Bookforms: A complete guide to designing and crafting hand-bound books, from the Center for Book Arts

Center for Book Arts, Ana Cordeiro, Celine Lombardi, Sarah Smith, and Elizabeth Sheehan

Brought to you by the instructors at the Center for Book Arts, Bookforms is a comprehensive guide for making books by hand with a focus on functionality in design.

Written by the experts at the Center for Book Arts in New York, Bookforms presents all the instruction you need to craft by hand a comprehensive array of historic bookbinding styles from all over the world. Bookforms traces the functional roots of each structure, explains their appropriateness for various uses, and provides projects for making an essential structure for each style of binding.

Topics covered include:

• Why books work: General bookbinding principles for functionality and what we can learn from the past 
• What you need to know for planning a special book or embarking on an edition 
• How materials affect function

Bookforms tackles a wide range of projects for all levels of bookbinders. You'll see everything from sewn and ticketed blank books and traditional western codex book forms, to scrapbooks and albums, Asian stab-sewn bindings, unusual structures, and aesthetics/embellishments. What better time to dive into this venerable and unique hobby than now?

• ISBN13: 9781631596056
• Publish Date: 24 January 2019
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 9 April 2022
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Rockport Publishers Inc.
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 176
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Bookforms is a tutorial and artistic guide for learning bespoke bookbinding. I've always been deeply in love with books. Not just the contents inside (though I am a complete and total book dragon also) but the form, the binding, the presentation, even the smell. This book is a textbook on traditional and artistic book binding.

Released 22nd Jan 2019 by Quarto on their Rockport imprint, it's 176 pages and available in hardcover and ebook formats. This book is published under the auspices of the Center for Book Arts and is written by four former students/interns/instructors at the CBA in New York. There is an introductory chapter which includes a short CV/bio for them, followed by a pretty comprehensive tools and supplies list. This is followed by a short line-illustrated subchapter on book and paper anatomy and related jargon. This is an accessible and interesting treatise for the layperson as well, since being able to understand the way books are constructed certainly helps us understand at least a little bit how to also protect and care for them. The introductory segments comprise roughly 16% of the page content of the whole.

The introduction is followed by chapters with history and tutorials on: pamphlet and accordion books, multi-signature books, books with non-adhesive bindings, and specialty/artist books. The book is well documented and illustrated throughout with photographs and line drawings. Concepts and terminology are defined where they appear and the entire book is accessible to the average layman. The book ends with a resource list with links, where applicable, a bibliography/further reading list, and a list of where to go to see and find book arts. There is also an index.

This is a dense little book. It isn't strictly speaking an instruction or tutorial book, although I did follow the included tutorial with some bookbinding tools I had lying around to create a small sewn pamphlet with a cover. This is more of a resource book to supplement and support other instruction, especially formal instruction at a bindery or other classroom situation.

I really enjoyed the historical portions of the book as much or more than the tutorials.

Worthwhile book for bibliophiles. It's strengthened my years-long desire for more formal tuition in creating handmade books.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.