On Apprenticeship

A few days ago, I had an interview with QEST about an apprenticeship grant.

Mastering a craft takes years. And you also have to work out how to make a living from it.

The traditional image of apprenticeship is of someone entering a workshop as a teenager, learning a trade they expect to practise for the rest of their working life. Today, there’s more room to explore different disciplines and change direction. A lifelong career in one field can feel like a considerable expectation to place on someone just starting out.

The commitment a craft demands hasn’t changed much. The world around it has.

I know that desire to explore. I studied engineering and tried several disciplines before eventually finding my way to bookbinding in my mid-thirties.

I had no idea how long I would stay with it.

Putting in the hours isn’t enough. It also requires patience.

Which is interesting, because I’m an impatient person. Very impatient, in fact. Yet somehow, over the years, I’ve learnt to be patient with my work.

Craft gives you little choice. However passionate you are, you spend an extraordinary amount of time getting things wrong. You have to accept that, pay attention, try again and gradually learn to see things you couldn’t see before.

I wonder whether I would have been ready when I was younger.

What a Book Can Hold

I’m currently making a book to celebrate a paediatric oncologist who is being inducted into a hospital’s Hall of Fame.

It brings together messages from former patients, their families and colleagues, reflecting on the difference this doctor has made to their lives.

Some of the patients are now in their thirties or forties. Others didn’t survive.

I’ve made books like this before.

Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours reading the messages, often with tears in my eyes.

It’s a relatively simple book to make. It won’t be the most technically accomplished thing I’ve ever produced.

But through these messages, I get a glimpse of what someone else’s extraordinary work has meant to so many people. Of lives saved, families supported, and moments of care in circumstances I can barely imagine.

My part is simply to bring those voices together in a physical object. Something that might outlive the doctor herself, passed on and discovered by people who never had the chance to meet her.

What a privilege.

Book Glamour

Books are having a fashion moment. Quite literally.

Earlier this month, Valentino presented its latest collection inside the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. The show was called Antibiblioteca, inspired by Umberto Eco’s collection of unread books.

At Milan Design Week, Miu Miu hosted a literary club, while Jil Sander and Apartamento created a temporary library of books selected by artists and designers.

Even Dior is taking its next show to the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin.

I find myself wondering what exactly fashion has fallen in love with.

The book as an object? The ideas it contains? Or everything a book seems to say about the person holding it?

A book can be displayed without being read. It can be read without being owned. It can be admired for its design without any interest in its contents.

It reminds me of Eve Arnold’s famous 1955 photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. The photograph raised the question of whether she was genuinely reading such a demanding novel or simply posing with it. Yet Monroe had brought the book herself and was apparently fascinated by its language.

Whatever the reasons, I’m delighted to see my favourite object in the front row.

The Space Between

Photo by Jenny Zarins

I was recently featured in Condé Nast Traveller as part of a piece about London’s makers.

Reading the article, there was one sentence I kept thinking about.

Katie Baron described me as “both aesthetician and technician”.

There was something about those two words that, although true, didn’t feel completely right.

At first, it was aesthetician.

Perhaps part of my reaction was linguistic. In Italian, an estetista works in beauty. An esteta is something quite different. The word has its roots in sensing and perceiving, and carries a broader idea of aesthetics: not simply making things beautiful, but thinking about how things are experienced.

That felt much closer.

I care deeply about how things look, but making something look better isn’t really what I do.

Then there was technician.

There is certainly a lot of that in me. I like understanding how things work. Materials, structures, processes, tolerances. I like solving problems.

But somehow that didn’t quite describe it either.

The more I thought about those two words, the more I realised that what interests me is the space between them.

When someone brings me a project, I’m not simply trying to make the content beautiful, nor am I working out how to manufacture it.

I’m trying to define the relationship between the content, the physical form it will take, the person who will encounter it, and the environment in which it will live.

