barbara schmelzer Bound for Glory

Bound for glory

The tools are old, the workspace is old, the objects of her work are often old, but Barbara Schmelzer is a very modern designer bookbinder. She talks to Diana Dekker.

Barbara Schmelzer works in an old building above a cake tin factory in Newtown, Wellington. The metallic sounds of cake-tin making drift up the wodden stars and sharpen the gentle music she lays while she’s standing at her bench.
Ancient books, fine old tools, a massive guillotine past its 100th and a sculptural book press with big brass knobs, also a centenarian, surround her.

“Modern stuff is hard to come by and it hasn’t changed much,” she says. And old bookbinding tools, she adds, are less expensive than new ones, though the vereable guillotine, strictly speaking a board-shearer, is in for the chop. “It’s difficult, a pain.”

Ms Schmelzer is one of a small handful of mostly women bookbinders in Wellington, operating in what was once a man’s world. When she needs manpower, which is not often, she can call on the friendly cake-tin makers downstairs, where, fortuitously, a mechanical engineer and a toolmaker ply their trades. “Changing the 80-centimetre blades in the guillotine is not much fun.”

Her workspace has some similarities to the one that drew her to bookbinding in the beginning. When she was a teenager in Bavaria her birthplace, she used to walk past the dusty windows of an abandoned bookbinding business on her way to and from college. It was a Dickensian sight, “everything higgledy-piggledy, old books and tools, like going past a second-hand shop which is never open and you think ‘What’s going on?’ Nothing ever changes. It just sits there. I didn’t know about bookbinding.”

Three decades later and married to a New Zealander, she translated the romantic dream of the decaying bookbinders into the reality of the craft. She learned how at the Bookbinding College in Stuttgart, Germany, and in internships with the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library in London.

At the Victoria and Albert, she worked on rehousing a collection of textile samples in the design library and was able to watch conservators at work in other departments.

“There is an amazing library with a lot of fine bindings and it was heaven to be able to touch them and see how they were made.

“To learn fine binding and the quality I wanted to do, I had to leave New Zealand.”

She taught herself, too, skills of a craft which these days is anything but “crafty”—it’s more about sleek design and modern materials. She uses a variety of materials from fish skin to plexiglass sprayed with automotive lacquer. She has won numerous awards for both fine and experimental binding.

Ms Schmelzer works with more finesse and patience than brute strength and repetition. She produces one-off wedding albums, guest books and limited-edition presentation portfolios. She also works on archival storage and conservation, which she has done for the National Library and Archives New Zealand, as well as for private individuals.

On her bench, awaiting attention, is a wonderful old, leather-bound book produced in 1849, A Century of Orchidaceous Plants Selected from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, descriptions by Sir William Jackson Hooker, director of Royal Gardens of Kew. It’s sagging at the seams and in need of attention after 150-plus years of wear, but the hand-coloured prints it contains are clear and bright. Ms Schmelzer will tamper with it as little as possible during restoration—unlike some bookbinders who, she says scathingly, will “take the old bits off, even the covers, and throw them away, sometimes the old tooled leather, and put the whole thing back into a horrible new buckram binding.”

Done expertly, it’s not cheap. One valuable leather-bound book might take a week to restore. A mass-produced book, its pages removed and newly bound in leather and requiring 20-30 hours of tooling, might sell for $750.

Modern jobs have included involvement in producing 600 hard backed promotional booklets featuring The Lord of The Rings post-production film unit in Miramar. They were packaged in black velvet, with a piece of greenstone included, for distribution in Los Angeles.

Her next big assignment is to produce 21 books of limited-edition prints from a prominent New Zealand artist whom she’s not allowed to name. There will be no expense spared. “They will have a classic vellum [very fine animal skin] binding. It’s a dream job for a bookbinder. You hardly ever get to work with vellum. The books will have a fantastic quality of bindings, material and trims. To have a commission for 20 fine bindings doesn’t happen very often these days.”

The techniques of putting a book together have changed little over the years, she says. “The best way is still folded sheets of paper sewn through the middle.”

There has never, she says, been a perfect way of fixing single pages, a product of modern technology, into book spines. The technique used for the past 20-30 years is called “perfect binding”—“but it’s absolutely not perfect”, says Ms Schmelzer.

It involves putting the pages in a clamp and gluing them to the spine of the book.

Modern bookbinding can involve no glue all, with the paper folded and fastened with slots and tabs.

“A lot of bookbinding can be done with little equipment. With a bone folder [like a bone letter-opener], scissors, a steel ruler and a good cutting knife, you can make a photo album at home.”

The bookbinder’s most important tools?

“Good eyes and a steady hand. Getting the shakes and my eyesight gone would be the end of my career.”

Website: www.barbaraschmelzer.com

The Dominion Post 9 May 2004.