Bookbinding Club #1

by Suw on October 3, 2010

Last Wednesday’s inaugural Bookbinding Club, held at The Lamb on the wonderfully named Lambs Conduit Street, was a runaway success! Ben O’Steen and I were joined by about half a dozen others, and much beer, food and conversation was had. Not a bad turn-out, given that the weather was so vile.

I took a few of my notebooks and my most recent Argleton prototype to get some feedback. There may even be some pictures of said prototype floating about somewhere, as cameras were present! Overall, feedback was good, especially to the prototype, which made me very happy.

We did have a fairly heated discussion about whether or not some of my books were, and I quote, “wonky”. Certainly I’m aware that it can actually be quite hard to get a book to come out perfectly square, even if you’ve carefully measured everything out. Sometimes, it’s just a bit wonky. Ben contended, however, that wonkiness is part of the charm of hand-made books and that, in any case, the wonkiness I was complaining of was so minor as to be unnoticeable.

We’ve decided that our next meeting will be in two months, on the last Wednesday of November, 24th, and then again on the last Wednesday in January, 26th, conveniently skipping over that awkward Christmas period. It’ll be at The Lamb again, 6pm. If you’d like to come along to the next meeting, here’s an Eventbrite page to sign up to. You don’t need to – you can just decide to come along on the night – but if you do it’ll give us an idea of numbers.

The theme for the next meeting will be paper! Please do bring along samples of paper, whether for covers, construction, endpapers, or book blocks, to discuss. We look forward to hearing about your favourite paper. I’m hoping that, by November, I’ll have finally found a good, affordable paper for making fountain-pen friendly notebooks. If so, I shall certainly share!

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