Bookbinding Core Certificate Program

The San Francisco Center for the Book celebrates the craft and art of bookbinding. Our Bookbinding Core Certificate Program introduces students to four different binding models, leading them through the history and evolution of bookmaking. It provides students a comprehensive foundation to delve into the practice of binding and qualifies them to rent studio time in our bindery. Core classes must be taken in order, 1 through 4.

Click here to learn more about the Bookbinding Core Certificate Program and how to receive a discount!

Bookbinding Core 1: Coptic Binding

This class introduces students to the craft with the Coptic stitch, one of the earliest structures in binding. Students will spend the morning making their own decorative pastepapers, then use them in the afternoon when binding their book.

In addition to coming away with a finished book made by hand, students will also be introduced to the tools and terms of bookbinding. Basic practices and equipment will be discussed as students familiarize themselves with both skills and safety measures needed for working in a bindery.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite:
None. Beginners are welcome. 

Materials to bring:
None. All tools and materials will be provided.

About the Instructor:
Madison Halaby Gordon (she/they) is a bookbinder and conservator-in-training living in Oakland, CA, currently working at Zukor Art Conservation and the Walt Disney Family Museum. She is fascinated by paper, and loves making and repairing practical, fun, accessible, and well-made structures for the use and enjoyment of everyday people. Madison is also trained in letterpress printing and has worked previously with the Key Printing & Binding (Oakland, CA) and Small Editions (Brooklyn, NY).

Cylinder Core Certificate Program

The four class Cylinder Core Certificate Program allows students to move quickly through press basics while also addressing relief printing in general. Students who finish the four Core classes are qualified to rent press time as well as move on to more advanced classes and techniques. Core classes must be taken in order, 1 through 4.

Click here to learn more about the Cylinder Core Certificate Program and how to receive a discount!

Cylinder Core 1: Experience Letterpress!

Dig in to the tradition and history of letterpress printing and get your hands dirty. Learn about the process and practice of setting type, mixing inks and pulling impressions. Students will design and print a small edition of a single-color folded greeting card using the type and cuts (images) in the SFCB collection.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite:
None

Materials to bring:
All tools and materials will be provided. Students can come with a few phrases/ideas for their greeting card.

Please note: Class projects are for learning particular skills and supporting class dynamics. Project ideas should be flexible, open to what class time and communal studio use will permit.

About the Instructor:
Alan Hillesheim (he/him) has been wrenching around printing presses for 35 years. Printing presses need to be moved, oiled, inked, cleaned, and maintained, in short they need attention like a six year old. Maintenance is a dirty business, but a necessary one for beautifully printed anything. Alan has a passion for the mechanics of the print studio and enjoys encouraging others to roll up their sleeves and grab a wrench. His 35 years in the letterpress business and “all-ten-fingers” count speak for themselves. Join him and wear old clothes. Oh, and once the press is in fine order, Alan has a few secrets to divulge about perfect inking and stellar printing.

Learn how to exploit the natural beauty of leather to create several useful techniques which can enhance your binding. All of these techniques are used by Dominic in his Design Bindings. Each technique gives different tactile and visual results to the finished surface of the leather.

We begin with simple raised onlays which give a slightly raised effect; back-pared onlays which produce a smooth surface, and feathered onlays for a more painterly effect. We will then progress to inlays, useful for larger areas, which demand very accurate paring and cutting. We will then move on to impressed leather techniques, which allow all manner of surface patterns to be embossed in the leather grain. We will finish with Tudor Style, a way of covering a book in overlapping strips of thinly pared leather which gives a very handsome finish.

All these techniques necessitate mastering the precise steps involved in planning and execution so that the desired result is achieved.

Working on prepared panels, you will learn how to prepare the board for decoration, the correct working order needed for each technique, and how to design, cut out and apply the leather accurately.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite(s):
Bookbinding Core 1-4 or equivalent; Orientation to Leather, Practical Leather Skills, or other experience working with and paring leather.

Materials to bring:
All tools and materials will be provided. Students are also welcome to bring any of their own favorite bookbinding tools.

