Customer Reviews

The Handmade Book

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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For a well-photographed example of one bookbinder's personal work, this book serves its purpose. For helpful background material and detailed explanations of variations on particular binding styles and book sensibilities, you won't find it here. This is more of a coffee table book and highlights one binder's style of working rather than serving as a helpful "how-to" manual. Other books on the market, e.g. Shereen LaPlantz's "Cover To Cover," are a more expansive guide (for beginners through scholars) since they focus on the process of what books are about as a contextual framework, not just how one person binds books. For those of us who teach book arts not just for fun but also in fine art academic settings, this book adds little information to the body of knowledge. It focuses solely on binding at the expense of content, which sells the intelligence of bookmakers & book arts advocates short. Binding for binding's sake is only one component of what comprises books as books, not to mention books as an art form. What the handmade book is about content-wise is important to explore in relation to binding variations - this book does not enhance our knowledge of how these aspects relate to one another. It's a pretty book, but more about highlighting the binder than highlighting book arts as an artform or truly educating learners. If you just want to copy what one binder has done, this may be the book for you. If you want to explore books, bindings, approaches to structure, contexts for paper, text, images, etc, you'll be disappointed with this book, as I was. I wouldn't recommend it to my students.

I bought this book a few weeks ago, and I am dreaming of making almost every project in this book. The photographs are beautiful. The explanantions and directions are very good. Very inspiring.

I thought this book was very useful for
the amateur bookmaker. I thought the photographs were excellent. In a craft book I want photos of the finished product that make it plain how it should appear. This book has many useful detailed photos of the steps taken to build the finished book as well as the completed project. What I especially like in craft books are ones that give me ideas and teach me new skills, rather than a strictly cookbook approach. You can thumb the pages of this book and get lots
of inspiration. I especially liked the chapter on the cross structure book. This is a unique book that is not clearly documented in other books.

Angela James, The Handmade Book (Story Publishing, 2000)

A thin, information-packed craft volume, The Handmade Book contains a number of projects for those who'd like to (as you can probably guess from the title) make their own books. Everything is spelled out, and the text is lavishly illustrated to give you extra guidance. Note that we're not talking "regular"-shaped books here, but all sorts of interesting ideas, some of which might not fit on your bookshelves. Great ideas to be had. ****