For students who have completed either the basic Clamshell or Lift-Top Box class.

Over the course of two days, students will measure, cut, and construct their own custom clamshell (solander) box for a book or other item of their choice such as prints or photographs.

We will review measuring & scaling, board cutting, tray construction, cover making, casing in, and options for labels and inlays. We will discuss additional lining options for the interior of the small tray and how to plan for the necessary allowances when constructing the inner tray.

Students will begin by rough cutting their materials for the box and then the coverings and trimming them down to the size required as they construct the box components. We will review key elements of the construction process and explore some stages in more depth, but students will be working independently for a substantial chunk of the class.

Students are welcome to bring a second project with the understanding that it may not be possible to get both boxes fully assembled by the end of the weekend, but at least one box will be taken to completion.

All materials needed for the construction of the boxes, board, bookcloth, and decorative paper, will be available at the center. If you have a specific design or color palette that you wish to use on your boxes, you will need to source your own materials.

Prerequisite:
Box-making experience, clamshell or lift-top.

Tools/materials to bring:
- your usual bookbinding tool kit
- teflon bone folder
- aluminum drafting triangle (this is the drafting 30-60-90 triangle with circles punched in it
- any bookcloth or paper that you might want to use on your project.

Any materials will need to be approved by the instructor; some papers or cloths may not be appropriate.

About the Instructor:
Brian Lieske (he/him) wandered into SFCB many years ago and continues to haunt the place. He completed both the bookbinding and letterpress cores as well as several of the summer historic structure classes, and now teaches SFCBs Box Making Core classes. He enjoys making fully hand-sewn books and still fights to not over-tighten his kettle stitches.

He’s lived in San Francisco for more than 20 years having arrived shortly after completing an MFA at the University of Texas at Austin.

For students who are Cylinder Core Certified, here's a chance to expand on the skills you’ve learned and try something new.

Learn to use strip rule - long, thin pieces of type-high metal - to build decorative borders to enhance your already interesting work. Borders can be functional, fun or both, and we'll try everything from a simple 45º angle to a bold and flourishing cornerstone.

Students will learn the difference between different kinds of strip material including brass rule, lead borders and rule, and wood borders. They'll create their own rule borders, combining strip material and decorative ornaments, and learn the painstaking process of mitering rule to get a 45-degree angle with the aid of a border box.

Students will leave class with an understanding of how to deploy a range of traditional decorative letterpress techniques to apply to their own projects.

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):
Cylinder Core 1-4 Certification or equivalent Vandercook/letterpress experience. Please email us with your qualifications if you're new to SFCB.

Materials to bring:
All tools and materials will be provided.

About the Instructor:
Brian Ferrett (he/him) has a printing degree from MATC and worked in offset web and screen printing. In 2008 he joined M&H Type as a typecasting apprentice under Lewis Mitchell. He currently manages M&H's daily operations, maintains the historic casting machines and presses, casts type, and prints Arion Press publications. Brian is a member of the Northern California chapter of the American Printing History Association, the American Typecaster Fellowship, and volunteers with San Francisco Public Library's annual Valentine’s Day broadside event. In his spare time he plays around with his Vandercook 219AB, C&P New Style 10x15, and his two Kelseys.

Learn how to make a facsimile of the earliest known codex binding, famous for containing the controversial Gnostic Gospels.

The Nag Hammadi codices take their name from the Egyptian village where in 1945 a clay pot containing thirteen ancient books was discovered. They are the earliest extant codex bindings ever found, and were uncovered in remarkably good condition.

This workshop will lead you through the making of a codex bearing all the characteristic features of these early book structures. We will construct a sympathetic facsimile of the Nag Hammadi codex, and experience the structure and form of ancient bookbinding.

We will make our version of this 3rd century book from a textblock of folded papyrus, bound together with knotted leather tackets on a leather spine piece and covered in boards stiffened by layers of papyrus. The boards have leather edging strips, and the book is covered in hand-dyed North African goatskin.

It is held closed with beautiful leather ties and wrapping bands, which are integrated to the cover using a delicate slotting and lacing technique.

Step back in time and enjoy making your own model of the oldest book in the world.

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):
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:
Michael Burke (he/him) studied bookbinding with Dominic Riley and paper conservation with Karen Zukor. Michael lives in England, where he teaches bookbinding as well at events across the UK. Michael researches the structures of ancient and medieval bindings and received his Masters degree in the History of the Book from the University of London in 2011.

Michael is a co-founder of Book Camp, an immersive residential bookbinding experience which aims to teach new generations of binders.

Learn how to print on the Risograph, a machine that combines the ease of a photocopier with the stencil concept of silkscreen. A Risograph creates a stencil for each layer, printing a single color at a time. Inks are semi-opaque, so when layered two colors can create a third overlay.

In this class you’ll create two image layers by hand, and each student will print a 2-color poster in an edition of 20. Come ready to turn sketches or drawings into your poster. If you would prefer not to draw, consider bringing clip art, traced designs, stamps, or collage elements to make your design.

This workshop focuses on the analog approach to printing with a Risograph. The Introduction to Digital Risograph Printing workshop focuses on preparing files and printing via digital transmission. Either class will suffice as the prerequisite for the Risograph Certification workshop, though students are welcome to take both. Successful completion of the certification allows students to rent time on SFCB's Risograph.