About the Instructor:
Dominic Riley (he/him) is an internationally renowned bookbinder, artist, lecturer and teacher. He has his bindery in England, from where he travels across the UK teaching and lecturing. He spends part of the year teaching in San Francisco and across the USA. His work is mostly restoration and Design Binding, for which he has won many prizes in the Designer Bookbinders competition. He was elected a Fellow of DB in 2008 and is Patron of the New Zealand Association of Book Crafts. His bindings are in collections worldwide, including the British Library, the Grolier Club in New York and the San Francisco Public Library. In 2013 he won first prize, the Sir Paul Getty Award, in the International Bookbinding Competition. Dominic is a past President of the Society of Bookbinders. Dominic and Michael Burke are co-founders of Book Camp, an immersive residential bookbinding experience which aims to teach new generations of binders.

He has taught masterclasses in the USA, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, at the Centro del Bel Libro in Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Canada.

Looking to expand your letterpress skills? In this class, we will explore improvisatory ways of creating multicolor prints on the Vandercook without locking up typeforms on the press bed.

Freestyle letterpress printing is an improvisational approach where type and ornamentation are inked by hand in different colors and creatively placed on the press bed (without using quoins or furniture to lock them down). This gives you the opportunity to quickly and easily create unique monoprints as you play with type and combinations of color.

To begin the conversation with our tools and materials, we will:

• discuss historical precedents for creative letterpress printing by H.N. Werkman and Jack Stauffacher
• learn how to safely print metal and wood blocks without locking them up with quoins and furniture
• discover strategies for inking individual blocks, layering colors, and ghost printing
• explore approaches to improvisation using text prompts, game structures, and group interactivity (e.g., exquisite corpse, call-and-response, etc.)

At the end of the workshop, you will go home with a collection of monoprints that reflect your own aesthetic explorations using the Center’s vast collection of historic letters, numbers and ornaments.

Prerequisite:
Introduction to Letterpress or other Vandercook press experience

Materials to bring:
None. All tools and materials will be provided.

About the Instructor:
As a sound and visual artist, Gino Robair (he/him) explores how nonrepresentational imagery influences interpretive performances in music, dance, and theatre. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis, developing performative approaches to papermaking and letterpress printing. In November 2023, a collection of his most recent prints was exhibited at the San Francisco Center For New Music.

If you’ve taken either the Introduction to Digital or Analog Risograph Printing class and are looking to rent the Riso machine independently, this is the next step. 

The Risograph Certification class will reinforce proper usage and care of the machine through two projects, covering both analog and digital techniques.  We’ll reacquaint ourselves with the machine and troubleshoot when printing our first project from the glass. Then we will take a look at Spectrolite software, which can be used to prep digital files before printing or review files in desired color combinations. We will use Spectrolite to send files directly to the Riso for the second project. 

Each student will be required to switch drums, confidential a master and execute other basic functions. This class will be a fast-paced assessment of a student’s skills rather than a time for experimentation.

Upon satisfactory completion of the Risograph Certification class, you will be able to rent the Riso at SFCB to work independently on your posters, zines, or other printed matter! 

Prerequisite:
Introduction to Digital Risograph Printing OR Introduction to Analog Risograph Printing OR previous Riso printing experience. If your experience is from outside SFCB, please contact us before registering to request a skills review. 

Materials to bring:
Students will complete two separate projects, two colors each. Come prepared with designs ready to print. Both projects will be printed on 11” x 17” paper, they must have margins and images must not be larger than 10” x 16”.

One project should be ready to print from the glass of the machine (remember that two colors means two separate layers!). The second project should be digital files on a thumb drive, or digital storage that can be accessed from a shared laptop. Ideally you’ll work with one or more color photographs for this project, .jpg or pdf, please. The studio will supply paper for printing.

We suggest you download Spectrolite in the weeks before class to familiarize yourself with the software.

About the Instructor:
Meri Brin (she/her) has been teaching Printmaking around the Bay Area since 2007. Besides teaching at SFCB, she has taught Silkscreen at Mission Grafica, and was full-time faculty at Academy of Art University for a decade. Her prints have been exhibited in local, as well as national shows. She has a print in the Library of Congress, and also exhibits as Fixated Press at San Francisco Zine Fest. Her artwork examines the complexity and visual noise of the everyday world, or she just wants to show you some cats.

Meri is a member of the California Society of Printmakers, and is the Printmedia Studio Manager at California College of the Arts.

Bookbinding Core Certificate Program

The San Francisco Center for the Book celebrates the craft and art of bookbinding. Our Bookbinding Core Certificate Program introduces students to four different binding models, leading them through the history and evolution of bookmaking.  It provides students a comprehensive foundation to delve into the practice of binding and qualifies them to rent studio time in our bindery. Core classes must be taken in order, 1 through 4.