That requires technical understanding, but also sensitivity, imagination and judgement. Often it means bringing together things that come from completely different disciplines.

An idea from engineering might solve an aesthetic problem. A material might change the direction of the design. An aesthetic decision might create a technical problem that sends the whole thing somewhere unexpected.

After a while, it becomes difficult to say where one ends and the other begins.

And that’s why the sentence didn’t feel complete.

Both words describe something I recognise.

But what I really do seems to happen in between.

Read the full Condé Nast Traveller article.

The Concertina

And So I Watch You From Afar, Aindreas Scholz.
Seven-metre concertina made in collaboration with Mazzotti Books.

Recently, a surprising number of people have been asking me to make concertinas.

Different people. Different projects. No connection between them.

And I’ve started wondering why.

Is it simply becoming more visible? Or is there something about the structure itself that people are responding to now?

A concertina is a strange kind of book.

Closed, it can sit in your hands.

Open it, and it can take over a table. Keep going and, sometimes, an entire room.

It can be experienced one panel at a time, like a conventional book. But unfold it completely and suddenly everything exists at once.

Sequence becomes image. Book becomes object.

It doesn’t really ask you to choose between reading something and looking at it. Between holding it and displaying it. Between experiencing the parts and seeing the whole.

I’ve made concertinas that extend for metres, and yet return to the size of a book.

Maybe that’s part of the attraction.

Then again, suddenly everyone seems to want one.

Why the concertina? Why now?

The Actual Thing

A designer friend was telling me about turning a website into a zine.

The content was already there, so he thought it would be relatively straightforward. It wasn’t. Once the scrolling disappeared, everything changed: the amount of text, the typography, the sequence, the pacing.

A pretty good example of Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message.

I happened to have a 1967 copy of The Medium Is the Massage, the book McLuhan made with Quentin Fiore, so I showed him.

Even the title carries the idea. It was supposed to be The Medium Is the Message, but message arrived back from the typesetter as massage.

McLuhan kept it.

I loved being able to show him the actual thing.

That’s one of the pleasures of collecting books. Every so often a conversation comes along and you have the reference itself. Not somewhere online. Right there.

And in this case, the book was also the proof. Its typography, images and sequence are as much part of the argument as the words.

Which made me think about the medium we’re all trying to understand now.

AI is already becoming part of how we write, search, design and make.

If AI is the new medium, what will the message be?

Narrow. Deep. Wide.

The temperature finally dropped this week.

After three weeks of working almost continuously towards a deadline, I hadn’t realised how narrow my world had become until it started expanding again.

When I’m deep into a project, my field of vision gets progressively smaller. Eventually there is very little outside the thing in front of me. A measurement. A material. A decision. Sometimes a fraction of a millimetre.

I like going there, although I’m not sure like is quite the right word.

It’s painful.

The deeper I go, the more I notice. And the more I notice, the harder it becomes to let things go. Differences that would have seemed irrelevant a few weeks earlier become impossible to ignore.

But there are nuances you only encounter at that depth.

Then the work finishes and I surface.

This time, at almost exactly the same moment, the heat broke in London. The air changed and I could feel my attention expanding with it.

Things started coming back into view. Music. Conversations. Objects. Other people’s work.

I like this state too.

And I’ve realised that what doesn’t work for me is everything in between.

Medium attention.

Being slightly focused and slightly distracted. Never going deeply enough to encounter the nuances, but never coming far enough out to really see what is around me either.

I seem to need the movement between the two.

Narrow. Go deep. Surface. Expand.

There is precision in one and perspective in the other.

Perhaps that’s why surfacing feels so good. After spending weeks seeing almost nothing except what is wrong, I suddenly start seeing everything else again.

And eventually, somewhere in that wider field of vision, something catches my attention.

The aperture begins to narrow.

And I go in again.

The Scan

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
  Italo Calvino

I’ve been thinking about that sentence lately.

Not because of the classics, but because of the ordinary books.

