Tag: bookbinding

What Bookbinding Taught Me About Patience and Care

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations
Photo by Antoni Shkraba Studio on Pexels.com

There is something about the craft of bookbinding. It re-educates the hands, and through them, the nervous system. It returns time to its proper scale.

I’ve been thinking about this more since settling into my new flat, which—by a small but meaningful stroke of grace—includes a dedicated studio space. For the first time in years, my tools don’t need to be packed away between sessions. Paper can sit under weights overnight without being disturbed, and work can pause without being dismantled.

Already this matters more than I expected. Bookbinding, after all, resists the logic of efficiency. Adhesive must dry. Grain direction must be respected. Linen thread must be drawn tight but not too tight. You cannot rush a spine without paying for it later. The work teaches you—firmly but kindly—that attention cannot be compressed.

Simone Weil famously wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Bookbinding operationalises this insight. You can’t bind a book while thinking three steps ahead. If your attention wanders while folding signatures, the error will propagate. If you rush the punching of sewing stations, the whole text block will pull askew. You can’t persuade paper fibres to behave differently through force of will; you must cooperate with them.

In this sense, bookbinding has become a counter-practice to much of contemporary creative life. Online, speed is rewarded. Visibility is currency. Iteration is encouraged, but only when it looks like momentum. The slowness of binding—a practice that may take days or weeks before anything finished appears—feels almost monastic by comparison.

And yet, paradoxically, it has made me more productive, not less.

One of the biggest misconceptions about patience is that it means waiting. In practice, patience is active–it’s a verb (metaphorically at least) because you are always doing something: sharpening a blade, squaring a stack, testing tension, laying out the next stage so it will be ready when the moment comes.

This mirrors something I see repeatedly in coaching work, particularly with highly sensitive or intellectually driven creatives. There is often an underlying anxiety that if one is not producing, one is stagnating. But many forms of growth happen beneath the threshold of visible output.

Since moving into the new flat and setting up the studio, I’ve noticed a subtle shift in how I approach my other work—writing, teaching, contemplative practice. I’m more willing to let something rest unfinished.

There is also, I think, an ethical dimension to working with materials in this way. Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, describes craftsmanship as a dialogue between hand and material, where resistance becomes instructive rather than frustrating. This is not mastery-as-domination, but mastery-as-listening.

In bookbinding, materials remember what you do to them. Paper creased carelessly will never quite forgive you. Cloth stretched unevenly will telegraph the mistake forever. This permanence sharpens responsibility. You learn to slow down not because slowness is virtuous, but because it is necessary.

This has felt especially grounding during a period of personal transition. A new home, even a welcome one, requires recalibration. New light patterns. New noises. New routines. The studio has become a place where that recalibration can happen somatically, not just cognitively. Through repeated, careful gestures, the body relearns safety.

It’s hard not to notice the symbolic resonance here. Books are already threshold objects—containers of thought, memory, and voice. Binding them by hand heightens this awareness. You become acutely conscious of the labour that precedes reading, of the infrastructure that makes inwardness portable.

All of this feeds into a broader theme that’s been shaping my work lately: the power of small, well-held experiments. Not performative reinventions, but modest shifts in practice that reorient attention.

Perhaps the deepest lesson bookbinding has taught me is that care compounds. What feels like slowness at the outset becomes reliability later. Structures hold. Work lasts. You spend less time repairing what was rushed.

This is true of creative practice, of relationships, of inner life. Patience is not something we adopt once and for all; it is something we rehearse through forms that demand it of us.

For now, I’m grateful for a studio that allows this rehearsal to continue—quietly, materially, without display. And I’m grateful, too, for the conversations that extend from it: in workshops, in coaching, in shared spaces of attention.

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Preserving Ideas

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Last weekend I spent a few hours wandering through the Small Publishers Fair in London, where tables of hand-bound chapbooks, risograph zines, and small press essays lined Conway Hall like devotional offerings to the printed word. There was something really wonderful about it: a room buzzing not with algorithmic chatter, but with paper, ink, and the human hand.

Lately, this question of preserving ideas has been preoccupying me. As I’ve been working on my forthcoming projects—both scholarly and personal—I’ve found myself turning again to the physicality of books, not just as containers of knowledge but as archives of consciousness. The handmade box-making I’ve been experimenting with at home (a small project that began as a way to store my growing stack of old notebooks) has become a kind of meditative practice: measuring, cutting, folding, gluing, all in careful rhythm. It’s taught me something about form and memory—about how enclosure can protect, but also invite reverence.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that every book has a double life: one as a vessel of ideas, and another as an artefact that carries the traces of its readers. Marginalia, stains, folded corners all become evidence of encounter. When I teach or write about modernism, I’m always struck by how that movement both exalted and feared this materiality. Woolf, Joyce, and their contemporaries wanted language to transcend its own physical limits, yet they depended utterly on print.

My own shelves are full of books that now hold more of me than of their authors, filling with underlinings, exclamation marks, and the occasional coffee ring or grease smear. They are records not only of what I’ve read, but of who I was when I read it. In a sense, they preserve moments of thought—snapshots of consciousness mid-formation. To lose those, or to surrender entirely to digital ephemerality, would be to lose something essential about how we think in time.

There’s a similar intimacy in the act of making. When I’m gluing the corners of a handmade box or rolling out pastry dough, I notice how my thinking slows, finds rhythm in repetition. Craft requires patience, but it also invites reflection—it’s an embodied philosophy. David Pye, in The Nature and Art of Workmanship, distinguishes between the “workmanship of risk” (where every action could alter the outcome) and the “workmanship of certainty” (where machines guarantee precision). The handmade book, like the handwritten note, belongs to the first category: it lives in the space of risk, imperfection, and care.

In an era of constant digital revision, the printed page still says: this is what I thought, then. It invites us into a conversation with our past selves. Even my old notebooks, boxed and labelled, feel like small dialogues across time—some pages embarrassedly naive, others startlingly prescient.

There’s a line from Italo Calvino that I often come back to: “The classics are those books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to go away and when they hide in the folds of memory.” I think the same could be said of our own notes, letters, recipes, and marginalia. They refuse to go away; they wait patiently for us to rediscover them.

At the Small Publishers Fair, I was reminded how vibrant this world of small-scale making still is. Stalls dedicated to poetry, philosophy, and experimental art books, each one a testament to the persistence of the tactile imagination. Many of the presses represented there are acts of devotion, sustained by people who believe that ideas deserve bodies. To hold one of their books is to participate in a lineage of care: the slow publishing ethos that values depth over reach.

In the evenings lately, with autumn deepening and the smell of spiced raisins still in the kitchen, I’ve found myself reflecting on what it means to live archivally, or, to put it another way, to be a steward of one’s own thought. It’s a gentle calling, really: to keep what matters, let go of what doesn’t, and tend the rest with attention.

So whether you’re keeping a commonplace book, baking from a family recipe, or printing a limited-run essay for a small press, you are participating in this broader human act of preservation. You’re ensuring that thought continues to have texture—that it lives in the world not just as code or content, but as something we can touch, smell, and remember.

And maybe that’s what the physical book still teaches us, in its quiet way: that ideas, like relationships, need form to flourish. They ask for bodies, boxes, bindings, and for the gentle friction of being held.

UPCOMING EVENTS

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