Design bindings sit at the point where art meets the craft of bookbinding. Every aspect of these bindings is thought through and made to suit the subject, not just on the cover but extending out to the protective box and into the endpapers, the edge decoration, and endbands. It’s an involved and lengthy process, the finished book a culmination of months of work.
Design bindings can be commissioned of your favourite book, special editions, by collectors, and for competitions. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss a binding of your own, or have a look below to see what I have available.
Klee Wyck by Emily Carr. First published in Toronto in 1941 by Oxford University Press. This version typeset in Doves Type by binder, as the text is now public domain.
I’m a huge fan of Emily Carr and grew up in many of the landscapes she is famous for painting. This full leather binding is my small hat tip to her evocative artwork and writing. Hand sewn silk endbands, painted endpapers, edge colouring and gilding, surface gilding, gold tooling, and painted leather. The book is a collection of stories from the author’s travels in the Canadian rainforests. The design references this with the painted treescape, colours, repetition of paint strokes; the ‘moon’ is reminiscent of First Nations button blankets. The gold used is 22ct moon gold.
Love Poems edited by Imtiaz Dharker.
The design of the binding is in response to the highly patterned and textural illustrations by Mikki Lee. The use of chiyogami papers, combining paper inlays with leather, the layering of patterns with blind and gold tooling, gauffering, and handmade paper doublures were all chosen to echo the stylised imagery used throughout, creating multiple tactile experiences when handling the book.
Goatskin, chiyogami paper, gold and blind tooling, tooled doublures, tooled clamshell box with suede lining. Book roughly 17cm x 25.5cm.
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
The binding focusses on Lennie’s need for tactile interaction, especially his love for soft and fluffy creatures. The spine features cut out letter with the sheep fleece poking through. The book is fully covered in a sewn boards binding, with natural coloured book cloth that has been hand toned. The touch and look of the cloth evoke the dusty life of the itinerant farm worker. Blue and gold marbled paper peep-throughs on the front and back cover speak to the starry dreams they held, while also tying in to the interior illustrations. The endpapers are a sandy yellow marbled paper that carry the theme from the cover into the book.
The book is housed in a custom made solander box to protect it on the shelf. The cutout sections from the book cover are used on the presentation box, giving a hint to the binding inside.
Canvas buckram, hand marbled endpapers, sheepskin. Book roughly 14.5cm x 23cm.
Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney.
This is a famous and popular book of recreational mathematical puzzles, problems and curiosities.
This binding uses an origata binding structure, which felt appropriate as the binding is a bit of a mathematical puzzle in itself. The math aspect comes in even further in the use of the golden ratio to calculate the placement and size of all the different pieces in the binding structure. The vintage design and years of patina on the original dust cover were kept and incorporated into the new cover. The book is housed in a complementing solander box.
