I can trace my interest in books to my childhood. My family had a small claw foot bookshelf with an even smaller collection of old books, and I remember sitting against it taking the volumes out one by one inspecting them and placing them back on the shelf. I was fascinated by the bindings, the richness as compared to the books I was used to seeing and dealing with in the early noughties. In high school my art making shifted to making photographs and collages and wanted them to be housed in a beautiful book but I was very underwhelmed with the selection of sketchbooks that were available to me. If such nice fine art papers existed then why were none bound into blank books? Moreover why was the quality of the bindings so cheap and fragile. Around this time I met Lisa who over the next year and a half mentored me through several styles using The Craft of Bookbinding by Manly Banister as reference / textbook. Throughout college and grad school I continued to make my own sketchbooks and albums and over time bookbinding became more and more a part of my art making. I started to read everything that I could get my hands on about bookbinding, parsing out the similarities and differences. For me durability and quality of paper were the most important elements I wanted from my books with flexibility and archival life weighing in heavily as well.


The purely utilitarian function of the book; the need to mass produce it in the cheapest way possible is systematically being supplanted by digital forms.