At the tender age of 14 (it may have been 13, now that I think of it), I took a nine-week bookbinding class taught by Joan Soppe, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I didn’t know at the time, of course, that it would tap into skills and interests of mine that run so deep.
Over the course of the class, we covered the basics of making any good book by hand: materials, grain direction, cutting, tearing, measuring twice & cutting once!, sewing on tapes, rounded spine, casebound books and a final, more self-directed project. The 27 hours of the class itself during the fall of 1994 were probably some of the most memorable I’ve ever spent, since I seem to recall every single thing we did, talked about, tried, and learned. It was a solid foundation for beginning to explore the possibilities of the book at its most basic, fundamental levels, as well as a structure, and as a vehicle for content.
The following summer, my best friend Sara & I took another class from Joan, this time a one-week intensive bookbinding workshop. We tackled coptic stitch binding, paper marbling, case binding, and sewing techniques. I know that Sara & I both have incredibly fond memories of that week, and I consider that workshop and the nine-week class a major foundation for my sustained interest in bookbinding over the last 14 years or so.
After those workshops, I tried to incorporate bookbinding into whatever else I could…there’s a suede bound book of poetry I’m still incredibly proud of that I definitely received a B- on in freshman English (let’s just say creating the book was more important to me at that point than the stab at poetry inside), a 26-foot long accordion book covering a large chunk of European art history that I made for a junior year of high school humanities class assignment, a large-scale coptic bound collection of prints my senior year at Grinnell, and a lot of other small journals I gave as gifts along the way.
This is the portfolio of my prints from my senior year at Grinnell. I’m wishing I had pictures of some more of the projects I did…but most the books are tucked away in Rubbermaid bins in basements in Iowa right now!
This portfolio is 12″h x 16″w and the covers are lithographs of mine. The interior pages feature a series of 10 prints pulled from the same plate, which was altered over the course of the semester. The binding is done with a basic twine and each page is lined with glassine, which was hand stitched in black thread along the left margin.
About two years ago I started making books again on a regular basis, just for fun, to vary the way my brain was working after a full day in an office in front of a computer screen. About six to nine months after I began making things on a leisurely basis, I started making books in a serious, much more full-time way. I began to develop techniques I had only really had a casual grasp of before. My stitches got tighter, cleaner, and more precise. My choice of materials got progressively more polished with each book. The books I was creating started to look more like finished pieces for other people to enjoy, rather than personal studies in the medium, designed only for practice. I was on my way, and I’m proud of how far I’ve come in a short time, with a great deal of focus and hard work.
I took skills that I had previously thought I had mastered and worked and refined and made various structures over and over until I got them just right. It’s always refreshing to remember that there is always more you can learn. Even with the techniques I feel like I’ve gotten a handle on, there is always more to do with them, more innovative ways to employ them, and any number of opportunities that are opened up by having a vocabulary of skills at your disposal.
Awkward Peeping by Joan Soppe, 1995
Just like Harry Duncan, there are key people I’ve been lucky enough to know and/or work with in some capacity over the course of my life so far. These days, I find myself using all of the principles that Joan taught me on a daily basis, and am inspired to create work as lovely and carefully structured as hers always was. I’m not sure Joan is doing much in the way of binding these days, but there’s a little bit of her in everything I create and I’m incredibly grateful for the encouragement and foundation she gave me from the very beginning. We all need people like that in our lives…and I’m lucky to have had (and still have!) several.
And, finally, it’s nice to have Friday to yourself sometimes, and today was a treat because it included one of my favorite museums, the American Museum of Natural History (a bit for its anachronistic value, a bit for its 1962-science-textbook-feel, and a bit for its text panels). The text-panel writer had this to say about the independent lifestyle of the Berbers of North Africa who, over centuries, seemed to plow ahead on their own path with a lack of regard for Islamic customs that sprang up alongside their daily lives during centuries of invasion and cultural change. They did not care if their way of life was simple and their customs were different:
“…[T]heir life was ample because it was their own.”
