Bookbinding and book restoration
A full story of the restoration of a Geneva Bible can be found here
The Genevan Bible...restored and re-bound by Paul Tronson
Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson was one of the last of the visionaries in traditional bookbinding, ( his and Alberto Sangorski's name were often spoken in the same breath ), although he is responsible for founding the "designer binder" movement
of today (what was he thinking!!)....In this lecture he is referring to machine
made books in the high tech society of the 19thC......I just kinda
continued his train of thought in my own work.....He was the last of
his time as I am the one of the last of mine.
Go for it Tom lad!
"The life of bookbinding is
in the dainty mutation of its mutable elements — back, bands, boards,
squares, decoration. These elements admit of almost endless variation,
singly and in combination, in kind and in degree. In fact, however,
they are now almost always uniformly treated or worked up to one type
or set of types. This is the death of bookbinding as a craft of beauty.
The
finish, moreover, or execution, has outrun invention, and is the great
characteristic of modern bookbinding. This again, the inversion of the
due order, is, in the opinion of the writer, but as the carving on the
tomb of a dead art, and itself dead.
A well-bound beautiful book
is neither of one type, nor finished so that its highest praise is that
"had it been made by a machine it could not have been made better." It
is individual; it is instinct with the hand of him who made it; it is
pleasant to feel, to handle, and to see; it is the original work of an
original mind working in freedom simultaneously with hand and heart and
brain to produce a thing of use, which all time shall agree ever more
and more also to call "a thing of beauty."
T. J. COBDEN-SANDERSON.
Thomas didn't really care much for machine made books.
