Strong, elegant and pleasing to use, this structure is modelled on the nineteenth century artists' sketchbooks and journals, similar to the ones used by Wordsworth and Ruskin as they wandered across the Lake District to draw and write. It is an honest structure made simply and from high quality materials, opens beautifully and is very durable. It can be made at home with no equipment, just a few simple tools, and since it is not 'cased-in' requires very little pressing. The pages are made from good cartridge paper, ideal for pen-and-ink drawing, pencil sketching or writing. Working from full sized sheets, we will fold and slit the paper to give a beautiful, feathery deckled edge. We will then sew the book with linen thread on strong tapes, and sew in a cloth hinge for strength. The book is rounded, for easy opening, but not backed, eliminating the need for a press. The case, or cover, is made from cushioned boards covered in strong natural canvas that can withstand all the hard knocks associated with going 'out into the field'. The cover is then tooled with carbon and gold to personalise this simple hand made binding.

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 2 or equivalent experience preparing a textblock.

Tools/Materials to bring:None. 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 make one of the most extraordinary historical styles of binding. It is many years since Dominic taught this workshop, due to the lack of availability of the right leather. But recent research has led him to find a new source, and so he is happy to revive this once very popular class.

Tree marbled calf dates back to at least 1775, in England, where it was employed as a cheaper decoration for leather books. It combines the use of two chemicals—salts of tartar and copperas—with the severe curving of the boards to create a channel in which the pattern is created. Actually, copperas and salts of tartar had been used as staining agents for a long period before tree marbling was developed, so it would seem that it was the curving of the boards which was the real innovation.

The style was very popular throughout the nineteenth century, as it was quick to execute, could be augmented with the minimum of gold tooling and resulted in a very handsome, striking binding. As with many hand-wrought techniques, tree calfing suffered a decline after the Second World War and by the 1960s there was very little demand for it.

In the workshop, we will make a small binding, sewing the book on cords and lacing on boards. Simple edge sprinkling and headbands are added. The book is covered in thinly pared calfskin, and left to dry open so the boards warp outwards. They are then rolled into a severe curve, coated with salts of tartar, glaired with egg white, and then the copperas is thrown on. After the boards are rinsed, they are flattened and the book completed in the usual way.

We will have plenty of time to work on practice panels before decorating our bindings. 

This is a deep dive into eighteenth century binding technique with one of the few binders working today who practices this obscure binding style.

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):
Experience binding books in leather.

Materials to bring:
A leather paring knife (something like this) and a strop. 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.

The Library Style is ideal for large or heavy books which get a lot of use and need to be extra strong. Coming straight out of the Account Book tradition at the end of the nineteenth century, the Library Style was developed by the British Museum as a way of binding books which needed to be extremely robust yet could remain pleasing to use and would open well.

The book is sewn on heavy tapes with linen thread in a reinforced herring-bone style. It has a hidden cloth joint for strength, and a ‘made’ endpaper and a waste sheet. Together, the tapes, cloth and waste sheet form a flange that is glued into laminated split boards: this makes for a very strong attachment of the book to its cover. The book edges are then sprinkled, burnished and waxed, and a hollow back added to the spine. The book is covered in heavy-duty buckram, with special ‘library’ corners for added strength. The endpapers are put down and a gold-tooled leather title added.

After this class you will be able to bring all your dilapidated reference books back to life in this very strong cloth binding.

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 bookbinding experience sewing and binding books

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.

A thorough introduction to tooling: lines, both free-hand regular, hand-tooled titles, creative tooling and blocked labels.

 This new class combines several tooling techniques that Dominic has taught at the Center over the years, into a five-day extravaganza of traditional and creative approaches.

The first part of the class will concentrate on traditional hand tooling. We’ll begin with cloth-covered panels and a one-line wheel. Using both metallic foils and carbon paper, we will spend time producing simple tooled lines, beginning with free-style lines until the technique is learned, then progressing to formal lines using a guide. Then we’ll be ready to move onto a leather-covered panel, where we will execute a formal gold tooled ‘diaper’ pattern.

Following this will be the hand-titled spines: working on prepared leather pieces attached to a special spine tooling block, we will learn how to execute three kinds of title: in blind, carbon and gold, using various jigs devised by Dominic which ensure accuracy and efficiency.

This next part of the class will introduce you to Dominic’s creative approach to free-from gold tooling, which he has spent many years perfecting. This is done with his adapted tool which allows you to ‘draw’ in gold.  We will all make our own tool by shaping a piece of brass which is sunk into a wooden handle. We’ll then create a design and learn how to transfer it to the leather using simple jigs and templates, which control the tooling as the completed design takes shape.

Finally, we will concentrate on blocking labels using the Kwikprint. Learning to use this machine is relatively easy but there are a host of tips to learn about how to set up the machine, arrange the type correctly and produce really good crisp labels.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fashion for attaching a devotional book to a girdle dates back to the twelfth century and flourished for several hundred years in England and Scotland, as well as Germany and the Netherlands.

Belts, or girdles, were worn by clerics in the middle-ages around the outside of their robes as a sign of office. Girdle books were small volumes kept about the person for frequent consultation, and were worn by monks, priests and lay people. They denoted piety, importance of office, and wealth.

Our girdle book will be made of quires of paper with vellum endsheets, sewn with linen thread onto alum tawed supports. The book has oak boards which are chamfered into a gentle curve to render them more tactile and ergonomic for handling. The alum tawed lacing slips will then travel along channels through the boards and be secured in place by wooden pegs.

The textblock will be trimmed after the boards are attached, using a drawknife. This now unusual technique of trimming was common to all bookbinding before the invention of the plough in the sixteenth century.

The book has a primary covering of reverse calfskin — the suede side providing the grip necessary to hold the outer cover, or chemise, in place. This secondary covering is made from alum tawed leather, and has simply stitched pockets into which the boards are inserted. Further strips of alum tawed leather are woven into a Turk’s Head knot around the tail of the chemise. Finally, a strap-and-pin closure secures the book within its bindings.

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:
Experience binding books in / paring leather.

Materials to bring:

Don’t worry if you don’t own everything listed, you shouldn’t go out buying unnecessarily, we can share. Bring if it is convenient.

- A small pair of pliers
- Metal square (Engineer's L-shaped square)
- Hand operated drill and small bits, 1mm - 3mm
- Woodworker's Plane (small Block Plane that can be used one-handed)
- Needle Awl
- Bone folders
- Scalpel handle and a few blades, straight and curved
- Sanding block and sandpaper, various grits
- G-Clamps
- Paste brush
- Paring machine (Scharf-fix or Brockman)
- Paring knife and strop
- A sharp quarter-inch or 3-6mm chisel

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.