined with thread: some in a colour to match the onlay; and others in a contrasting thread. I worked my way around the whole of shape using small stitches, before applying a whipping stitch to consolidate the first run of stitches. A whipping stitch (or whipped stitch) in embroidery is a decorative technique where a second thread is wrapped around an existing “foundation” stitch without piercing the fabric again. I like using this technique as is solidifies the stitches and makes them stand out better.
When embroidering leather, I don’t use an embroidery hoop as the leather is too thick. Instead, I secure the material by coiling the edges and fastening them with bulldog clips. This project traveled with me on a flight to France (see bottom left) and a coach trip to London (see bottom right) – a perfect way to make productive use of travel time! Of course on a flight I can’t take sharp embroidery scissors with me, instead I have found that nail clippers work very well to cut the thread whilst being permitted in hand luggage.
The intricate embroidery was meticulously built up on the surface of the covering leather, creating a rich, tactile landscape through the layered application of diverse stitching techniques. To achieve this level of depth and detail, a curated selection of stitches was employed: French knots provided raised, granular texture; seed stitch added a delicate, stippled effect; and running and whipping stitches were used to define fluid, linear elements. Additionally, couching was utilised to anchor heavier threads, resulting in a multi-dimensional decorative finish that seamlessly integrates the artistry of needlework with the structural elegance of fine leather binding.
Although titling a binding is not always necessary, I intended to include one for this project. During the earlier forwarding stage, I planned to create a recessed panel in the spine for a decorative title. However, as the project progressed, I decided that a rectangular panel was no longer appropriate and adjusted the design accordingly.
In the illustration by Charles Robinson that inspired the design, a graceful female figure was present wearing floaty fabric with a great sense of movement. I designed the spine panel to echo this sense of fluidity. I cut a large flowing onlay out from pale cream leather, shaped so that it would run across the spine.
The title was meticulously hand-embroidered freehand, ensuring a bespoke finish that captures the unique, artisanal character of the binding. The lettering design was directly inspired by the elegant typography found on the text block’s original frontispiece, creating a visual connection between the book’s exterior and interior.
I opted to sew the letters using a rich, dark maroon-coloured thread, a choice made to ensure the title stands out against the background.
I also added some gold metallic threads to the flowing title panel, to give more of a sense of movement.
The embroidery had to be completed before the leather was put onto the book. The finished embroidered leather cover gives the binding a surface that changes as it catches the light. It is decorative, but it is also structural in the sense that it is fully integrated into the covering material.
When designing the cover, I considered how the pattern would wrap around the book edges and onto the leather doublures. To ensure a seamless transition, the onlays were intentionally extended beyond the board edges so they would flow around the turn-ins once the leather was applied. The embroidery, however, was kept strictly within the boundaries of the boards. Below shows the front of the covering leather, complete with all of the enbroidery.
While the front of an embroidery piece reveals a meticulous design, the reverse side tells the honest story of its creation. This hidden landscape of trailing threads, functional knots, and unexpected intersections forms a spontaneous, abstract map of work done on the front, and I always like to capture in before it is lost forever! Below is the back of the embroidered leather.
The second part of this blog post features details about the covering of the book, the edge-to-edge leather doublures and the container.