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  1. Bookbinder of the Month: Tracey Rowledge

    March 29, 2015 by Erin Fletcher

    LeatherPanels2-TraceyRowledge

    So far in this interview with Tracey Rowledge we’ve looked at her binding work and her works on paper, more specifically the work inspired by markings either found or interpreted. The leather panels presented in this post are a wonderful representation of art created using traditional binding and finishing techniques. The panel above is called 3 Milk and was created in 2000; the panel is covered in black goatskin with gold tooled design. The detail of this panel will awe you and make you think about tooling combinations differently.

    LeatherPanels4-TraceyRowledge

    Many of your leather wall panels are tooled representations from found paper scraps with markings. The gold tooled marks that decorate your fine bindings appear spontaneous. Are you creating these free-form designs in response to the work being bound or do they come from found paper scraps?
    It’s a mixture. Sometimes I found I had the exact response to a book in my ‘found archive’, other times I set about creating images for a book myself, as time went on the latter was more and more the case. Sometimes though a found image was so strong a driving force that I felt I needed to make a piece of work with it that wasn’t a book. In these instances, the materials and decorative techniques I used and the proportions of the wall piece would all be guided by the original scrap of paper I’d found. Really, what I’m describing is that I created a framework for these pieces of work, whereby the decisions were half made by the found material itself.

    LeatherPanels-TraceyRowledge

    LEFT: Where, covered in mid-blue calfskin, gold-tooled, 2003   RIGHT: Diptych, covered in baby pink goatskin with grey goatskin recessed inlays, 2000

    LeatherPanels5-TraceyRowledge

    LEFT: Buff, covered in turquoise goatskin with leather inlays, 2004   RIGHT: Fidget, stretched native red goatskin, tooled in carbon, 2004

    LeatherPanels3-TraceyRowledge

    Cash, gilded gesso panel on wood, 2005

  2. Bonus // Bookbinder of the Month: Tracey Rowledge

    March 26, 2015 by Erin Fletcher

    Vathek1-TraceyRowledge

    To continue with the same theme from the prior post, I wanted to discuss another unique binding from Tracey Rowledge’s portfolio. The binding is of a 1929 edition of Vathek by William Beckford published by the Nonesuch Press. Bound as a fine binding in biscuit colored goatskin and feathered onlays.

    Vathek3-TraceyRowledge

    This binding is unique within your portfolio. The markings are created through feathered leather onlays instead of gold tooling. Onlays are used rather sparingly in your work, can you talk about the reason why your chose to use onlays on Vathek as opposed to a gold tooled design or colored foils?
    This book contains wonderful illustrations by Marion V. Dorn and the binding further explores my wanting to alter the language of a fine binding. The book has a rough-edge gilt top edge, the endpapers are the same colour as the text-block and are hand-coloured with coloured pencil so that when the book is open the endpapers frame the text-block with the same colours the illustrations contain.

    Vathek2-TraceyRowledge

    The leather-joints are red, the same colour as the endbands, this union I felt brought these two elements together, like an elastic band encircling the book. The natural colour of the leather is for me like a grainy blank canvas and the coloured onlays give the impression of the making of a drawing with coloured pencils: you know when you’re drawing and you lean on another piece of paper and the pencil runs off: over the edge. That’s what I wanted to create – a remnants drawing. Gold tooling wasn’t the right medium for the image, also, I didn’t want the image to be made from tooled impressions, I wanted for the image to sit on the surface of the leather. This was the only way the image felt right.

  3. Bookbinder of the Month: Tracey Rowledge

    March 22, 2015 by Erin Fletcher

    TheEssenceOfBeeing-TraceyRowledge

    The prior posts on Tracey Rowledge’s work have focused on her designs mostly inspired by abstract markings. However, there are a few pieces in her portfolio that stand out for their sheer difference in design. The above binding of The Essence of Beeing by Michael Lenehan with illustrations by Alice Brown-Wagner is bound in black goatskin with a gold tooled design.

    The second binding featured in this post is a copy of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which was bound by Jen Lindsay in a red native-dyed goatskin with rough-edge gilding. Tracey completed the binding by gold tooling the title in 2012.

    Even though letterforms can be viewed as markings in their own right, I wanted to find out why Tracey veered toward a typographic design for these particular bindings.

