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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.

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A Passion for Perfection: Two Recent Movies About Craft

jay

Deceptive Practice

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/36319857″>Jiro Dreams Of Sushi – Trailer</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/curiousdistribution”>curious</a&gt; on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Traditionally craft is learned through close contact with skilled practitioners. Currently most professionals I know have cobbled together an autodiadactic path that often consists of reading, experimenting, practice, formal classes, weekend workshops, and hanging out with others in the field. But what happens when a craft is “mastered”—however you define the term— and how do practitioners keep learning, refining and performing at peak levels? And why do they keep doing it? Both Deceptive Practice and Jiro Dreams of Sushi explore this question.

At an age when most are ready to retire, Jiro cannot stop making sushi. When interviewed, he candidly admits his family and life outside of work have suffered because of his obsession of crafting the most prefect sushi he is capable of. His Tokyo restaurant was awarded three Michelin stars. But he can’t stop, and still doesn’t feel his son, who is 50 years old and who has worked by his side most of his adult life, is ready to take over. The act of crafting is rewarding to him, but it has become such a large part of him, that he can’t let go of it. Jiro’s story bypasses much of his formative experiences, but instead concentrates on a perhaps inevitable paradox: many enter into crafts in order to reestablish some kind of physical/ mental balance in their lives, yet craft at the highest levels becomes singular and obsessive.

Ricky Jay began performing at the age of 4 (there is home movie footage to prove it!), and much of this film discusses his influences and mentors. Most of his education was informal and his skills learned through intensive practice.  He mentions he still practices card handling seven hours a day, though I wondered if this might be a bit of magicians patter. Yet Jay is not only one of the most accomplished sleight of hand magicians (he can pierce a watermelon with a playing card), he a scholar of the history of magic, writer, and actor. His books, such as Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women or Jay’s Journal of Anomalies, are facinating and well written. I had the chance to watch him perform a couple of years ago, and left more impressed than ever. I was picked from the audience to play poker with him on stage; for the finale I shuffled, cut and dealt the cards. He didn’t touch them except to turn them over. He had four aces and I had nothing.

Both films feature photography that verges on pornography in their larger than life closeups. An excusite piece of sushi glistening with a brush of shoyu that fills the screen, Jay’s incessant fondling of cards which he watches his hands by using three mirrors. Again the separation of the hand and the head is emphasized. Together these films give an unusually revealing view of the work that craft involves. Attentive practice, trying to improve and trying to maintain one’s skills are never ending. For Jay and Jiro there is no rest. There is only the need to do something very, very well. And do it again, and again, and again. Ars long, vita brevis.