Tag: craft

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.

Upcoming Events

Integrative Meditation

  • 19 January | 7.30-8.30 PM GMT | £4

Creative Flow Co-Working Session: The Power of Tiny Experiments

Highly Sensitive Creatives: Energy, Boundaries, and Creative Rhythm

More to Explore

Sourdough as Slow Philosophy

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Bread is one of the oldest human technologies, and once or twice a week when I feed my starter, I get to feel the quiet intimacy of participating in something ancient. The jar on the counter, alive with invisible life, asks nothing more than regular attention. A little flour, a little water, a little faith. The process become philosophical, a daily practice in patience and presence, and sourdough, for me, is not simply food; it is a mode of inquiry. It asks how transformation occurs, and at what pace we should approach that transformation.

Every sourdough baker learns early on that control is an illusion. The starter has moods, the dough responds differently each day, and the line between perfect proof and an epic collapse is razor-thin. In this small domestic theatre, the dough resists command, growing best when treated with care, not coercion. Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society warns of the violence of acceleration, how the modern subject, obsessed with optimisation, loses the capacity for duration. But sourdough refuses this logic. It can’t be rushed, not by willpower, not by technology. The microbes moved at their own pace, and perhaps I have begun to as well.

Fermentation, after all, is transformation through decay. It is the art of letting things break down in order that something new may emerge. There is philosophy in this: a recognition that change requires dissolution. The sour tang of the starter, the slow bubbling, and the mingling of bacteria and yeast are all material lessons in collaboration and renewal. Our ecological lives, too, depend on unseen networks, on the fermentation of shared experience.

In a world addicted to instant results, fermentation becomes an act of quiet resistance. We live amid the tyranny of instant coffee, instant messages, instant gratification. Sourdough asks us to wait. It requires a slowness that verges on contemplation. Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement began as a protest against fast food, but its real gift was philosophical: a reclamation of pleasure, locality, and rhythm. Baking, like slow thought, teaches that nourishment and wisdom arise through attention. To bake for oneself, or better, to bake for another, is to rejoin an economy of care rather than consumption. When I share a loaf, still warm from the oven, I’m reminded that slowness is also a form of generosity.

The sourdough jar reveals how we attend to it. Some days, the starter is buoyant, light, eager; on others, sluggish and heavy. It reflects not just temperature but temperament. My own perfectionism has often met its match in the unpredictable nature of fermentation. The failed loaves — dense, burnt, deflated — have taught me more than the flawless ones, and sourdough offers its own alchemical education. The process cannot be hurried; it thrives on warmth, patience, and rhythm.

When I take a loaf from the oven, I feel a satisfaction that the intellectual world rarely grants: here is a thing complete, made by hand, known through touch. The world slows, if only for a moment, and becomes sufficient.

Sourdough, then, becomes a teacher of right timing, a philosophy that ferments rather than forces. Its lessons are certainly not confined to the kitchen. I’ve begun to notice similar rhythms in my creative work, where projects now follow seasons rather than sprints. After years of academic urgency, I’m learning the value of waiting and of letting ideas ‘prove’. What emerges, when it finally does, carries more depth, less strain. Slow philosophy isn’t simply slow thinking but slow being: a willingness to inhabit processes rather than rush through them. Education itself could learn from this pedagogy of fermentation, where growth happens unseen, between the visible milestones.

To bake bread is to remember that life itself is leavened by care. The simplest rituals, when done attentively, become meditations on being alive. Whether it’s bread, gardening, sewing, or journaling, each act can be a form of everyday metaphysics where philosophy meets fingertips. The smell of bread cooling on the counter, the sound of the crust cracking as it releases its final breath, is a small hymn to time.

UPCOMING EVENTS

If this resonates, you might enjoy joining one of my upcoming gatherings:

More to Explore