Bookbinding is a fairly easy hobby to pick up. Besides the paper, all it really requires is a flat surface, a bone folder, an awl, an x-acto knife and some needle and thread. For those in New York, SVA offers evening courses in bookmaking. The Center for Book Arts is also located somewhere in Flatiron, I believe, and offers occasional workshops on specific binding techniques.
I absolutely can echo that the basics are pretty simple and fun. With some creativity it makes for great gifts. I used to make docking-stations and other desk-appliances with it.
Having worked for a bookbinder for about a year though I absolutely can assure anyone "hobbyist" binding has little in common with what professionals do. There is more tooling, more (expensive) machinery, more steps and more process refactoring. As can be expected, if someone's hobby is another one's craft and income. It's less of "The journey is the reward".
Well, first excuse me if I don't use the bookbinder-english correct words as I'm not a native speaker.
How did i build docking stations? Well, the way you create the back of a book (not of course the "inlay" or "pages") is usually by working on a thick board (you may call it "paperboard") and covering it with some sort of leather (my literal translation would be "leather paper"). With the same technique you can create other objects as well. Boxes would be the most obvious ones but any form that comes to your mind and you consider doable. I basically did that "around" a cable ;-)
Most cool. I totally wasn't ridiculing you. I apologize profusely if that's how it came off. I would never make fun of anyone's English, and I didn't find yours defective anyway. I was sincerely trying to wonder how a leather docking station would work. Also, I haven't seen docking stations around in ages.
And like many other crafts, while anyone can bang out a shell script to print "hello world!", it's a fair bit different from something large, complex and finely crafted.
I admire a guy who works for so many years. He's just gonna keep going until he literally cannot make it to the shop any more.
He likes the work. He likes what he makes. He likes the customers. Seems like a good life, a good career path -- the kind of path programmers don't necessarily get to traverse.
Maybe not NYC but I randomly bumped into a young woman in her 20's who was a professional bookbinder and restorer in Boston on the T about 7-8 years ago...so there is at least one representative the younger generations doing it somewhere..
He did my Masters thesis from NYU Poly, actually everyone in our department for like 30+ years was getting done with him. It was an experience that I would never forget.
Some on-demand printing services offer hard-cover bookbinding.
That's not bookbinding, it's a cheap not-quite-replacement for the real thing. When difficult-to-replace volumes from your personal library start losing pages you see a bookbinder, not your corner photocopying business. University libraries used to have them on the staff, but they seem to have gone the way of the glassblower in the chemistry department. I understand that one can find still find bookbinding shops in strict-orthodox communities, people like to keep their prayer book, even after the original binding has given up.
Yeah, I could find at least three here in Stockholm, so it would be a pretty damning sign of american book culture if NYC couldn't produce more than one...