Click here to learn more about the Bookbinding Core Certificate Program and how to receive a discount!

Bookbinding Core 2: Flat-Back Case Binding

In this second Core Bookbinding class, students will create what most of us refer to as a hardbound book. In bookbinding terms, it is known as a case binding; where a sewn textblock is glued into a separate structure known as a case. Students will learn more about the mechanics of books as they build on skills from Core 1 and expand both their vocabulary and capabilities in and around the bindery.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite:
Bookbinding Core 1

Materials to Bring:
All tools and materials will be provided. Students are also welcome to bring any leftover pastepapers from Core 1 that they might want to use on their book.

About the Instructor:
Clair Emma Smith (she/her) is a bookbinder specializing in repair located in Oakland, California. She found her love of bookbinding during an art conservation internship at a historical society in Indiana, and she has been setting up her dream home studio ever since. Clair Emma relocated to the Bay Area after graduating from North Bennet Street School's bookbinding program in 2019 and works in private practice for both herself and other conservators as Bouguereau Bindery. 

Cylinder Core Certificate Program

The four class Cylinder Core Certificate Program allows students to move quickly through press basics while also addressing relief printing in general. Students who finish the four Core classes are qualified to rent press time as well as move on to more advanced classes and techniques. Core classes must be taken in order, 1 through 4.

Click here to learn more about the Cylinder Core Certificate Program and how to receive a discount!

Cylinder Core 2: Power of the Broadside

A broadside is a single-sided printed sheet historically used for advertisements, proclamations, or other public announcements, though in modern times they're most often used for poetry.

In Core 2 you'll build your letterpress skills: learn advanced justification, typesetting, and composition, then put it all together to print a single-color 8 x 10" broadside of your own design.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite:
Cylinder Core 1

Materials to Bring:
All tools and materials are provided. 

Students can bring some ideas for what to set as multi-line text, with the understanding that the instructor will have final say in what will be appropriate for this project. Poems, song lyrics, and pithy paragraphs are good candidates.

Please note: Class projects are for learning particular skills and supporting class dynamics. Project ideas should be flexible, open to what class time and communal studio use will permit.

About the Instructor:
Lisa Rappoport (she/her) publishes poetry broadsides and artists' books under the imprint Littoral Press. Since 1998 she has produced a series of broadsides by the poets who teach at the Community of Writers; she has also printed poetry broadsides for Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books, the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, the Northern California Book Awards, and many others (last but not least, the Poets Pulling Prints series of the SFCB). Her poetry has appeared in Nostos, Five Fingers Review, Literal Latte, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 1998 Icarus Poetry Competition and the recipient of a poetry residency at Centrum. Her poetry collection Penumbra was published by Longship Press in 2019. Her book The Short Goodbye received the Alastair Johnston Fine Press Award and was a runner-up in the Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design. Lisa has taught at the New College in San Francisco, at a middle school in Lafayette, and in her own studio. Her work has been displayed nationally and is in collections throughout the U.S. You can visit her website at littoralpress.com.

In this class students will find solutions for common problems that are often found in standard hardcover books, including:

- how to mend tears within the text block
- how to patch and sharpen the worn corners on cover boards
- how to tip in a loose page
- how to bridge a gap between signatures without removing the covers
- a simple technique to reback a text block 
- how to repair worn and torn head caps

This class is an excellent chance to learn repair techniques that often plague our most frequently handled books. Students are welcome to bring their own books but there will also be a sample book available to each student, just to be sure the full range of repair needs are available.

SFCB's Windgate Scholarship Fund is dedicated to providing need-based financial support to individuals interested in learning bookbinding, letterpress printing, and related book arts. Click here to apply.

Prerequisite:
None

Materials to bring:
All tools and materials will be provided. Students are also welcome to bring any of their own favorite bookbinding tools.

About the Instructor:
Michelle Sarjeant (she/her) is a bookbinder, author, and museum professional. She earned her Masters of Arts in Museum Studies Archival Care from John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, California, and her undergraduate degree from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. She apprenticed in bookbinding with Sandra Good and now does repair and restoration work in her binding studio in Marin. 

She co-authored Modern San Rafael 1940-2000 with Jocelyn Moss, Librarian for the Marin History Museum, A History of the San Francisco State Belt with railroad historian Bill Kaufman and wrote San Rafael Through Time: As Illustrated & Described in 1884.

She is currently writing a book on the California Missions while rebinding books and is the Membership Chair for the Hand Bookbinders of California’s board.