Bookbinding Awards

By Archivist, Hannah Dunmow

The Company continues tosupport the endangeredcraft of hand bookbindingby commissioning fine bindings fromestablished bookbinders and by funding prizes in the Open Choice category of the Designer Bookbinders’ Competition.

The Competition is organised by Designer Bookbinders – one of the foremost societies devoted to the craft of fine bookbinding, founded more than 50 years ago – and co-sponsored by The Folio Society. Entry is open to all binders (except DB Fellows) who are resident in the UK at the time of completing their binding. Every entrant must bind the appointed book (this year it was Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man), but can also submit open-choice books and artist’s books as a secondary entry.

The Clothworkers’ Company provides two prizes in the Open Choice Book category, where binders choose their own titles to bind. This category consistently attracts high quality designs. This year the first-prize winner also won three other awards,and between them both Clothworker prize winners have won sevenClothworker Awards in recent years!

First prize was awarded to Yuko Matsuno for her miniature binding (76 x 60 x 25 mm) of The Island: An Amsterdam Saga by Geert Mak [Stichting Handboekbinden, The Hague: 2016]. It is bound in full red goatskin, with hand ink-dotted doublures, endpapers and edges. The cover has swingable ladybirds (made from polymer clay, covered in goatskin and painted with acrylic) attached to it with gold-filled headpins. The title is tooled in dark brown on goatskin inlays underneath the ladybirds. The whole volume is contained in a diorama glass jar with handmade cork soil and hemp thread foliage.

In the story there is a character called Sandra. Her anecdote is ‘She lives in her own world and she can make ladybirds, she puts four in a jar and after a week there are eight. She can do that’. Yuko has created this world on the binding. The design of the doublures, endpapers and edge decorations represents the village on KNSM Island (in the Amsterdam docks) on fire.

Second prize went to Kaori Maki for Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson [The Folio Society, London: 2016]. It is bound in full teal goatskin with yellow, tan and white goatskin onlays of wild flowers.

Emily Dickinson spent most of her life at home, but her inner world was inspired by the wider world. Kaori was influenced by one of the poems, “Nature Rarer Uses Yellow”. This particular verse stirred in her the idea that the colour yellow was symbolic of Emily’s way of life. The little white and blue squares on the cover and endpapers represent prisms of light.

The Company also continues to fund and support The Queen’s Bindery Apprenticeship Scheme (QBAS), now in its third year of training new apprentices.