Adventures in London
Road Trip!
Every 4 weeks a couple of "lucky" bookbinders get to drive our wee van down to London and back on a two day road trip. Last week it was the turn of Gail and I.
We left at 7am on Monday morning and with just a few stops for coffee on the way we had a thankfully uneventful journey to the capital. We blethered all the way and arrived at our first stop, The British Library, at about 3:30pm. After making our delivery there we headed to pick up a little box of books in need of repair from the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths'.
We also needed to deliver an order to the London Library and collect another even bigger one to take home. The London Library give us lots of interesting rebinding work as they are such an eclectic organisation and a beautiful library - I encourage everyone to visit. They run tours!
All this before we even get to check into our hotel!
But, not a minute is wasted as we head out to enjoy the small amount of free time we have to explore the city. Gail and I love a walk to Covent Garden and a look around the quirky stalls and shops. Although we had to cut our wanderings short as we had a dinner date with our bosses!
Robin and Lesley-Anne are currently looking after a huge library cleaning job for the Royal College of Surgeons and kindly offered to take us out for our evening meal. We had a lovely time, a couple of cocktails and tried to keep the work chat to a minimum.
The following morning, Gail and I were up early to get back to the British Library. As we are not allowed to remove any of the materials from the library we need to go and measure up all the items to then create a bespoke box for each back in our workshop. The process can be fairly time consuming but they require such an accurate fit that it is the only way we can do their order effectively.
The British Library is another amazing place. It is like an iceberg as it has more levels under the city as it does above, with the vast majority of their items being stored in temperature and humidity controlled, airless environments below street level. The main areas of the library are littered with people working from notepads and laptops with the reading rooms being completely and eerily silent.
With only one more small collection to do on our way out of London we drove our laden van back, through the rain, to Glasgow. Our highlight of the drive home was meeting these two cheeky chaps at Tebay service station!
It is a long trip to do every month but we need to take care of our customers in London in the same way as we do our lovely Scottish clients!
Back in the Bindery!
Old Meets New in our New Year
This book has been re-backed in leather with the old spine remounted. The top panel had been lost so we tooled it to match.
Happy New Year everyone! We were hard at it up until Christmas, and January certainly isn't breaking us in gently after the festive season!
After a couple of days to catch up with, and finish off a couple of smaller jobs we spent yesterday cleaning the workshop from top to bottom. Decluttering and tidying in preparation for an exciting year!
Having already been awarded a prestigious tender from a huge library in London towards the end of last year, we are preparing to apply for another! These large contracts are really important for us, not only to keep us all in a job, but for to prove how great our little bindery is! We are a small operation, but we take pride in taking the same care over each book in a big order as we do with those brought to us by individual customers who come to our door every day. The quality of every single book has to reach our high standards!
Our next tender application relies on us expanding our more specialised repair and conservation skills. As more and more binding of new books is being done on such a massive scale, mainly by machines, bookbinding by hand is becoming a dying art - especially book repair. Every book brought to us for restoration is different which makes our job more difficult, but also much more interesting!
We find a lot of people want us to rebind their favourite books, books they want to hand down to their children and some that have been passed down to them. Some folk find old books in charity shops and second hand bookshops and take a shine to them, love the smell of them. They are treasured for the pencil notes in the margins, inscriptions on the front page and beautiful illustrations - both the ones printed in the book and the ones your 3 year old scribbled when you left it out near the colouring pens. Books can hold incredible sentimental value for their owners, something a modern e-book could never manage.
If you have a book you'd like restored, just bring it in - we are always happy to chat about books! You could even have a go at fixing it yourself - under our expert supervision of course - on one of our Book Repair Classes.
Bookbinding Classes
Come to one of our Workshops
Our classes usually run two Saturdays a month from 10am until 4pm creating a range of products. You can take our courses all the way through Introduction and Intermediate to the Advanced class, or you could try Box Making, Book Repair or Coptic Sewing. We only have a couple of classes left before Christmas but the schedule for the New Year is organised already and bookable online in our shop. We are surprised at how quickly we are getting bookings for 2017 already so get in fast to avoid disappointment!
We usually only accomodate up to 8 people on a day - we like to keep it intimate! We only have limited space in the workshop - there are 8 or 9 of us working in the bindery on a regular basis so it's only really designed for us! It also means that you get a lot more one-on-one attention at the class which is better for you!
John, our Master Bookbinder, and myself are usually the ones who teach the classes. John did his apprenticeship straight from school and has been working in the industry all his life. As there are very few training programmes available for bookbinding John has been responsible for training everyone in our workshop on the job, so he is the ideal person to teach anyone from absolute beginner to more advanced levels.
Before I started working here at Downie Allison Downie, several years ago now, I took a couple of classes with John purely to feed an interest for beautiful handmade sketchbooks which began for me at art school. Just seeing the workshop and all the things going on here is quite inspiring and many of the peole who have previously joined us for classes now bind or repair books as a hobby at home, some even make a little money from selling the books they make!
As handmade, and small craft industries are becoming more valued it is a great time to try out a new skill and learn to appreciate the time and effort which goes into creating a hand made product. Hand binding uses very little equipment so it is ideal to do from your kitchen table, and the variety of what you can produce is endless!
Classes for Christmas
As Christmas is approaching you can of course buy vouchers for our classes as gifts! The vouchers can be used to book any class and so the lucky recipient can come to a class of their choice.
Classes for Groups
We can also organise classes for groups of varying sizes, either in our workshop or at your venue. You can read about the class we ran at the Glasgow School of Art a short while back in this article.
If you are interested in organising a class, or even just a talk about bookbinding, for your group then you can contact us for more information and we will do our best to accomodate your needs and suggest options for you.
Please share this post - drop hints for Christmas or pass on to any budding bookbinder!
Workshops at The Glasgow School of Art
Workshops at The Glasgow School of Art Portfolio Preparation Course
Bookbinding Workshops at GSA
Last week we were invited to run a couple of bookbinding workshops at the Glasgow School of Art Portfolio Preparation Course.
Robin and I spent the day in the inspiring spaces of the old McLellan Galleries teaching two groups of future artists and designers a little about bookbinding.
Portfolio Preparation Classes are a great way to build up a cohesive body of work for prospective art school applicants to take to interviews.
At GSA they run Summer classes as well as an evening course with a brilliant and varied output to encourage their students to work independently to develop their own creative processes. Similar courses can also be found in a number of other colleges.
Although not used to teaching quite so many people at once(!) the classes went really well and everyone went home with a couple of very interesting sketchbooks!
If you are part of a class, group or organisation who might enjoy a bookbinding workshop we can tailor one to suit your needs. Contact us to see what we can do for you!
Hot Off the Press!
See our Editorial in the new issue!
We are very excited to our name in print! We are the subject of a wonderful 5-page editorial in the new September/October issue of Homes & Interiors Scotland. Find it in newsagents now and let us know what you think? Learn more about our bindery and see some lovely images of the work we do. You can also find it online but it's so much more satisfying to hold the glossy magazine in your hands - as bookbinders we are all about the physical article!
Click here to read all about it!
