Tag: craft

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“An Investigation of Seventeenth Century English Bookbinding Tools in Randle Holme’s Academy of Armory” Now Available!

It’s exciting be published in The New Bookbinder 41 with such a beautiful layout and high print quality!

Publishing a blog post is instant gratification compared to a print article. An Instagram post is an even quicker higher-octane endorphin hit. Writing a print article already feels archaic and process of publishing is frustratingly slow: finding a suitable vehicle, researching a topic, writing, gathering images, requesting (and often paying for) reproduction permissions, formatting, incorporating reader’s comments, working with an editor for additional revisions, triple checking everything, and finally approving a final layout. Then waiting for months while it is being printed and shipped. At least in this case, though, the result is deeply rewarding.

Seeing and holding your writing makes it feel like a thing, not just ideas in your head. It implies a permanence and accessibility. But I wonder how long print — at least for non-fiction scholarly articles — will be used, in terms of people reading, using, and citing it. Many papers I read from younger people only cite the online sources. On the other hand, the transparency of online data is rewarding for the author (as well as profit generating for the corporate overlords…) For example, I will know how many of you read this blog post, how many times it is linked to, what links you click on, and where you are from. I have no idea if anyone actually looked at or read the printed article. Anyway, onward!

OVERVIEW

Randle Holme’s little known Academy of Armory contains the only images of seventeenth century English bookbinding tools currently known. Six fundamental tools described in it are analyzed: a folder, a beating hammer, a needle, a sewing frame, a lying press, and a plough. The context of seventeenth century English bookbinding and other contemporaneous sources are investigated. The relationship between the nature of seventeenth century English books and the tools used to make them is also explored.

FIRST PARAGRAPH SNIPPET

“There are a variety of ways of approaching the history of bookbinding. Examining actual books for physical evidence is, of course, the primary method. But additional context can be gained by interpreting historic images and texts — including, manuals, advertising, trade cards, archival records, etc… — making models of historic bindings, and investigating how traditional tools were used. (2) In the case of seventeenth century English books, there are tens of thousands of extant books, but only one currently known text that contains images of bookbinding tools from this time, Randle Holme’s 1688 Academy of Armory. (3) Just over thirty copies are located in the English Short Title Catalogue, and it escaped the rigorous eyes of Pollard and Potter in their standard reference, An Annotated List of Technical Accounts of Bookbinding to 1840. (4) Analyzing the tools and equipment of bookbinding is one way of understanding how books were made, which is one of the foundations of bibliography. (5)”

PURCHASE: The Designer Bookbinders online shop.

Jeff Peachey “An Investigation of Seventeenth Century English Bookbinding Tools in Randle Holme’s Academy of Armory“. The New Bookbinder 41 (2021):38-48.

Thanks to OG Joel Moskowitz of Tools for Working Wood for introducing me to this text and allowing reproductions of his copy!

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The Craft of Nailing

Nick Lindsay was a poet, carpenter, boatbuilder, union organizer, playwright, translator of Gullah oral history, and raconteur. He died earlier this year. A chronology of his amazing life is here. I was lucky to have studied poetry with him in the 80s, and he left a huge imprint on my life. Rest In Power, Nick!

During a Goshen College Mennonite Church sermon in the 70s or 80s, Nick Lindsay told a story about watching and a roofing nailer at work, steadily zig-zagging up a roof. It was not something many of us had thought about at the time. He could hear the Craft of nailing in the sound of nails firmly hit and driven flush with three well-placed blows.

Words, wood — everything , really — he infused with Craft. Three was the most powerful number in his cosmology, imbued with numinous power; “thrice is true” as Lewis Carrol earlier said. I interpreted his conception of Craft as similarly tripartite: understanding the nature of a material worked, knowing the tools to shape it, and skillfully performing the of technique of making.

Nick’s workshops were a masterclass in teaching. He would always have us close our eyes when a fellow student read their poem aloud, to help the audience enter into the world the poet crafted. Poems were an aural dreamscape for him. He often talked about dreams, once where his famous poet father Vachel Lindsay’s death mask was placed on him. Where did Vachel stop and Nick start? Nick often sang and chanted Vachel’s poetry, mixing it up with his own. It troubled some people, but, in the end, it really doesn’t matter. Craft was something bigger than himself.

I don’t drive that many nails these days, but when I do Nick comes to mind. And I strive to drive the them home in three sweet blows. 

A version of this remembrance originally appeared in the Center for Mennonite Writing Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2020.

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Standing at a Vice and Teaching Craft

Jules Amar, The Human Motor;or the Scientific Foundations of Labor and Industry, London: George Routledge & Sons, LTD., 1920 (p. 418)

Amar’s The Human Motor is extraordinarily precise in dictating how a worker should position themselves while working. After all, this was the era of Frederick Winslow Tayler and scientific management. Such dogmatic instruction now seems a little crazy — position your feet at exactly 68 degrees! — and it would certainly put a damper on worker motivation and engagement. However, there are corollaries in teaching and learning craft technique.

Most people hate to be told how to accomplish a task in such excruciating detail, yet several bookbinding teachers I’ve encountered have a dictatorial style which embodied this “one right way” approach. Is our musculature (and ability to manipulate it) so much the same that there is only one right technique to accomplish a specific task? Traditional craft does usually have a very specific end product ideal, so it makes sense to follow exact procedures to achieve exact results. Considered optimistically, traditional techniques have undergone a Darwinian type evolution, resulting in efficient production. The downside of this results in people unthinkingly replicating the techniques they were taught, irrespective of the results.

There is a difference between being told how to do something, and learning how to do something. Learning styles vary: some of us are experiential learners, some didactic learners, and sometimes it varies with the task to be learned. Trying and possibly failing with a variety of techniques can teach us a lot about craft, and often not just the project at hand.

Granted, there are easier and harder ways of doing most craft actions. This is possibly one of the most common reasons for taking a class or workshop: to learn easier ways of accomplishing a craft action. Learning one successful way, then branching out and experimenting with others, is often a good foundation. A constant challenge is balancing the workload in able to continue learning with the pecuniary pressures of working efficiently.

 

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