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6646 Hollywood Boulevard
Hollywood, CA, 90028
United States

(213) 223-6921

Stephanie Gibbs, a bookbinder in Los Angeles, CA, offers edition and fine binding, book conservation, custom boxes, and paper repair for contemporary and historic books, manuscripts, and documents to clients throughout California.

studio news

a score of seasons

Stephanie Gibbs

The completion of the 2022 / 2023 holiday edition brings with it a completion of the holiday editions as a project. I started this tradition in my second year of graduate school, with the 2003 / 2004 cards: a project to fill the anxious moments of end of term assessments. During the intervening years, they’ve been a source of joy, an expression of curiosity, a way of trying out new techniques and new materials, and a chance to be frivolous in a way that my normal studio practice didn’t always permit. There have been years when the holiday edition has been the only purely creative project that I’ve undertaken; there have been years when my brain was ricocheting in hundreds of directions and the edition delivered well beyond the “holiday season;” there have been years when I’ve finished the edition and felt a great sense of accomplishment at the outcome.

And now it has been twenty years of holiday editions, and I feel like they have fulfilled their purpose. I have a more dedicated creative process which co-exists with my studio process; the edition itself has grown into a fuller artist-book undertaking than I ever intended for it to. In future years I will probably continue with holiday cards, but with reduced ambition, as my focus turns towards other ways of realizing my projects.

as above, so below

Stephanie Gibbs

The holiday edition has soared through the postal system, arriving in mailboxes near and far, in time for the Lunar new year. Its flight corresponds with the green comet that is wending its way past us this month, and caps a year when things mostly returned to normal, although many of us [me] aren’t quite sure what normal is supposed to be any more.

This year’s edition started with curiosity about two of the options offered by my printing company: the ability to print on mylar [polyester sheets], and the ability to print metallic ink. Could they … print metallic ink on mylar sheets, I asked? They’d try, they said, and: it worked! Since I generally achieve metallic outcomes using a kensol hot foil stamper, and since this would melt mylar rather than embossing images, I wanted to experiment to see what would happen.

From previous years [year of fog, sphere ornaments], I knew that mylar can’t be attached using glue, and so, in my first prototypes, I was concerned with finding a construction method that was adhesive free. Accordion books are traditionally great for this type of material, but I wanted something that played with the reflective qualities of the mylar, in addition to the translucence. While folding samples, I realized that a simple overlapped panel with a slit cut half-way through would allow the two panels to lock into position; and then, by sewing through the center folds, I could use a modified pamphlet stitch to anchor the star into shape.

Last year’s edition was the sea, and it felt appropriate for this year’s edition to be the stars. During the summer, photographs from the Hubble telescope made headlines; the year before, I had read a novel re-imagining the life of Kepler’s mother, who was tried as a witch while he was the astronomer royal. I’ve always loved the idea of the music of the stars, and believe that if any composer has the ability to translate that movement into sound, it would be the precision and balance of Bach, and found a manuscript of the Well Tempered Clavier to convey that song in these cards. While playing with the structure of the star, I added a belt, an echo of Saturn’s rings, and saw this as an opportunity to incorporate a line of text from Emerson’s essay, Circles: Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. The elements when brought together as a whole allow you to go deeper, into whichever direction you find inspiring.

While it seems like bad astronomy to have both rings and a comet tail, I liked the idea of folding a paper tassel to have both the message of well wishes for the new year and the colophon information dancing below the star, and was thrilled to discover that the Thai metallic paper from Hiromi Paper can be run through a standard laser printer.

Once I received the printed paper inner star, and the printed mylar outer star, I created two jigs for scoring fold lines, punching sewing holes, and cutting slits for the paper ribbons. The inner star is smaller than the outer star, so that it nests inside the mylar, and so the measurements needed to be recalculated for each. After scoring and then folding the pages, I cut them into individual strips and began the initial stages of assembly.

The tassels were cut and folded; the ribbon rings woven through the mylar outer wrappers, and the wrappers locked into position; and the paper interior folded and also held in place with a slit-lock.

The tassels and the hanging ribbon were attached to the stars at the same time that the outer and inner layers were sewn together, using a modified pamphlet stitch with a backstitch element to anchor the star into the correct position.

Since the post office has a tendency to destroy my cards in transit, they always receive some type of wrapper to protect them on their way. This year the wrapper also included instructions for opening up the star for display — since I know it isn’t always obvious what, exactly, the holiday edition is.

