One bench, one pair of hands, and a queue that runs about six weeks.
The bindery
Where the work happens
The workshop is a converted outbuilding with north light, which matters more than it sounds: paste-up and colour matching are miserable under a bulb. It holds a nipping press, a board shear, a sewing frame, a small standing press for boards in the drying stage, and rather more offcuts of bookcloth than any one person needs.
Everything is done at the bench. Nothing is sent out, which is why the queue is what it is.
Training
How I got here
I came to binding sideways, through a decade of library work and a growing irritation at watching books get thrown away for want of an afternoon's repair. Formal training followed: a City & Guilds in bookbinding, then two years part-time under a conservator in Cambridge who taught me most of what I actually use.
I am a member of Society of Bookbinders and go to the regional meetings when the drive is survivable.
Position
Repair, not restoration
There is a difference, and it is worth stating plainly. Restoration tries to return a book to how it looked when new. Repair tries to make it usable again while leaving the evidence of its life intact.
I do the second. Foxing stays. Inscriptions stay. A previous owner's clumsy tape repair from 1962 gets removed only if it is actively damaging the paper, and if I do remove it I photograph it first. The scuffed corners of a book that has been carried around for eighty years are not a defect to be corrected.
If what you want is a book that looks like it came out of a shop last week, I am the wrong bindery, and I would rather say so at the enquiry stage than at the collection stage.
Teaching
Workshops
I run a beginners' day two or three times a year: pamphlet stitch, a simple sewn notebook, and enough about grain direction to save you a lot of grief later. Six places, all materials found. Dates go out by email to anyone who has asked to hear about them.