Coptic Binding Workshop with Julia Miller

 

It has been a while since I posted. Mostly because, well, grad school and other things. And while finding words is usually not a problem for me, lately anything longer than an photo caption has been a challenge–sad to admit, but it’s kind of true. For reasons I won’t go into now, I’ve temporarily lost my writing mojo. So this post, and possibly the next few, will be mostly photo based (but who doesn’t like photos?).

This past semester I was fortunate to participate in a weekend workshop with the legendary Julia Miller, author of Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings. As a book historian and bench-trained conservator, Miller has done extensive research and model making of the Nag Hammadi codices. In this workshop we focused on the Morgan Library’s MS M.671.1, a 13th century prayer book written in a dialect of Coptic and Arabic. MS M.671.1 features an interesting combination of Coptic and Islamic binding characteristics–one that Miller believes to be transitional binding. The workshop was so great–not only did I come away with a historical model and Islamic endband mastery, but also with the realization that I just really want to be bookbinding historian extraordinaire Julia Miller.

MS M.671.1 measures 108 x 95 x 12 mm with cartonnage boards. Here I’m crinkling paper before pasting them together to create the cartonnage.

Applying gum arabic to some select interior folios for burnishing in the fashion of Islamic papers (scans of two interior pages shown here)

Busy working

Coptic sewing using hand-spun thread

The beginnings of an Islamic endband

Secondary part of the Islamic endband

preparing the leather for covering

Making our own leather stamping tools from wooden dowels

tools

this must have been taken during lunch break

Lower cover (back) of Julia Miller’s model of MS M.671.1 which features the leather spine repair seen on the original

Upper cover (front) of Julia Miller’s model of MS M.671.1

tooling the cover

Making my goucho style leather toggle. A tightly wrapped strip of leather that is pierced with an awl and the tail fed through the pierced hole.

Miller’s historical toggle examples

Covered binding and completed Islamic endband

My completed model of MS M

completed model of MS M.671.1 — the original shows rather skewed tooling so I tried to stay true to that, despite my OCD.

completed model of MS M.671.1