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A Book Conservator Goes to Hollywood: or, Pretending to be an Actor Playing a Bookbinder

It is pretty unusual—once in a lifetime?— for any craftsman to appear in a Hollywood commercial. I had my chance last week. In many ways it was almost the stereotypical experience: a phone call out of the blue, sending a production company a couple of images of me and my work, a bunch of phone meetings, sending more pictures, then all of the sudden a limo was picking me up at 5:00 am to fly to Los Angles.

The first day was spent meeting the director, producers and wardrobe fitting.  My “costume” was chosen, which was surprisingly similar to the kind of clothes I usually wear.  Loose linen shirt and blue pants, though they did make me wear a kind of silly looking heavy duty leather apron.  Wardrobe went to do a few alterations and I was driven to look at the set.

The set really looked like a bindery, even though much of it was from other trades.  All the small details were wrong, but the overall feel was right.  The director of photography was there with a top of the line DSLR, so I left thinking this was going to be a small, intimate shoot.

The next day my driver picked me up and the scene had changed dramatically. The crew parking lot was filled with over 70 cars.  The caterer had 4 tents set up.  All of these people would be filming me for the next couple days, and I’d never acted before.  I was playing with the big boys.

As my make-up was being applied and my hair cut, I kept thinking that my experience in teaching should help me out, since I’m used to having people watch me work.  Or maybe I should think of this as extreme method acting: I’d practiced bookbinding for 23 years, and now was my chance to perform in front of the camera?

I saw the real camera for the first time; one of those monsters used for film shoots that three people ride on. We shot the various stages of book binding at different times.  Often I had to repeat an action three times, for a wide, medium and tight shot. The raw footage I saw looked amazing; the most professional, seductive looking images of bookbinding I’ve ever seen.

Seductive images of craft are great PR.  I still remember how appealing Bernard Middleton’s hands were on the cover of The Restoration of Leather Bindings.  Quite likely it was a reason I got into bookbinding in the first place. Could the less scientific, and more romantic side of conservation be emphasized a bit more for public appeal and possibly funding? Or does it land us back in the murky world of craft and restoration which conservation strives to differentiate itself from?

Film shoots are pure chaos.  As one crew member recommended “embrace the chaos”.  But the crews were remarkable in the way they worked together, thought creatively and spontaneously, and in the end got the job done.  It was great to get a glimpse at this world.

If you happen to find yourself being filmed using a sewing frame, which is a de-rigor shot, use pre-pierced the inner folios but not the outer one.  This way you can feel the hole on the inside with the tip of the needle, and burst out through an unpierced outer folio with frightening precision, without having to look inside the book. Smooth.

The most difficult thing for me was doing a familiar action differently or at a different speed—either to show it better on camera or because the director wanted it. I spend most of my time thinking about pragmatic realities—reattaching a board to fit the textblock exactly, mending paper fibers to realign or grinding a knife to exactly 13 degrees— so it was a bit difficult for me to get my head around the “prop” mentality, and how much the camera would see, and concentrate on the action, not the object. It was hard work to repeat an action over, and over, and over. “Show the leather more love when you touch it!” In the end I was left with much more respect for “real” actors; it is hard, skilled work.

And how quickly I become accustomed to being treated like a star!  By the end of the second day, it seemed natural to have a driver, someone yelling “talent on the set” and “talent stepping down” when I moved on the set, a hairstylist preening me every 30 minutes of so, food and water brought constantly the minute I sat.

I signed a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) so can’t go into any details until December.  Once the commercial is live, I will post links to it on this blog.

Now, back to reality. Finish sewing an endband, then edge paring, spokeshaving, and covering an appealing well used edition of Luther’s Commentarie on the Epistle of Saint Paul, London, 1616. I keep telling myself I’m glad to be back in the real world. But….

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Temple Thorold on Quality in Tools

“Good tools are necessarily expensive, nevertheless our apprentices must use none but the best; for in the end they are the cheapest. Always remember the old and true saying, “A workman is known by his tools.”  A good workman may do a tolerable job with indifferent tools, but a beginner should never attempt to use any but first-class implements, or he will never become a first-class craftsman. If you use bad tools, and try to cast the blame of bad work on them, recollect that “A bad workman always complains of his tools.” A really clever mechanic cherishes his reputation far too highly to allow his tools to lapse into an inefficient condition; therefore, next to his character, the honest workman prides himself, and justly so, on the superior quality of his tools.”      -Temple Thorold, Out Workshop, 3.

Temple Thorold may not be a household name, but his book, Our Workshop: Being a Practical Guide to the Amateur in The Art of Carpentry and Joinery is the earliest (I think) woodworking manual written for or marketed to amateurs. Gary Roberts, publisher of Toolemera Press, who reprinted and sells this book, writes:  “Our Workshop is taken from Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual where it was serialized, along with Thorold’s serial on wood turning. Only Our Workshop became a book. Both were serialized in 1866 and 1867.”  Keep in mind the earliest bookbinding manual I have found written for amateurs is Crane’s Bookbinding for Amateurs from 1885, over 20 years later.

Of course I have a vested interest in selling high quality tools, but Thorold makes several valid points.  Many getting into a craft fear they might not stick with it, so purchase cheap tools, thinking they might buy better ones later, once they are “good enough” for them.  Not only does this make learning the craft almost impossible, but cheap tools are almost worthless on the second-hand market. High quality ones maintain their value. Additionally, high quality tools are much more pleasureable to use: isn’t having fun a big reason why we choose a hobby in the first place?