My cats received a mini-edition of their own: originally, I was going to make a special “cats of recipients” edition-within-an-edition, but, even though I anticipated this year’s project being substantially less involved than last year’s, it still took a month to assemble after receiving the printed elements, and so the feline mini-edition was allowed to exist purely in the “conceptual” state.

Wishing you — and your cats — a very happy new year!

System Theory

Stephanie Gibbs

System Theory purchase (ships 6/15/2022)

process notes after description | video of volume 2

“We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.” — William Bateson

Two volume artist’s book in clamshell box. A study of lichen as a system, and of society as a system: a lens for examining how the organism requires thinking and acting beyond the immediate needs of the individual.

Hand painted wood veneer covers [designs vary], 6 hand embroidered pages, 8 woodcut prints, 6 woodcut collages digitally printed on fabric, and two essays: Twelve Readings on the Lichen Thallus by Trevor Goward, and A System of Logic by John Stuart Mill, with historic lichen imagery. The hand-embroidered pages are the text from the Sociology entry of The Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th edition, which describes society as a organism working towards the health of the whole over the desires of the individual.

9"x 9". Edition of 10. Two volumes in clamshell box. Ships 6/15/2022. $4,250

In the early autumn of 2021, I became fascinated by the unresolved nature of the definition of lichen: how it is a combination of algae and fungus; how it forms a third, completely different organism than would be possible without this combination; how science is still flummoxed by aspects of it: is it an organism? Is it mostly a fungus? Is it a parasite? Is it mutually beneficial? I was interested in their variety and their functionality: the time scale they operate in, by the climates they grow in, how they display interdependence into a new whole.

Different scientists have different interpretations, as it was only at the invention of more powerful microscopes in the late 18th century that Erik Acharius teased out the constituent parts. One of the books about lichen that I most enjoyed was Kem Luther’s “Boundary Layer,” which includes a reference to the work of Canadian scientist Trevor Goward, author of a series of essays entitled Twelve Readings on the Lichen Thallus. These personal essays combine science with storytelling to explore the nature of lichens, and conclude that they can best be experienced as systems rather than as individual parts acting in self interest. Trevor Goward very kindly gave me permission to reprint his essays, which I abridged to tell the story of a system formed of interdependent parts.

This led me to start searching for other metaphors that explored the nature of systems: what would make lichen something that other people could conceptualize, who weren’t already knowledgeable? What would make lichen larger than a biological curiosity? I started looking into other examples of networks and systems: neuroscience, brain theory and the nervous system; transportation hubs; samples of manufacturing; and then came across John Stuart Mill’s book which established social science, A System of Logic. There is a chapter that applies logical thinking to the study of human rights and society — in short, the establishment of sociology as a field — the study of humanity and politics as a system rather than as individual actors.

The rest of the creation process formed around combining these elements in a unity representing both the biology of lichens and the science of society, telling both narratives concurrently without causing information overload or blurring the essential nature of each subject. The creation and construction of the artist’s book is a combination of form and function to explore the narrative of systems being more than their individual components.

The text of the book is the abridged essays by Goward; the borders of the pages have the abridged text of Stuart Mill. Throughout the book, imagery from the early scientists has been brought into the page designs: the botanical illustrations of Acharius, Nageli, and Westrings.

The three disparate elements of volume one mirror the nature of lichen [algae, fungus, cyanobacteria; Goward, Stuart Mills, historic botanical plates], brought into a different tri-part format in volume two: hand-embroidered text, woodblock prints, and digital collages.

Volume two uses a more poetic exploration of the visual nature of lichen, with the most laborious and slow-growing method of creating text on the page that is possible — hand embroidery. This outcome was inspired both by the long tradition of embroidered book covers and more directly by the fabric books of Louise Bourgeois for inspiration in how cloth could work as a book structure. [New York Times | MoMA [original] | [edition] ]

The text literally grows on the substrate, the way lichen grows on trees and rocks; and it is slow, slower even than calligraphy or using handset type: it operates at the scale that lichen grows. I had a copy of the famous Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition, and the article on Sociology echoes the message of volume one:

It is a feature of organisms that as we rise in the scale of life the meaning of the present life of the organism is to an increasing degree subordinate to the larger meaning of its life as a whole. The efficiency of an organism must always be greater than the total of its members acting as individuals.

I extracted a total of six excerpts from the text, which illustrate this concept of the sum being greater than the parts.

