San Francisco Center for the Book

Leather paring requires patience, practice and, of course, sharp tools. This workshop will introduce you to both accurate leather paring — using the knife and the paring machine — and covering.

We will be begin by assembling a small open-necked box useful for note cards, made from pre-cut materials. The box is lined with coloured card and is made with double walls for strength. Then we’ll cover the box in leather.

The leather for the box is fine goatskin from Harmatan, which is pared down to 0.6mm for elegance and easy handling. The paring process is in three parts, and begins with a piece of leather rather bigger than is needed. First is the turn-in. This is achieved by a process known as ‘abrupt paring’: the leather is scored, folded and hammered to create a pronounced ridge. This hammered line allows you to feel the edge as you pare. The turn-in is pared in the machine down to 0.4mm, then sanded against aboard until the edge is crisp and even.

Second, the turn-in is trimmed to the correct width (no edge paring is necessary). Third, the leather is cut to the precise length to wrap around the box, and where the two ends overlap, feathered edges are made with the paring knife on a stone. The feathering allows the beginning and end of the leather cover to overlap invisibly. The box is then covered and finished.

Taken together, these techniques should allow you learn the fundamentals of accurate paring of leather, and you’ll go away with a little jewel of a box, for your messages.

Prerequisite:
Practical Leather Skills or Orientation to Leather plus additional experience. Orientation to Leather alone is not sufficient practice for this workshop.

Tools/Materials to Bring:

• SHARP paring knife: if you don’t have one, I recommend the Premium English knife from Hewitts. New knives often don't come sharpened; you will need to have it sharpened before class.
• Strop
• Scalpel with straight blades
• Sharp bone folder
• Small thin bone folder
• Wax pencil

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.