This guy at a craft fair in Asheville said my hand-bound journals were 'too perfect' to be real books

He was flipping through a coptic stitch journal I'd worked on for maybe 15 hours, with custom marbled endpapers. He stopped and said, 'These are nice, but they're just fancy notebooks... real books have that broken-in feel from a press.' It happened right at my booth, with people waiting. I told him I built the text block from signatures and sewed every one by hand, but he just shrugged. Made me think... is there a line between 'bookbinding' and just making pretty covers for blank pages? How do you all explain the craft to people who don't get it?

4 comments

4 Comments

gray8754mo ago

What does he think a book is before someone prints in it? That's the craft. You made the object itself. The press just fills it later. His "real book" was blank once too. Your work is the foundation. That guy missed the whole point.

amy_craig284mo ago

Actually, a lot of early books were printed first and then bound by hand. The pages came off the press as loose sheets. The binder's job was to fold, sew, and cover them. So both parts are the craft, the printing and the making of the object. It's all important.

jadej504mo ago

Heard that on a history podcast once.

kimfisher1mo ago

Jeez, @jadej50's source must be onto something because I've run into that exact "real book" gatekeeping before. What worked for me was just handing them one of my blank journals and asking them to tell me what was missing - usually shuts them up when they can't find an answer. Never waste your breath justifying 15 hours of work to someone who thinks books come out of a machine like postage stamps.