Matt Edwards from Derby City Museums came to run a mini workshop on Japanese stab binding for our Fenruary meeting, and final event at Eastwood Hall.

Matt has a Fine Art background, but discovered book binding whilst at university through RGAP originally based at Derby University.

Bookbinding is the process of fastening together the multiple pages which make up a given book, and covering the result.

Matt talked us through a little of the history and terminology of binding - Forwarders were the serwers and usually female (no surprise there) followed up by the binders (usually male..)
Traditionally, the craft of bookbinding is divided into the areas of forwarding and finishing. Forwarding consists of all the procedures leading up to the decoration of the covers. That is, folding the leaves into pages and gathering into signatures or quires, sewing them together, adding endpapers, attaching boards, and covering. In other words, the binding proper. Finishing is a specialized field involving gold (or blind) tooling, and sometimes inlay and onlay work: the artistic embellishment of the binding.