    I love your use of typography as the single design element on these two bindings. The texture you create by overlapping a word or building up a letter with several impressions of a single tool is really genius. What draws you to use typography over the abstract markings you often employ in your designs?
    With The Essence of Beeing I was interested in combining my handwriting, the nature of the crosshatched images in the book and the wonderful title, to create an image that was the title – to see how far a fine binding could be simplified in appearance – to see if at first glance it could look like an art book. I don’t know if this makes sense, but to try to explain it another way – I really enjoy the look and feel of a fine binding, but I sometimes wonder if they look to others overly laboured. I was exploring in this work, whether I could remove this element.

    Hamlet-TraceyRowledge

    Hamlet was bound by Jen Lindsay in 2002 and it came to me in 2012 to be lettered. Although there was a ten year gap in between the time Jen completed the binding and I gold tooled the lettering, it was very much a collaborative process. We felt it was really important that the lettering worked with the incredible grain of the native red goatskin Jen had bound the book in. The Hamlet lettering is gold tooled using Jen’s handwriting, it being uppercase and superimposed, creates an image that also evokes something about Hamlet itself.

  4. Bookbinder of the Month: Tracey Rowledge

    March 15, 2015 by Erin Fletcher

    AuggieWrensChristmasStory1997-TraceyRowledge

    This is one of my favorite bindings from Tracey Rowledge; the tooling is brilliantly executed and in such a way that is perplexing. Which is precisely why it was included in the interview. Tracey bound this edition of Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story by Paul Auster in 1997 using native red goatskin.

    I’m really intrigued by the design for the binding of Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story that you created in 1997. I would love to hear about the steps involved in executing the design; from the detailed image of this book, the tooling appears staggered, as if the depth of the impressions varied. Were you using a series of hand-made tools to create the overall design and this effect?
    This was a pivotal binding for me, as this image dictated that I alter my gold tooling technique from using albumen glaire and laying the gold on the book, to using BS Glaire and picking the gold up on the tool (Ivor’s method). The tooling was done using a series of pallets and irregular shape brass finishing tools (which I’d made), that overlapped in order to fill various shapes in the image. This was the first time I’d used Caplain leaf (18 carat), it’s a difficult leaf to work with as it’s quite brittle. It remains a favourite leaf to use as it doesn’t tarnish and has a wonderful melancholic tone.

    This book took about 100 hours to gold tool.

    AuggieWrensChristmasStory1997detail-TraceyRowledge

  5. Bookbinder of the Month: Tracey Rowledge

    March 8, 2015 by Erin Fletcher

    SatyrAgainstMankind-TraceyRowledge

    The two bindings featured in this post are earlier pieces from Tracey Rowledge, but I think they represent her core interests in melding simple marks into complex gold tooled designs. The binding above is an edition of A Satyr Against Mankind by The Earl of Rochester, which was bound in a chestnut brown goatskin in 1999.

    Below is one of two bindings Tracey has completed on Ulysses by James Joyce. This particular one being the earlier binding done in 1996. Also bound in a chestnut brown goatskin; the majority of the design is gold tooled with subtle touches of blind tooled lines.

    Ulysses-TraceyRowledge

    There is a sense of exploration in the design these two bindings. The execution itself is awe inspiring and I set out to discuss Tracey’s technique and process for creating such expressive tooled designs.

    The gold tooled design on these two bindings is reminiscent of Ivor Robinson’s work; the style is very free and uncontrived. Do you execute this form of design directly on the book in a spontaneous manner or are you tracing out the design from a planned drawing?
    Thank you for the compliment of writing that these two bindings are reminiscent of Ivor’s work, for me what we have in common is leather, gold leaf and the drawn line. Ivor’s work is majestic in its rightness, the tooled lines have a tension and a stillness, which in some works causes the image to reverberate. My interest is to capture the energy of mark-making via the non-gestural process of gold tooling, I’m interested in the play between how something looks and how it is made. How can something that was made intuitively with a pen or pencil be transcribed by the painstaking process of gold tooling – and yet it can. To gold tool a gestural image you need to transfer the image onto the cover by blinding it in through a hand-made paper template, then you blind-in direct to ensure the grain is crushed in the impression and is of the correct depth; then you paint two layers of BS Glaire into all the impressions and then you gold tool each impression with up to nine layers of gold (this is done by gold tooling three layers at a time). This means that I will go into each impression up to five times.