I was interested in incorporating a woodgrain print element to the project, based on the photograph from the nature hike [above] with the lichen growing on a felled trunk. A Canadian woodworkers forum described sanding the wood smooth and then using a wire brush drill attachment to pull out the soft grain to raise the grain, so that the rings would form prints. My studio was partitioned into a special sanding area (plastic cloths hanging from the ceiling) and sanding and wire-brushing commenced.

These sanded blocks were then turned into rubbings using graphite on paper, then dropped into Photoshop, and digital collages were made using the rubbings and the hand-dyed covers [see below]. The resulting collages were digitally printed onto organic cotton, which was dyed in the studio in a bath of acorn dye [acorns collected by my nephews], and cut down into panels for the books.

The embroidered panes and digital collages were trimmed with a rough edge, formed into signatures with a second embroidered panel and collage, and the outer edges hand-stitched.

Bringing the woodcut element into sharper relief, inked woodblock prints were created by printmaker Catherine Ulitsky, who accompanied me on the lichen walk through the Hawley Bog pictured earlier. In addition to being a trained professional printmaker, Catherine also has a long history of interest in the natural environment and our relationship with it, and her selections of woodblocks and thoughtful inking bring a sharp visual focal point into the edition, providing a foundation for the embroidery and collages to grow in relation to.

The covers of the books are maple veneer panels, hand dyed in a range of colors and patterns to resemble the various palettes and forms that lichen takes, on trees and on stones. Each cover is different; while the covers of volume one and volume two are in relationship to each other as far as tone, it was never the intention to have them match or coordinate. Nature is too diverse for me to be interested in that as a solution. A selection of these panels were used as a base and color layer for the digital collages of volume two.

The same way that lichen is a relationship between disparate elements that forms a complex, functional system, this book incorporated the skills and talents of a group of people that I am thrilled were graciously involved in the project. Without Trevor Goward’s essay, Catherine Ulitsky’s woodblock prints, and the talented handcraft of my studio assistant, Kayla Mattes, this project would not have unified into the whole presentation that it offers the reader.

Field Guide

Stephanie Gibbs

Field Guide is a two volume artist's book edition that traces mankind's fractured relationship with nature, stemming from our difficulty in recognizing that we are, in fact, a part of nature.

production notes below description

I shall collect plants and fossils, and with the best of instruments make astronomic observations.

Yet this is not the main purpose of my journey.

I shall endeavor to find out how nature’s forces act upon one another, and in what manner the geographic environment exerts its influence on animals and plants.

In short, I must find out about the harmony in nature.

— Alexander von Humboldt

Volume 1, Field Guide, has the abridged text of Man, A Machine, written by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in 1747, and a thorough range of historic skeleton illustrations, presented in the order of the traditional "evolutionary tree of life" that has biology reaching its pinnacle in modern day human beings. It is covered in rabbit fur (various patterns).

Volume 2, Field Guide to the Anthropocene, uses historic Field Guides covering a range of topics, to depict visually how humans have continued to insist on describing the natural world through how it specifically affects humans; it is also organized internally in the same order as Volume 1, starting with plants and ending with human beings (and war). The cover material is a camouflage fabric.

The pages of both volumes were digitally printed, then hand dyed using tea, walnut husks, and hibiscus flowers. Edges painted. Titles engraved on brass tags, mounted into front covers.

Limited edition of 15. Two volumes in clamshell box. 2019/2021.

Work on this project started in the spring of 2019. Do you remember those heady early spring days? I was just about to depart for Seattle, and in the planning stages of a trip to Japan (Seattle was full of delicious pastries, Japan is still in the future).
At the time, I had two fuzzy cats, Ferdinand and Charlie. Now, I have two tuxedo cats, Ezra and Vincent. Obviously, other things have happened in the intervening two and a half years, which accounts for why it has taken said amount of time to finish this edition, but let’s just spend a moment admiring the cats.

The entire project was undertaken because I wondered — how do you cover a book in fur? Whenever I see a book as a prop in a film, I’m filled with [occasionally irrational] envy that I was not the person who made that prop, and I want to have the skill set to be able to do literally anything that a prop master requests, regardless of whether it’s a thing that I’ve done before or not. And that Harry Potter book really made me want to know … how do you do that? There aren’t any bookbinding how to manuals that really go into working with weird materials, but I’ve never let that stop me before — even back in graduate school, I used a rattlesnake skin on an artist’s book just because I wanted to see how it would work (it worked).

