The bookbinder's craft

The workshop smells of paste and wet leather. On the bench lies an eighteenth-century book taken apart into gatherings, like a patient in surgery: the last person to sew it died two hundred years ago, and the new sewing has to hold a conversation with theirs.

The rule of the craft is reversibility: everything done must be undoable without damage. Hence starch paste rather than modern adhesives, hence linen thread, hence vegetable-tanned leather. Several pieces in our shop came out of this workshop — when a listing says "restored binding", this note is the fine print.