All in a Day

'All in a Day' consists of twelve hand-bound volumes of varying sizes, made specifically for the exhibition at the University of Connecticut’s Art Gallery in 2004

The research field is the contemporary binding and decoration of books based on nineteenth century conventions which were themselves developed at a time when the demand for reading material made it necessary to develop rapidly produced but serviceable and attractive book covers.

Although hand made bookbinding is a skilled processes with a venerable craft tradition, it is generally thought that effective production/use and a decorative finish were, and therefore still are necessarily time consuming.

The premise of this research was to take the basic nineteenth century case binding model of the kind used during the rapid industrialisation of book binding to consider if robust bindings with aesthetically satisfactory values could be created in a single day. A number of titles were sought representing different shapes to vary the rigid codex format. These included David Hockney’s ‘The Clint Eastwood Sketchbook’. A non-commercially available paste, developed by the researcher to enable decoration on bindings to occur before setting takes place, was employed. The paste also facilitates folding or creasing of the outer leather/vellum without any cracking.

A wide variety of techniques were employed for the binding of the volumes which were exhibited at the University of Connecticut’s Art Gallery in 2004. These techniques included gold tooling, onlays, full morocco, silk endpapers, sculptured boards and reverse leather doublures. Some of the binding structures which had passed folding and stitching techniques, were also employed. In each example, the entire binding was carried out during the course of one day which keyed the theme of the exhibition and gave it its title. A workshop for students also took place. They can be viewed online at www.bookarts.co.uk. A selection of the volumes were acquired by the University of Connecticut’s Library and Special Collections.

• http://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/Terry_Buckley_...
• http://www.lib.uconn.edu/about/exhibits/...