San Francisco Center for the Book

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.