In order to figure out how to even work with fur, I ended up using the extensive tailoring collection at the LAPL — books published in the 1930s and 1940s that provided directions on how working with fur is different from working with leather or cloth. While there are significant differences between a goatskin that has been tanned specifically for use in bookbinding and fur for the clothing trade, it was at least a starting point for how the material behaved and what types of technical issues would need to be addressed.

Oddly enough, in one of those moments of synchronicity that make you wonder if the universe is paying a bit too much attention, as these books were nearing final completion, the New Yorker published an article about Margaret Wise Brown, and discussed how she had enough clout with her publishers to insist that the first run of Little Fur Families be covered in rabbit skin, with later editions in fake fur. I had spent two years looking for examples of fur in bookbinding, and suddenly, here was one, unexpectedly. Unfortunately, the first editions were missing from both the LAPL and UCLA special collections, and the other library copies are in traditional laminated covers, but the Beverly Hills public library had a copy of a recent fake fur edition, which was at least something to study to see how the internal structure and turn-ins were handled.

Once I had worked through enough of the technical issues regarding the material, I began to think about this as an artist’s book edition. If I wanted to cover a book in fur, what should the content be?

Obviously, the content should be bones.

After I had amassed a geological quarry’s worth of skeletons, I started thinking about the text. I wanted … a bone identification guide? An excavation guide? A field guide? The more I looked into field guides, the more I realized that a field guide of field guides was a fascinating lens through which to tell the story of how mankind has defined the natural world around the needs of humanity. So while looking for text for volume one (bones), I inadvertently created volume two (field guide of field guides).

This still left me with the question of how to give the skeletons context, so I started reading natural history and philosophy concerning the ability of humanity to see itself as separate from all other aspects of creations. This belief stems from the very first chapters of Genesis, where it is declared that man was created in god’s own image, and has led to millennia of exploitation of natural resources and cruelty to animals (and women, who were seen as closer to animals than to men). (Even today I’ve met [had first but not second dates with] people who believe that humans are somehow more than other animals.) In doing this reading, I came across the essay Man, A Machine, by the French philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, writing in the 18th century that, nope, we’re just functional organisms like everything else. He was excommunicated for this. I loved this essay, and the writing style, but in abridging it for this project, I removed most of what he had to say about the intellectual powers of women. (He was on the right track, but it was still the 18th century, and women were still property.)

Now that I had the collection of skeletons, the essay, and the collection of Field Guides, I started working on page layouts for the text. The skeletons are arranged in the order of the traditional “tree of evolution,” which sees, as its pinnacle, the development of modern mankind.

The skeletons face the inner margin, with the text swimming around the outer margins, and evolve from fish to birds to mammals to apes to humans.

In the second volume, the Field Guides start with plants, then works through the same order as the skeletons — fish, birds, mammals, humans — ending with that most human of creations, war.

I experimented with different page color backgrounds, and settled on tea-dying the pages as a way to bring texture into the digital printing.

time passed

To begin the process of dying the pages, strong tea was made, and the pages were dipped for about a minute and then line dried.

After they had dried, there still just wasn’t quite enough texture to the paper surface, so I experimented with other types of dyes.

Using a speckled effect in walnut husk and hibiscus provided the level of visual softening that I was looking for.

After the pages were dyed, speckled, dried, pressed, and trimmed, the edges were painted a dull gold that adds more visual texture rather than shine.

Which brought me back to the process that started it all — covering the books with fur. It really isn’t like working with leather. For a lot of the process, you’re working just by feel — because the fur obscures everything that the skin is doing. While my techniques were informed by my research and previous experiments, they were, honestly, also informed by growing up in Dallas in the 1980s. Let’s just say that I hadn’t bought hair spray since I was in high school, and some of the turn-in trimming techniques owe more to the concept of the Flowbee than to any bookbinding techniques.

The engraved brass name tags were the result of wondering how to attach a title to fur, my previously experiments therein being lackluster, but it was resolved through a lifetime of having fuzzy feline companions. The hand-stamped unevenness that the dog supplier produced I found charming and in keeping with the feel of the book.