    For something to look spontaneous it needs to have been painstakingly planned and meticulously executed – Ivor and I certainly had that in common!

    You have been noted to incorporate several shades of gold in your tooling. What are the qualities to mixing different tones of gold?
    The different golds are my pallet of colours. Using a gold that is more yellow or more grey will alter the balance of the image and will take it away from being what I think of as standard gold tooling. Using Moongold can make an image appear playful and delicate, using Caplain can give an image a solemn feel. It depends on what I’m wanting to convey as to what colour leather or paper I use to cover the book and what type of gold leaf I use.

  6. Bookbinder of the Month: Sol Rébora

    November 30, 2014 by Erin Fletcher

    CantoGeneral-SolRebora

    This binding of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General is the most recent binding Sol Rébora has completed and the most important book she has worked with to date. This first edition copy was printed in a limited 500 copies. This particular copy is number 52 and is signed by Pablo Neruda, Diego Rivera and David A. Siqueiros with additional signatures by Cesar Chavez, Carlos Fuentes and Baldemar Velasquez (American labor union activist).

    CantoGeneral3-SolRebora

    The text is printed in black and red with original color printed endpapers illustrated by Diego Rivera (left/front endpaper) and David A. Siqueiros (right/back endpaper). (Click image to enlarge)

    CantoGeneral2-SolRebora

    Why the book is so important to Sol:
    This epic book consists of 15 sections and over 300 separate poems tracing the history of Spanish America. Canto General is considered by many to be the most important work of political poetry of the 20th century in Latin America.

    About this work, I may say this book was sent to me at a perfect time.

    I had been working with the inlay technique used on this binding for the last two years. I had the feeling that I had worked with it enough as to feel free to create any design I wanted, without any fear of the inlay process, but also because I decided to trust my capacity to find solutions to any problem.

    The other important point is: I had spent 15 days in Mexico in February, for bookbinding reasons, sharing time with wonderful people who taught me a lot about their history. Two months later I went to Guatemala, to the Francisco Marroquín University to teach bookbinding. There I had been in contact with their culture, almost completely with the history of Mesoamerica.

    My feeling coming back to Argentina was that I had to make a book, may be an art book, to convey all of my experiences and my feelings on these wonderful trips.

    Two months later, I got this binding commission from Heritage Book Shop and I could believe in such a great opportunity. Pablo Neruda, Canto General, first edition. [As Sol mentions again] The book considered by many to be the most important work of political poetry of the 20th century in Latin America.

    – – – – – – – – – – –

    The book is bound in full leather in the French-style of fine binding. The design is created using thirteen different colors creating the several levels of relief and low relief. The thirteen colors come from goatskin and buffalo leather supplied through Argentina, Mexico, England and France. The title is tooled in green on the spine. The doublures are French goatskin with a design of inlayed circles.

    CantoGeneral7-SolRebora CantoGeneral6-SolRebora CantoGeneral5-SolReboraCantoGeneral4-SolRebora

    The front and back flyleaves are made from Argentinean suede. The book is housed in a matching custom clamshell box covered in orange goatskin leather with the title tooled in turquoise.

    CantoGeneral8-SolRebora

    The design for Canto General is quite beautiful and energetic. The complexity of the design is displayed in the various recessed and raised layers. When you approach a design of this complexity, how detailed and thorough are your steps leading to the final bindings? Are you creating multiple drawings and models of the design?
    To make a design for any binging, I prepare sheets of paper, many are the size of the full cover. I make a fold to place the spine and to have clear sense of where the hinge falls. I start the drawing by composing the three planes (top, back and spine) separately and together simultaneously.

    CantoGeneral9-SolRebora

    After several drawings, I put a selection of them on the studio wall. After mediating over the selection, I choose a final design. Then I scan the design and I start to make color tests in Photoshop.

    CantoGeneral10-SolRebora

    So then I start to work over the book. To place each of these inlay pieces I need a map. This map is the replica of the design, on a translucent (60 gr.) paper. It will help me locate each piece and put it in its rightful place.

    I always use the same map, I do not combine it with another, with this method I can be quite sure the pieces will find the right place. The first pieces of leather on the covers needs to be compensated with paper to make it all level, so I get a flat surface again and start to place the next pieces.

