About me…

I have been an editor, writer, and publisher with a small book-packaging company in New York City. Book collecting led me into bookbinding. After an informal apprenticeship with Hope Weil, I set up a bindery in an 18th-century barn on my New Jersey farm. My design bindings are in many private collections and such institutions as Princeton University Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library, The Pierpont Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, and the Bridwell Library at the University of Texas in Austin. Other bindings have been exhibited in Guild of Book Workers’ and Designer Bookbinders’ exhibits. The binding of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  received first prize in the Helen Warren DeGolyer Competition in 2003.  In 1982, Oak Knoll published my earlier book, A Collector’s Guide to Bookbinding.

My Books

Cover Stories

Cover Stories presents the impulses that combine in my bookbinding designs. The bindings I chose for this survey range widely in style and content, some configured in pictorial schemes composed of color onlays, some gold-tooled in the grand tradition, some decorated sparingly with florial motifs or an abstract pattern. For each one I had to make a personal decision how far to go in forming a reader's expectations, how much to intervene in the reading experience. Connoisseurs may be content with an empty expanse of tastefully dyed and grained morocco. Purists can admire technical virtuosity without asking about its meaning. Conversely, classic texts may invite an interpretative approach not so much to please the eye as to engage the intellect, an act of artistic expression not unlike book illustration but with its own opportunities and constraints.

Cover Stories is available from Oak Knoll Press. To order a copy, click HERE.

Cover Stories is also available at the Morgan Library & Museum Shop in New York City, where an exhibition of my bindings is scheduled for 2028.

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Tricks of the Trade:
Confessions of a Bookbinder

My book, Tricks of the Trade: Confessions of a Bookbinder, is available from Oak Knoll Press. In it, I consider what is not taught— but probably should be—about binding and rebinding books. I delve into the gray area between technical discipline and artistic invention, bringing quirky but effective binding techniques out of obscurity and into the professional repertory. Here are tricks binders can use to polish and refine their bindings, as well as suggestions for repairs that may add value to collections.

To order hardcover or paperback click HERE.