Job Lot: The book binder

By GRAHAM REID

Anna Caithness, age 38, runs her Mt Eden business Bound to Last with Helen Everest. Income approximately $40,000.

Bookbinding sounds charmingly old-fashioned. Where did you train?

Helen, who is my business and life partner, and I did a fulltime year-long course in Whangarei just over 10 years ago. When I first saw the course advertised I hadn't heard of bookbinding but they'd also advertised papermaking and I'd done a bit of that. It was one of the last Access courses, we did it through the Te Kowhai Print Trust and our tutor was Roger Crowden who came over from England for it.

What appealed to you about it once you'd started?

I just fell in love with the possibilities, even though we've ended up in quite different areas now. I was very interested in journals. Also it was the first time I'd done something creative so that was rewarding. The repair side is a very small area for us now.

With old books were you trained to recreate them or just preserve?

We were trained to keep as much of the original as possible. We learned the old ways so we would understand how they were bound so we could do it in a similar way. As much as possible we keep the original covers. A lot of time it costs a lot of money — like restoring the big old family Bibles — and they are often beyond people's budgets because it is a luxury item.

What's a typical restoration process on an old book?

Usually the end papers, the front and back pages, are split so we repair those trying to keep the original — and keep any part with writing on it. We make new ones using acid-free paper and make them old looking. We clean glue off the spine and put new acid-free glue on. Then we work on the cover. If it's leather we would lift it off the front and back, put a new spine on and put the old one back provided it's in a condition to be used again.

Your work has changed over the years?

Yes. We did, and do, wedding photo albums for photographers. It was one the first things we started doing. We had all these skills and wondered what we were going do with them, there were only so many books to be repaired. We started in Whangarei and the market was small so we moved to Auckland eight years ago, to Devonport which was a really good place to start. Then we were in Westhaven for four years and shifted to Mt Eden in September last year. And the kind of work has changed too. We now work with a lot of advertising agencies and designers, we also do compendiums for hotels.

What kinds of projects are they?

We work mostly on boxes and presentation folders for corporates and ad agencies. We also make boxes for videos or bound documents, and menus. We did menus for Cin Cin and Otto's, the upper end of the market, because they are very expensive. We use buckram, the bookbinding cloth, because it's linen-based and is good to work with because you can wipe it down. So for menus it's perfect. They can also be bound with nickel or brass screws, or have spines of elastic. We work with someone who does our gold and silver foiling on the cloth, but printing is usually organised by the client. We have screen-printed fabrics, though.

What is it that businesspeople usually approach you for?

To have corporate reports bound, or they are often going for a contract or making a pitch so they want to present their work differently. Our main market is in creative and innovative ideas for presentation.
For example we made one like a jack-in-the-box. We made up the A4 document covers and made a box with springs. The deadline was tight and we worked through the night.

Most of your business is word of mouth?

Definitely. The businesses we work with are happy to tell others. We have found a niche. There are other binders but we work in different areas and there are a couple of us that refer work between us depending on whose best at it. We're lucky because we really like what we do and are proud of the area we've set up in.