    CantoGeneral11-SolRebora

    The same applies to the spine, every element is thinner, as thin as paper, and that will be strengthened by the following layers of leather. The mosaics are superimposed as well as I keep working. To cut each piece of leather I use a mold-made on heavy paper, (240 gr. in this case). Out of that mold each piece of leather is like a puzzle. Once the entire top is covered, I make the head cup and fold over the turn-ins.

  7. Bookbinder of the Month: Sol Rébora

    November 23, 2014 by Erin Fletcher

    LesRencontres1-SolRebora

    This is my favorite binding to date from bookbinder Sol Rébora. A french text bound in full goatskin with onlays that create a striking, eye-catching design. The overlapping ellipses are creating by using a combination of goatskin and calf. Combining these two skins as onlays is a technique Sol has used in other bindings (like this one or this one). I quite love the look of the textured goat against the smooth calf.

    The binding was created for Les Rencontres de M. de Bréot, which is a novel written by French author Henri-François-Joseph de Regnier in 1904.

    Although it’s hard to choose a favorite, I think this binding might be the one. Did this design stem from a love of 20th century French design binding?
    It could be, I bound this book for an Argentinean bookseller. He participates every year in the Antiquarian book fair in Paris and I specially bound this book so that he could show my work at this fair in Paris. It is a French book and so there you have the result.

    LesRencontres2-SolRebora LesRencontres4-SolRebora

  8. Bookbinder of the Month: Sol Rébora

    November 16, 2014 by Erin Fletcher

    FaustoA-SolRebora

    In this post on Sol Rébora, I am presenting two of her bindings of the text Fausto. Just as was the case with the two bindings she completed on Alice in Wonderland, Sol found inspiration in the individual editions, thus creating two independent and unique design bindings. Fausto was written by Argentinian poet Estanislao del Campo is 1866; the story describes a laborer that goes to see Charles Gounod’s opera Faust and believes the events to really be happening.

    The binding above is bound in full black goatskin. The circular design includes strips of goatskin and calf, offering a nice variety of textures. The title is tooled in gold along the spine.

    The binding below is bound in full calfskin with detail along the front cover fore edge in the signature style we’ve seen on some of Sol’s other bindings. On this binding, the goatskin and calf onlays sit on five tooled levels. The title is tooled in gold along the spine. FaustoB-SolRebora

    These two bindings of Faust0 are quite different. Can you talk about the concepts behind each binding and what made you design them differently?
    After the explanation of the process I use to make a design binding, probably there are not too much to say about.

    Those are totally different editions, different clients, different years, and different prices, which is another very important point that I didn’t mention before, and it is a big condition of course.

    Most of the tooling on your bindings seem reserved to the titles or is done blind. Is there a reason for excluding this technique from your bindings?
    Well, maybe I don’t use traditional tooling on my designs, besides the titles, but it just depend on the designs, if I feel it needs it, I used traditional tooling to make gold lines it as I did on Milongas, Borges.

    I think I just use what I need when I need.

    I mostly like to work with a metal or brass folder, a very thin tool which helps me to make the finishing work on the inlay and the onlay. I do not love the strong lines around the inlays and my feeling is that it makes the composition looks stronger.

    FaustoAB-SolRebora

    Click image to enlarge.

     

  9. Bookbinder of the Month: Sol Rébora

    November 9, 2014 by Erin Fletcher

    BaladaParaUnLoco1-SolRebora

    Sol Rébora bound this special one of a kind text by calligrapher Nancy Leavitt after a serendipitous meeting. The book is bound in the French-style of fine binding in full violet goatskin. The decoration is divided into six levels with onlays in purple and white goatskin.

    The text within this binding is a special edition by Nancy Leavitt. Do have a connection with Nancy, who is a calligrapher and book artist based in Northern Maine?
    I met Nancy in New York in 2006, at the 100th Anniversary Guild of Book Workers Conference. I love her work and I like her very much; she is really a beautiful person and a great artist. I proposed to her that we make a book together and she accepted; so we started to work on it. We looked for a topic which we both like to work with and [settled on the subject of] Tango. After some research we chose [the popular song] Balada para un loco [by poet Hector Ferrer].

    Sometime later she had finished the book, she sent it to me by mail, and I worked on the binding. Both of us worked totally free on our feelings.