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:

• Sketches, drawings, photographs, or collage imagery no larger than 10” x 16” on paper or clear acetate (spot imagery smaller than 10” x 16” will work as well).
• Pens: black ink, all kinds of tips/types (sharpies, markers, brush pens, felt tip, different sized nibs, etc.) Faber Castell's PITT pens or Micron's are examples where you have different sized nibs. You can also bring pencils (especially softer/darker ones if you want more hand-drawn imagery). Essentially anything to make a drawn mark with! Colored markers in yellows and pinks won't work well, though.
• Photos can be fun. Make sure they aren't precious in case you want to cut them up. Grayscale with a wide value range work the best, rather than color photos. You can print out or photocopy what you want to play with and bring that, rather than the original.
• Collage materials: papers with patterns, tapes like washi, templates or stencils for making shapes, black or dark construction paper for cutting out shapes.
• Stamps/stamp pad and letter/number stickers are great if you want to work with text.Scissors or X-acto knife; glue stick or clear tape; eraser.
• Please print out any digital imagery before class, no larger than 11" x 17", with a 1/2" border all around.

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.

Explore this fascinating style of limp binding, which offers many creative possibilities to today's book artist as well as presenting an interesting overview of historical sewing structures, both practical and decorative.

Limp bindings, held together with exposed sewing, have been made throughout Europe since the fifteenth century, and were used for both printed and blank books. It is interesting to note that because they are such simple structures, they were often not made by trained bookbinders, but could be put together by clerks in their offices with a few simple tools and, essentially, straightforward sewing techniques. They employ a range of sewing structures, including tackets, long and link stitches, decorative spine patterns and ingenious fastenings, using both simple and elaborate techniques.

In this workshop you will produce five bindings that are historically accurate but with a contemporary take. We will begin by making a simple binding held together with tackets — as old as the codex itself — then create a simple longstitch binding, a more complex linkstitch, and then combine the two. We will finish with a linkstitch binding, with a handsome wooden spine plate and additional decorative sewing.

You will create covers from a variety of materials, starting with handsome handmade case paper. You’ll then learn how to laminate two sheets of text paper together to make a stiffened card cover, and finally, how to create a very beautiful vellum cover by lining an old deed with thin Japanese paper. The books will be further embellished with spine plates of leather, vellum and wood. They will be given closures and ties (including hidden magnets!), and ornamented with buttons, bosses, secondary sewing and woven thread.

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:
sharp bone folders, small hand drill and thin bits, Japanese screw punch if you have one, various buttons, clasps and threads.

About the Instructor:
Michael Burke (he/him) studied bookbinding with Dominic Riley and paper conservation with Karen Zukor. Michael lives in England, where he teaches bookbinding as well at events across the UK. Michael researches the structures of ancient and medieval bindings and received his Masters degree in the History of the Book from the University of London in 2011.

Michael is a co-founder of Book Camp, an immersive residential bookbinding experience which aims to teach new generations of binders.

Learn basic bookbinding structures and stitches that every beginning book artist should know!

Students will learn five staple structures of the bookbinding world: pamphlet stitch, two versions of one-sheet wonders, accordion folding, and a Japanese stab binding. If you’ve been curious about book arts basics, this is a great starter class; in three hours, you’ll gain the know-how to start making books of your own.

Students also learn about local resources, bookbinding tools, and SFCB’s Bookbinding Core Program, as well as protocol for studio rental. 

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.

About the Instructor:
Jane Knoll (they/them) was the San Francisco Center for the Book's 2025 Type Devil. After an undergraduate in writing and printmaking from Bennington College and a diploma in bookbinding from North Bennet Street School, Jane was awarded two fellowships at the Boston Athenæum's conservation lab and worked as Assistant Book Conservator at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. Currently preparing for a master's in book conservation, Jane studies the archaeology of the book, with special interests in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century structures, folk repairs, and personalized bindings, and has two publications on the American scaleboard binding.

Everyone is familiar with — and awed by — the gilded edge. But gilding takes many years of practice to master. However, book edges have been decorated by other methods for centuries, and these styles of edge treatments are, by contrast, extremely easy to learn.

Working on ordinary paperbacks brought from home, we will complete six different edges treatments.

We will start with the easiest technique, the splattered edge — also known as the newspaper edge — used for centuries to decorate large bound-up volumes of newspapers and magazines. Next comes the solid red edge found on bibles, almanacs and journals, followed by the sprinkled edge common on cheaper books from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Then we will produce the more complex colored, sprinkled and waxed edge found on nineteenth-century leather bindings. We will proceed to the classic German-style graphite edge, which is sanded to a mirror finish before a starch size is applied and the graphite added. This edge is burnished andwaxed to a high sheen and can be augmented with simple gold tooling. We will finish with the painted edge, used on design bindings, which allows for a more artistic interpretation of the overall book 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(s):
None

Materials to bring:
- plenty of paperback books to work on
- 3 small kitchen plates
- various sized artists’ paintbrushes
- cobbler’s knife
- 4 new shoe brushes
- old toothbrush

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.

In this introductory class, students will gain a basic understanding of the history, techniques, tools and styles of European marbling.

Students will get hands-on experience of all aspects of Western marbling techniques from paper priming and preparatory mixing of water medium and paints, to the creation of classical patterns. Specific attention will be given to learning how to obtain particular designs using a diverse array of rakes and combs. Students will have ample time for experimentation with guidance from the instructor and will leave with a sampling of papers they've marbled themselves.  

*Please note that paper marbling is a wet process and papers made in the workshop may not be dry at the end of class. Students may return to SFCB after the workshop to retrieve any papers left to dry at the of the day or request mailed returns. 

Prerequisite:
None

Materials to bring:
All tools and materials will be provided. Please wear comfortable shoes for standing that you don't mind getting wet.

About the Instructor:
Pietro Accardi (he/him) owned a Bookbindery in Turin (Italy) for 12 years. He worked for Turin’s main Library, Municipal Archives, and University Libraries restoring and binding documents and books. He also runs his own paper marbling and decorative box making business. Now he lives near Lake Tahoe with wife, cats and a studio. He is currently working for the library of special collections of University of Reno doing restoration work and teaches workshops.