The Book Bindery Tragedy

One of my courses recently led me on a tour of our local book bindery.  What is a book bindery?  It is a place where new books, historical books, sentimental books, or books that will take a lot of abuse are taken to be given a quality, hard cover.  This will greatly increase the quality and life of the book.  But book binding is a dying industry.  This company was started in 1969 and while it may always have a niche market, it's bread and butter, the public and school libraries, are struggling with budget cuts and are having fewer and fewer books professionally bound.  The following is my report on the tour and at the end are examples of ways similar industries are being saved around the world.

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The book bindery tour was intriguing to me.  It seemed as though we were walking into a Shakespearean tragedy, where you know it wouldn’t end well, but the characters pushed forward, nonetheless.  It was like an artist’s studio; tactile and colourful and messy, but with bits of inspiration scattered everywhere you looked.  Huge rolls of cloth and leather hibernating on deep, dusty shelves.  Bands of gold and silver leaf lighting up a dark wall.  Foreboding machines, dangerous in their blades and heat and rollers and glue, dotting the workspace and declaring their territory, “I am Guillotine, hear me roar.”  Stacks of books-in-process, fragile in their naked cover-less-ness.  And you could not miss the women.  Scattered throughout office and workspace alike, comically grotesque in their paper-collage beauty.

As our guide described the slow decline of a once thriving industry, I felt the urge to thresh some wheat, ride a horse, sew by hand, whittle something.  Anything to keep the past more relevant.  To make sure we cherish the beginning from which we came.  But cheap and shiny and manufactured seem to accompany all things new and the traditional methods are often left to fend for themselves. 

But why such a dark prediction in sentence number two?  Take the stained glass industry.  For hundreds of years stained glass fell out of favour.  The families who spent generations perfecting their methods died out or moved on to new and different things and colour recipes were lost.  Now there are colours of glass that modern technology has never been able to reproduce.  They are lost to us for good. 

As people demand lower prices, books must be produced for a lower cost.  Poorer quality books don’t last as long, so libraries, schools and bookstores can’t justify the cost of having them properly bound.  Poorly bound books fall apart and need to be replaced more frequently which causes people to demand lower prices.  And the fewer books that are professionally bound, the more suppliers shut down, thus increasing the cost of binding books in the first place.  The vicious cycle in which the book binding industry is caught can only be stopped from the outside by those who recognise the value in a quality book and in preserving traditional methods.  So while the glow and allure of all things new may press us forward, we must take hold of this gilt-edged industry, drag it from the jaws of it’s glue-drizzled machinery and give it an place in our world.  Then hopefully my prediction will be proven wrong.

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• The Historic Acadian Village in Nova Scotia is a great Canadian example where people maintain traditional methods to farm and live as they did over 300 years ago.
• The Guedelon Castle in France is a medieval castle being built using only traditional methods.
• The Japanese have a tradition of honouring their past.  This website showcases some of their traditional crafts that are being preserved.