And so the edition is completed [the clamshell boxes are still in process]. I feel it is important to note that I did strongly consider using imitation fur for this edition: while this book’s nickname has definitely been the hunter and the wabbit, I’m very aware of the ethical and environmental issues associated with the use of fur. I live in a state where SB-5 strictly regulates the sale and use of fur. While I’m not a vegetarian — while I use goat and calf frequently in my bookbinding practice — there is a definite ick factor that happens simultaneously with the ooo fuzzy reaction. I think this is important. I want readers to be equally fascinated and appalled: that is the crux of the anthropocene, a world that we’ve created in our own image, that is slowly destroying our ability to continue to survive.

across the seas

Stephanie Gibbs

The holiday edition was completed and set sail at the end of the New Year weekend — bringing, hopefully, tranquil seas as we enter 2022. This past year was … intense. There really aren’t that many other ways to describe it. On a global scale, we had tiktok sea shanties, the Ever Given canal blockage, the backups at the Port of Long Beach, and, apparently, the Gulf of Mexico caught on fire. I didn’t even realize that last one until getting ready to write this essay.

On a personal scale, I watched the Pirates of the Caribbean, and had a brief moment of wondering if my brother had been kidnapped by pirates in the Indian Ocean (outcome: it was a pocket dial, not a ransom call). We were allowed to travel, then we were advised to reconsider those travel plans. We ended up more or less where we began, except time passed, turbulent and storm-tossed.

So, obviously, this year’s card was always going to be about the sea. 

From a technical standpoint, my printing company acquired a digital die cutter a couple of years ago, and I’d been curious about its capabilities. When my brain hears “die cutting”,  it immediately throws out “POP UP BOOKS.” So I knew early on that there was going to be a pop-up element to the card. I hadn’t previously used the cut-and-fold accordion book technique for the holiday edition, although I’ll frequently use it for other occasions; I like that it allows a book to be made from a single sheet of paper, and that the numerous mountain and valley folds would accommodate the pop-up elements that I wanted to incorporate. 

The structure of the cards references back to a similar approach that I took for the 2006/2007 edition — which was before I posted photos of the process of making the cards; I had only started making them in graduate school, 2003/2004. (There’s also a resemblance to the 2011/2012 “year of fog,” using a photo collage gradient with poem overlay, on an accordion book.) It’s fascinating to look back and see both how I was thinking about structures, and how they’ve developed and matured. (They’ve also gotten a lot more time-intensive and expensive to create, produce, and mail.)

The Poetry Foundation has a marvelous database of contemporary and historic poems; I did some searching along the lines of “journey,” “ocean,” “ship,” and was utterly charmed by a recent translation and compilation of Socrates’ “The Sea”. I’ve been in Los Angeles long enough that, even though I only make it to the beach once or maybe twice a year, I have plenty of photos of the changing colors of the water, and I decided to lean into being that person who sends pictures of the beach to friends shoveling snow in colder climates. In 2020, I restored a book of maps (Munstero’s Cosmographiae) from the 1550s, and, at the time, took note of the number of ships and sea monsters that were depicted scattered across the oceans. (In a news article that isn’t about catastrophe, the Smithsonian published a piece this year about the excavation of a ship from this era.) (Here’s another, from Vanity Fair, with fights over sunken treasure!)

At this point, I had: the text; a collection of photos of the sea; a collection of images of ships and sea monsters; historic maps. I dropped everything into InDesign, and arranged the photos to run chronologically from morning light to late afternoon, and aligned all the horizons. The text,  which runs across the skies, had page breaks put in which effectively mirror the shapes of waves — a spread has more lines, then progressively fewer, then increases again. This is subtle, but I wanted a sense of motion in the reading of the text itself. The orientation of the ships, fish, and monsters was shifted around, putting each element in play with the other elements and with the text.  As the triangles that separate each section are both hidden and visible, and since this is a book about the sea, I treated them as wave forms, and filled the space with ocean. Then I had to learn how to incorporate die cutting marks into the file; while I didn’t end up using the digital die cutting machine (it tore the paper when there were sharp turns), I’m glad that I went through the process of learning how to set up the files.

Once the printed pages were in the studio, I could start the process of assembly. The first step was to manually create what the digital die cutting wasn’t able to accomplish; I set up a jig to punch holes at the beginning and end of each outline, since part of a successful pop-up function is that the cuts are as parallel to each other as possible (otherwise the element opens at an angle). Then the outlines were freehand cut around each illustration. 

After all of the outlines were cut, the page, still whole, was folded along the mountain folds. When the pages were then folded for the valley folds, the pop-ups were encouraged to fold into the opposite direction from the parent sheet. 

