The Silver Rose Bindery

A coptic-stitch binding of Oscar Wilde's novel, using a text from Project Gutenberg.  The front and back are covered in a suede-like paper I found at the craft store, and the stitching is done using silver embroidery floss.  Both front and back covers are embellished with stitchwork called catepillars or centipedes at the top and bottom.

In 2003, I bound an edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, using a text from Project Gutenberg.  So far, this is my favorite binding project, and it turned out better than I could have hoped.  The cover is leather harvested from an old, torn jacket.  I cut the leather into different shaped chunks, then stitched them together with artificial sinew, making a point of keeping the stitching very visible.

Binding custom editions is a much more difficult and time-consuming process.  For those I have done, I've gotten electronic versions of public-domain texts and formatted them using Adobe PageMaker or InDesign.  These documents I then print to PDFs, which I can then laser print onto the appropriate paper.  The individual pages and the signatures must all be kept in exactly the right order during the binding process for the book to come out properly.