During the summer over a long weekend, I took part in another workshop for bookbinding! This workshop was on protective enclosures. Protective enclosures are either for decorative purposes or for protection, they keep a rare book safe – especially if the book is beyond repair. Over the three days we made a portfolio, a clam shell box, and a slip case. Our class was quick at the tasks and Dan also made with us a model of a fascicule – which is used often in archives. It allows the archive to make fragile thing (such as photographs of newspaper clippings) available for viewing, without the patron needed to actually touch the page.

Here are a  few images from the weekend! Our first task began with making a model – this model was simply made from board and paper, but on the paper we made the appropriate cuts to allow for folding. This was practice before we would later make the actual thing in cloth. This was for the clam shell.

We worked on several projects at once to allow things to dry while we worked on something else. Below you can see a few pictures from the various projects as they are being worked on.

The back object, (tallest) is the beginning of a portfolio, the small object in front of it will be the cover for the clam shell, which you can see the boxes for in the black cloth. There is also the box for the slipcase.

Once the boxes were made we began to cover them in cloth and paper, below are a few snapshots of the process.

As the enclosures were covered, we had to start to put them together and create the final product.

While things dried, we worked on the fascicule. This is the cover for it — at least the start of it! It was a series of folds and cuts that would make it possible to fold it into a nice cover, that the actual fascicule could slip into. Not necessary, but it makes it nicer and adds protection.

After three long days we had our finished enclosures! The large blue/green enclosure is the portfolio, the green/white enclosure is a slipcase, the blue/back box is a clam shell and the white booklet is the mini model fascicule.

Here are few more individual shots of the enclosures:

The slipcase, holding a few of CBBAG’s Book Arts magazines, the portfolio (used to protect single sheets often, such as rare manuscript pages), and the clam shell – made often to be as snug a fit as possible to the object. These enclosures protect the work from the environment but of course can also be used solely as decoration.

As always I really enjoyed the course!

For more information on CBBAG check out their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/cbbagsouthwesternontario

Until next time!