Annika Dyck cleans a map of Rome from the 1770s.
As a teenager, I scrawled these lines from Walt Whitman into my journal:
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
succession of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual,
sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such
leavings from them at last.
—from Leaves of Grass, 1881
Being youthful, and fascinated with the future, and with romantic ideas about the recycling of matter, I was pleasantly humbled and excited by these poems. Not that I love these lines any less now, but as a bookbinder and restorer, let’s just say I have a healthy respect for the need for balance between preservation and “corruptions”. At the age of 42, I have a greater respect for things like religious traditions and material inventions, like paper, that have sustained and preserved ideas and poetry, so that I can read and appreciate it decades later! In other words, there are some things worth keeping from Whitman’s “endless succession…”
Even though I’ve been enjoying working with books in my Durham studio for 17 years, it felt like it was time for some professional invigoration. So this spring, I, as well as my daughter Annika, signed up for two courses in Toronto through Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists’ Guild (CBBAG; we say “cabbage”). It was well worth the time away from home!
My course was on the treatment of a particular type of cloth and leather Victorian-era bindings. The six days were fabulous: looking at and working on all the samples we students had brought, deciding what would be the best approach, and keeping in mind all the variables. It was a good reminder how much books of a hundred or more years ago really were products of a particular geographic region: it was too expensive to transport paper and cloth and thread from across the continent, so the local stuff had to do. Our instructor competently drew subtle distinctions between binding techniques.
Sixteen-year-old Annika, having grown up around old books, has taken an interest in all this, so it seemed like the paper treatment course would be up her alley. It was a good introduction to repairing and cleaning and de-acidifying the most important part of any book: the text! As it turns out, she loved it, and has now set up shop at our store with me. Recently we tackled a 200-year old book, taking it apart and taking all the mould stains out of the etchings. My apologies to the bacteria.
I came to bookbinding through art; it was during my MFA program in printmaking that I apprenticed with a binder in Montreal. Both the old and the new inspired me, and since moving to Ontario, I’ve been making journals and fixing books continuously. Our two teenage daughters, Annika and Lydia, have taken over the journal end of the business, and will be vendors at the Fine Craft Christmas show in Owen Sound in November, and Annika’s books are featured in the Next Generation show at the Owen Sound Artist’s Co-op.
Anyone can take courses from CBBAG, and it is not all about old things. Many feature ingenious and creative approaches to the art of the book. The digital age is spawning a renewed interest in the uniqueness of books as objects.
We at The Colour Jar are jumping on the digital bandwagon this year, and will be posting videos and images of the projects we are working on, in the hopes that people will be inspired to learn more about the craft of bookbinding. Watch our site.
By the way, the definition of fetor is a stench.
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