After the sheets were folded vertically, the horizontal cuts, separating the pages from each other, followed along the dividing line of the images. At the end of each row, a 45 degree fold and turn were incorporated, to allow the book to both twist and then remain in a single plane. A larger hole was punched at this juncture point, to accommodate the movement. 

The books were then folded up into compact 2” squares, and placed in the press to set all the creases. 

I was originally going to typeset “best wishes for 2022” in the same font as the text, but “2022” is difficult to typeset: it’s inelegant on the page. I tried several different fonts, then realized that my own handwriting would allow me to adjust the spacing of the numbers more precisely. Even here, I shifted the alignment a bit in Photoshop before having the stamping dies made. The pastedown is foil stamped onto Twinrocker paper, then tabbed onto the last page of the book. 

The covers are a gray Twinrocker paper, the ship woodblock illustration on the front stamped with a pewter foil — the exterior of the book is a ship at moonlight, enclosing the progress of the day within. 

By this time I was ready to be done with the cards and just wrap them with a paper belt as in previous years, but, well, there’s a point where you’ve done so much work, that there’s no reason not to just keep doing more. Vintage ribbons were used for the foredge ties; however, being vintage, there wasn’t enough of any one color for the full edition, so some are gray and some are blue. 

In the spirit of “nature abhors a vacuum,” I was never going to leave the reverse of the card blank. The concept of a map element on the reverse featured in the 2019/2020 cards, although here they are more formally designed. The Cosmographiae had a number of charming maps to choose from; while I was tempted by the new world, I decided the whole world (Typus Orbis Universalis) was a better depiction of current events. The original map was then populated with all of the various ships, islands, and land creatures from throughout the original book’s text and other maps; my darlings were added to Nova Scotia, and I dropped myself in as a sea monster in the Caribbean.  When the text of the book is opened out and flattened from the cover, the map can be read. 

Since at this point I was leaning hard into “why stop now,” the card then received custom envelopes. Going through my various reference books on how-to-fold, the square that opens into a flower matched the emotional feel of the book; it’s larger than the books, to accommodate the thickness, and has a more modern aesthetic — a crisp encapsulation of the more flamboyant interior. 

Wishing you the very best in the year ahead: a tranquil harbor, a warm sun, a cool drink.

entering the field

Stephanie Gibbs

One of the most common emails that I receive is an inquiry about where and how to learn bookbinding, or book conservation. I have a set response that I will post here: however, please be aware that this field is an interconnected web of skills and training, and that certain training programs will focus on certain aspects that others will not. This is not intended to be an exhaustive guide, but provides a starting point for further research and exploration.

In my own studio, I do not use unpaid interns, and only hire assistants with studio experience [application here]. Private lessons are available; however, these are most suitable for practicing artists, advanced undergraduates / graduate students, and those interested in applying to art or conservation programs. 

Bookbinding and book conservation, as practiced in the United States and England, are generally regarded as separate professional fields. I wrote a paper about this in graduate school; I’m not going to delve into the details here.

If you are interested in a professional career working in a library or museum collection as a conservator, you will need an accredited MA degree specializing in conservation of books and/or paper. Please be aware that MA degrees do not teach basic bookbinding: this is a skill set that they expect students to bring with them into the program. MA programs lean heavily into chemistry, decision making and evaluation, preservation, bibliographic history, ethics, and conservation treatment and materials decisions. Which schools are offering MA training in conservation varies from year to year as funding, staffing, and grants are unstable. These programs are very competitive. For professional training, you’ll have to do a preprogram internship (Getty, Library of Congress, etc) before applying; the internships are also competitive and students are expected to have some working knowledge of the field through workshops and other coursework. Internships are posted in the autumn and winter for summer availability. Internships are available at various museums and research libraries, but many have been postponed due to the Covid-19 health situation.

If you are interested in a career as an edition binder, you will need the same basic bookbinding skills as for entrance into an MA program; however, you will cobble together the skills and context for edition binding through a combination of short courses, MFA or BFA programs, conferences, apprenticeships, and other informal routes. Please note that while many edition binders know the fundamentals of letterpress printing, this is generally considered a separate professional field, and there is rarely in-studio overlap of the practices. Likewise, the skills of paper making, marbling, printmaking and screenprinting are transferable but not actively incorporated into edition work. As with conservation programs, the universities and colleges offering MFA and BFA programs have a tendency to change as staff retire or funding is reallocated.