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Boards Bindings

Boards Binding

Nathan Drake. Literary Hours: Or Sketches, Critical, Narrative, and Poetical. The Fourth Edition, Corrected.  London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820. This board binding is covered in one sheet of paper, has a printed spine label on a tight-back spine, and substantial squares. 

John Townsend, the one and only Anonymous Bookbinder, has once again agreed to be a guest blogger.  Boards bindings (also called publishers’ board bindings, in-boards bindings, boarded bindings, paper covered board bindings, publishers’ boards, plain boards, boards bindings, in-boards publisher’s bindings, original boards, publishers’ trade bindings [1]) are particularly interesting in the way they prefigure certain aspects of publishers’ cloth case bindings.  John’s short essay, which is from a Paper and Book Intensive workshop he conducted in 2011, is a succinct introduction to this often neglected binding style, which until now has been missing from the web. John writes:

“Publishers’ board bindings” refer to an inexpensive retail style of binding that emerged in England in the mid-18th century. It typically consists of a sewn textblock with untrimmed edges, thin pasteboards laced on and covered in paper. The covering was often with three pieces of paper: a plain paper pasted down tight on the spine and slightly overlapping the sides (i.e. quarter binding), with a blue or gray paper covering the remainder of the sides. There are many variations, including covering with a single colored sheet (frequently gray); boards with or without squares; spines covered with leather or vellum instead of paper; the use of a made or natural hollow, etc. Different colors of paper were used at various time, with some colors identified with particular publishers.

By the end of the 18th century, books in boards had become the most common way for books to be sold. Although often described as temporary bindings, recent scholarship has demonstrated that they are more likely intended to help meet the growing demand for books at a cost the broader public could afford. As such, it is unlikely they were issued by publishers with the expectation that buyers would necessarily have them rebound at a later time. It was common for publishers to issue books in boards at the time they issued the same books in sheep or calf leather for those interested and willing to pay more.

The style and its variation had a very long life in the marketplace. After the introduction of bookcloth in the mid-1820s, cloth rather than paper spines was used for popular titles, especially novels. After mechanization took over many aspects of book production, the boards style continued to appear on certain types of publications, such as proceeding of scholarly societies, print versions of important library catalogs, and other bibliographic works. Many examples can be found well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Cowie’s Bookbinder’s Manual (1828 and subsequent editions) may be the first written account of the process for board bindings. But the key structural features of board bindings are easily observed in the many surviving examples and it is clear that the style changed little between its introduction and Cowie’s description. Somewhat later (1835), Arnett’s Bibliopegia describes it as “the commonest way of doing up books in this country.”

Despite its reputation as “temporary,” many thousands of board bindings still exist. Given their age and the fact that they were often not regarded as important, these are often in reasonably good condition. Deterioration is typically due as much to poor storage and degraded materials as to structural deficiencies. The structure is worth studying as a transition between leather binding and case binding. Many of its features—sewing on cords, laced on boards, tight back spine covering—are identical in form to traditional leather bindings, but performed with less expensive materials. (The temporary shortage of leather and its high cost in the 1760s being one reason for the development of board bindings.) By one account, the development of bookcloth by William Pickering (circa 1823) was his desire for a neater way of doing boarded bindings. Thus, cloth was developed as a substitute for board bindings, rather than a substitute for leather bindings, as is sometimes assumed.

Board bindings represent a significant development in the history of bookbinding and book selling. As a structure, they also have many possibilities to offer bookbinders, conservators and book artists who look to historical models for instruction and inspiration. As far as being merely temporary, it is worth remembering that, “All bindings are perishable, whether of wood, leather, paper or cloth. At their best, and treated well, books in boards offered a binding as lasting as any other.” (Hill, p. 273)

References

Bennett, Stuart. Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 1660-1800. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press/The British Library, 2004. An important work challenging and expanding the definition of publishers’ bindings. Section V.1 of chapter three (p. 80-85) deals with board bindings.

Cowie, George. Cowie’s Bookbinder’s Manual. London: W. Strange, 1853. Acessed online 19 Apr 2011 at http://www.archive.org/details/cowiesbookbinder00cowi. 

Hannett [Arnett], John. Bibliopegia; or, the Art of Bookbinding in All Its Branches. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1980. (Reprint of the 1835 edition.) Part IV (p. 161-163) has a brief account “Of Boarding” and “Cloth Boarding.”

Hill, Jonathan E. “From Provisional to Permanent: Books in Boards, 1790-1840.” The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographic Society 21.no. 3 (September) (1999) : 247-273. A scholarly account of various stages in the development of board bindings, challenging the early 20th century assertion that they were “mere sheet-containers.”

Pearson, David. English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800. London and New Castle, De: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2005. Chapter VI, “Cheap and Temporary Bindings,” deals with bindings in boards, p. 159 -163. Despite the chapter title, Pearson follows Hill’s view that board bindings were often very often intended to be more permanent that often assumed.

Notes

[1] “Boarding” also refers to the working of leather to make it more pliable, give it a more even consistency, and raise the grain. “Out of boards” binding refers to trimming the edges before the boards are attached, as in school-book and case binding. The term “in-boards” sometimes refers generally to a bound books, rather than a cased ones.