Is there such a thing as a book emergency? Other than fire and flood, I often try to tell myself there is not. It is merely someone’s impatience. It’s a useful thing for me to keep in mind. I should use it as my mantra. But I already have one.

This time, however, it was my impatience. It took two ENTIRE weeks for me to receive my copy of the The Neale M. Albert Collection of Miniature Designer Bindings. I even called the bookstore because they were off their usual timeline.

Finally it arrived!

Tom Grill takes MUCH better photos than I do.

I saw, in person, many of the bindings in the catalog. I did not have descriptions of the bindings at the time, just binder’s name and title of the book (and not always that). One of the bindings I tried to photograph was by Paul Delrue. When I came across it in the catalog, it gave me a giggle. The description states, among other details, that the binding was French sewn by “Gavin Povey.” Ahem. I believe the cataloger meant Gavin Dovey who, I happen to know, worked with Paul Delrue for a bit before coming to the US.

It’s all very nice that I got a laugh out of the Gavin typo, but I was left with the question: what is French sewing?

Turning to my ABC:

Chain stitch: A sewing stitch which catches up previous sewing threads but is not sewn to a support, also called unsupported sewing. Used in Coptic, Ethiopian, Near Eastern and Islamic binding and in France in the 16th century (called French sewing). Machine sewing is a type of chain stitch sewing.

No supports. That sounds like a good choice when binding a book slightly less than 3″ x 3″.

As I read through the catalog, another binding caught my eye. It is, I think, a very unusual technique, but I have seen it before. When I saw who the binder was, I knew why. It was a very delicate Mark Cockram binding, with panels of crushed and laquered eggshell. Guess whose first teacher was Mark Cockram, back in the days when they both lived in Lincoln? None other than current resident of the USA, Gavin Dovey (or should I say Povey?).

Several years ago, Gavin made something rather clever using eggshell panels. He describes the process briefly here [click the image]:

On her blog, Jana Pullman has a very detailed description of an eggshell panel project she did in 2010.

Anyone else experimenting with eggshell panels?