For training opportunities, research:

Be aware that it will take several years before you qualify for a masters program, and it is important to find diverse training centers for short courses beforehand. Academic training in book history, in addition to workshops in handskills, will also be helpful in applying to graduate programs. 

Some commercial binderies offer training to staff, but they tend to pay minimum wage and are not considered professional training. 

See the book arts web ( https://www.philobiblon.com/ ) and the American Institute for Conservation ( https://www.culturalheritage.org/ ) for further leads.

a year of liminal spaces

Stephanie Gibbs

It’s December, 2020. The election happened. That it was as close as it was is heartbreaking. That baby steps are being taken to resume civil society is heartening, but it shouldn’t have to be. This past year has been one of feeling caught in the in-betweens; stagnant, anxious, and unable to focus. I’m slowly regaining my concentration, and with it my equanimity, but for many months there have been both too many moments while somehow never quite enough time. In the uncertain days of October, I channeled my anxiety into the holiday edition, which makes this year’s the earliest completion ever.

the holiday edition 2020-2021: The Time-Being

2020 marked my five-years-in-Los-Angeles anniversary, and the traditional gift for this milestone is wood. Hiromi Paper carries a stock of paper-wood (wood veneer) products, and I’d been curious about using them for printing and foil stamping, so this year’s edition started with the desire to incorporate wood in some format.

As I cycled through the maelstrom of the year, I struggled to anchor in the present tense. It’s a difficult task for me at the best of times; I tend to live three steps in the future, and suddenly the future was too foreign, and the present too fraught. One of the books I read this year introduced me to the Buddhist philosophy of time as linked moments, rather than a progression, as explored by the Zen Buddhist teacher Dogen in his essay on Being-Time. This was a useful reminder, to value the present moment as a moment, rather than looking at either the moments that didn’t happen, or the moments that have not yet happened. I really liked the translation by Thomas Cleary, but the one by Dan Welch and Kazuaki Tanahashi is a bit easier to parse.

Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time.

In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time-being, they are your time-being.

And:

Practice-enlightenment is time. Being splattered with mud and getting wet with water is also time.

At this point, I had the material (wood veneer) and the text (Being-Time), and I started to think about format. Knowing that this year’s text was from Buddhist philosophy and has a rigid material as the substrate, the format of the palm leaf book was immediately apparent as being most appropriate. Palm leaf books are traditional to southern Asian religious texts, and often incorporate calligraphy with small ornamental flourishes; there are some great tutorials online: I especially liked this one from the University of Iowa. Additionally, an early western essay was available from JSTOR, which provided a interesting look at the bibliographic interpretation of the format in the west. That my adopted city of Los Angeles is awash in palm trees adds to the appropriate nature of this format.

After printing a test run on my laser printer at home, I was happy with the proof of concept, but struggled with legibility of the text. Many of the original manuscripts have etched lines guiding the calligraphy, so I added a thin line on the staves to assist with reading. Likewise, I liked the decorative elements around the sewing holes, and incorporated medieval heraldry imagery as a foil stamped element for the sewing stations.

The text had a tendency to rub off of the paperwood, so I did three tests with different fixatives: PVA size, matte medium, and klucel-g (a conservation consolidant). They helped fill in the grain of the wood, but then needed to be buffed with sandpaper and steel wool. And then they actually printed even less well on my home printer: thankfully they printed beautifully on commercial printers.

After printing, the sewing stations were stamped in red foil; then the paperwood was backed with a decorative Japanese paper. They were then punched for sewing, then cut into individual staves.

I wasn’t sure what type of sewing method would be the most stable; after a few tests, knotting the thread between each stave helped keep everything in alignment. While I liked the frivolous nature of the gold thread, it was significantly more brittle than the red thread, and tended to break during the sewing process. Looping the ends as an extension at the top allows the books to be hung, as a broadside.

And so, folded against themselves, wrapped, and posted, they fly into the final days of what has been a year of turmoil, and a year for trying to hold onto the smallest of moments, of catching my breath and breathing deeply, in and through the uncertainty of what has been and what will be.

Coda. This rather summarizes the year: an upside-down pane, noticed two days after the cards were mailed. How many were affected? Who are the recipients of this bibliographic irregularity (and hopefully rarity)? When I say my concentration has been shattered to pieces, this neatly encapsulates the result...