On Monday evening the winners of Designer Bookbinders 3rd International Bookbinding competition ‘Hero Works’ were announced at the Awards Ceremony and exhibition opening at the Bodleian Library’s new Weston Library, Oxford.
Continue reading “Winners Announced: Designer Bookbinders International Competition 2017”
The San Francisco Bay Area is a hotbed of book arts with a long-standing tradition of French-style binding. Historically, binding in the Northeast US owes more to the English and Germans. I’m not going to discuss dates, patterns of immigration and migration, or happenstance. The research has been done and written about by actual binder-scholars. I refer you to the index to the journal of the Guild of Bookworkers. These days, in San Francisco, you can get excellent training in both French and English binding methods from the many binders who reside and teach in the area.
The point is that in San Francisco there is an especially appreciative audience for exquisitely crafted fine art bindings such as the ones I brought to CODEX.
Monique Lallier is no stranger in the world of designer bookbinding. Her dedication to service in the field is extraordinary, as is her binding. She began to teach bookbinding in 1976 in Montreal, where she is from, and where she received her initial training in design bookbinding. For more than a decade, she traveled to Europe to study with masters in the field. She served as chair of the Guild of Book Workers Standards of Excellence for twelve years and as director of The American Academy of Bookbinding from 2005-2009, succeeding Tini Miura who was the founding director (more about Tini very soon). Monique continues to teach at AAB and at her studio in Summerfield, North Carolina.
There is much more information about Monique on her website, on the AAB and GBW websites, and other sites all over the web. You can do the googling yourselves. What I have is different.
Monique has been kind enough to allow me to show two bindings that have yet to be published anywhere. The first, Winter Walks, was made for a demonstration on edge-to-edge doublures at the Society of Bookbinders Education and Training Conference in Leeds in August 2013. The other, Lost and Found, is Monique’s contribution to the upcoming Designer Bookbinders exhibit of bindings by North American and British binders (see last post). In Lost and Found, Monique uses a technique that is very unusual and special to her work. Much as a dos-à-dos binding allows for decoration on two more surfaces than usual, Monique creates additional surface area for her design by incorporating an overleaf cover panel. The effect is quite surprising and beautiful.
First, Monique’s binding from Leeds:
And now…Monique’s entry for the exhibit Contemporary Bindings of Private Press Books:
American Bound 