    BaladaParaUnLoco2-SolReboraBaladaParaUnLoco3-SolRebora

    Nancy found a way to make a translation, which is very difficult for Tango. With the text and the song, she found a base to create the book.

    Later I bound the book, working with the same process I use for every design binding, but with the plus that I had been part of the creating process of the text in some way. I sent the design to Nancy before I began, (even if she didn’t ask it) and she liked it very much, so I started to work on it.

    It was a wonderful experience.

    Did you find inspiration in the text or do you draw from another source?
    To explain my way to work on a design or to find inspiration I have quite a clear process of work.

    As a starting point in the design process, I engaged in the act of reading the text of the book to be bound or I inquire about the context and history of the edition. To continue as a general basis of the process, I found very necessary to observe carefully all the aspects of the book:

    – Typography: The design of the typeface, its predominant form, size and color.
    – Print Layout: Book cover, typographic case and blank surfaces around the text.
    – Paper: Color, texture and paper weight.
    – Illustrations: Techniques used for illustrations, predominant color, size and quantity thereof.
    – Size and shape of the book: I observe the size of the book, number of booklets [signatures], leaflets or free sheets, and finally the weight of the book.

    From the evaluation of these conditions, I can begin to work on the design of the binding:
    – Structure and construction process: What may be the most appropriate structure and format and sewing by weight.
    – Materials to use: wire, paper, paperboard, leather, fabric, or alternative materials such as acrylic, wood, metal, etc.
    – Textures: Choosing textures in every material used for union or for opposition to the qualities that brings the book.
    – Colors: Colors of the materials I decide to use.
    – Design: Drawings, designs, models, colors and material testing.

    I think the openness and the preservation are the most important points on the construction process of a contemporary design binding, together with “good techniques and aesthetic criteria”.

    These are technical conditions that a binding should have to preserve the criteria that the book brings from the edition, which is accompanied by an aesthetic thought of form and color text, based on the text, work which is responsible editors, designers and illustrators.

    The design and the aesthetics or the artistic expression of the binding should be integrated to create one piece with intellectual and sensory reading from the outside. Finally, I would say the construction techniques of the structure, along with the design of the cover and applied materials, play together to achieve this unit.

  10. Bookbinder of the Month: Sol Rébora

    November 2, 2014 by Erin Fletcher

    SolRebora

    The design on these two bindings are very stylistic of Sol Rebora’s fine binding work. I wanted to ask her about the technique behind this signature look.

    These bindings are bound in a similar fashion with the boards built up with 7 different layers. Are these layers covered in leather off the book and then attached?
    The way I used to build the different layers of relief is:
    I cover the lower layers first, then I use some cardboard, with different thicknesses, and finally I cover the cardboards with very thin leather, working within traditional onlay techniques.

    SolRebora2

    The binding on the left is Cartas de Anastasio el Pollo. The binding is covered in calfskin at the spine with the remaining portion covered in various goatskin relief onlays. The edge to edge doublures are matching the leather near the fore edge of the covers. Sol shared an image of one of the illustrations, which demonstrates her inspiration for the binding design.

    CartasDeAnastasioElPollo-SolRebora CartasDeAnastasioElPollo2-SolRebora

    The binding on the right is Acuarelas. Published by Livraria Kozmos Editora in 1991, this artful text includes watercolors by Lieutenant Robert Pearce. The binding is full leather constructed in four sections. The spine and front edges are covered in a beige goatskin, the central panel is natural box calf and the relief onlays are a series of blue goatskin. The latter has been worked to get different tones of the same color.

    The title has been tooled in gold along the spine.

    Acuarelas-SolReboraAcuarelas2-SolRebora

    The doublures are also beige goatskin, with a single vertical line tooled in gold. The flyleaves are also goatskin from Argentina.

    From Sol on the design concept:
    The design is based on the watercolours in the book, which show outlines of the Brazilian coast taken from the sea. To simulate the movement of the water, I took photos of the water in a swimming pool, printed the pictures and working with a transparent paper, copied the strongest lines. I then developed them to get the feeling of movement. The pieces of blue leather were sanded and burnished to get different tones of the same color.

    Acuarelas3-SolRebora

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  • My name is Erin Fletcher, owner and bookbinder of Herringbone Bindery in Boston. Flash of the Hand is a space where I share my process and inspirations.
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