Traditional Iranian Hand Binding

A special thank you to Mr. Iraj Navidi for providing the content of this post. A Summary of the History of Iranian Traditional Hand Bookbinding Iranians learned to make paper from the Chinese, and started making paper in the city of Samarkand. Examples of Iranian paper include Samarkand, Khorasan, Tabriz

Continue reading

The Hearts of Bookbinding

In this season of chocolates and candy hearts, we wondered: how, and when, did the heart become associated with romance in Western culture? The early Egyptians believed the heart was the seat of the soul; the Greeks, the seat of both reason and emotion. It’s not an unlikely association, but there

Continue reading

The Bindings of To-morrow

The Guild of Women Binders and The Bindings of To-morrow In an age largely given over to utilitarianism it is gratifying to find purposes and persons at variance with the conditions around them, and in no field is the discovery more productive of satisfaction that that of industry.[1]

Continue reading

This book bound in human skin…

This book bound in human skin…isn’t human skin after all. Our fascination with the macabre practice of anthropodermic bibliopegy, or human skin bookbinding, isn’t a new one.  This inscription led readers astray for many years before scientific testing of the leather proved the note to be false.

Continue reading