On my post on Cook's Voyage, my friend and colleague, Mihai from Romania, left a brief, yet commissarial comment about a daily dilemma that "common" bookbinders have to face, which prompted me to write this post. The following is his comment, (copy-pasted); ------------- Very very beautiful! In my experience, I m faced with a dilemma: doing the best restoration job I can or listening to what the client wants. I ve often volunteered to sew a book on my own time when the client just wanted it glued, so it would cost less, because the book was worth it. I feel bad doing a cheap job, but I reali ..read more

The client of this Geneva Bible asked me to take series of pictures of the restoration process, which included the brief steps of Cambridge on the front and back covers. Just for the sake of it, I thought I should put them on my blog in case someone wants to know how it's done. As you see, it's a no brainer; it's basically the same concept as stencil, and hand-tooling the framing with or without gold at the end.By the way, this common design is called Cambridge because it became popular among binders in Cambridge in the 18th century.Well, if you are interested in acquiring this particular Gen ..read more

Just to keep the momentum of keeping up my blog going before my attention completely goes back to what's on my workbench, I took some pictures of my recent works to share with you guys. A few years ago, I had developed a strange physical condition that made my hands shake out of the blue, which prevented me from doing intricate works like gold gilt/tooling. But it has gotten better and I haven't had the symptom little over a year. So now I've been able to tool without a fear of unpredictable sudden shakes that would ruin hours worth of the entire job; the tooling is done at the end of bindin ..read more

It's been over a year since my last post, but I haven't forgotten about my blog; I've just been too busy to pay attention to anything other than what's on my work bench. (I'm horrible at multi-tasking ..) The reason I decided to write this time is to remind folks, who are planing to get their Family Bible restored, of the importance of choosing the competent/experienced real restorer. There seem to be too many people who call themselves "bookbinders", with only a brief knowledge of binding books that they obtained from watching Youtube videos, attempting to "restore" books for profit, or bind ..read more

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