Thousands of them are now being bought, their spines cut away, their pages scanned, and the remains discarded. The purpose isn’t destruction; the purpose is efficiency.

I understand the logic. I also understand the extraordinary potential of AI.

What I find harder to understand is something else, why does this feel like an acceptable price to pay?

In 1966, when the Arno flooded Florence, thousands of volunteers travelled from across the world to rescue waterlogged books. Conservators, bookbinders and students formed human chains, passing damaged volumes from hand to hand because they believed they were worth saving.

Sixty years later, we possess technologies capable of scanning books without destroying them. They simply ask for something efficiency rarely does: care.

Yet we increasingly choose otherwise.

A scan preserves the text. A book preserves something else more difficult to define.

Not just information.

Evidence.

Information can be copied indefinitely. Evidence has to exists somewhere.

A printed book fixes an idea in time. Once it enters the world, it becomes independent of its author. It can be ignored, rediscovered, challenged or celebrated. It may spend decades on a forgotten shelf before finding the reader who finally understands why it mattered. Or it may never matter at all.

We simply don’t know. History suggests we are remarkably poor at knowing what the future will value. That uncertainty is precisely why preservation matters.

Perhaps this isn’t really a question about AI.

Perhaps it’s a question about what we believe culture is.

Every generation decides what it chooses to preserve.
Every generation also decides what it is willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.

The moment we stop noticing that trade-off may be the moment we’ve already accepted it.

And I can’t help wondering:

When the object disappears, what becomes our anchor?

Seeing in Books

“Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.”
  Stéphane Mallarmé


Someone recently asked me what keeps me going.

I hadn’t really thought about it before.

It’s that I seem to be surrounded by books that haven’t been made yet.

A conversation.
An exhibition.
A label.
The way a parcel is wrapped.
A collection.

None of them begin as books.

But somewhere along the way, they become possibilities.

I catch myself wondering what shape they would take.
How they might unfold.
What they would feel like to hold.

Is it a codex, a concertina, a box, or something else entirely?

I hadn’t noticed it happening.

At some point, books stopped being simply something I made.

They became the way I think.

A Different Relationship

I finished my first audiobook this week.

The first thing I did afterwards was buy the paperback.

Not because I wanted to read it again.

I’d just spent thirteen hours doing exactly that.

So why?

I realised I wanted to know where the final chapter was.
I wanted to underline a paragraph.
I wanted to know I could return to it a year from now and find it exactly where I’d left it.

That’s how I remember.

Not just through ideas, but through geography.

I wasn’t buying the story.

I was giving those ideas an address.

Do some ideas need an address?


P.S. The book is Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Zadie Smith’s endorsement on the cover reads:“Should of course simply be called C**ts… well worth your time.”

I couldn’t put it better myself.

Until You See It

Two weeks ago an architectural practice asked if I could bring some examples of large-format books.

Back at the studio, I had a pallet stacked with the biggest books we’d made.

A few hours later they were spread across a meeting table.

The first reaction was immediate.
“That’s beautiful.”

A few moments later came the one I was hoping for.
“I didn’t know a book could be like that.”

I’ve realised that’s the moment I enjoy most.

Not because someone likes the work.
But because, for a moment, their idea of what a book can be becomes a little bigger.

After that, we aren’t just talking about books.

We’re talking about possibilities. 

P.S. Sitting on top of the pallet is one of the smallest books we’ve made. I brought that one too. A reminder that surprise has very little to do with scale.

Do You Care?

Earlier last week, I found myself trying to explain a technical detail about a book.

After several attempts, it became clear that we were not struggling because the concept was particularly complicated. We were struggling because we cared about different things.

I care deeply about books. The way they are made, the way they open, the details most people never notice.

For the other person, the book was simply a task to complete. A project that had landed on their desk. And there is nothing wrong with that. Not everyone needs to care about books.

But it did make me realise something.

The projects I enjoy most always seem to begin in the same place: with someone who cares.

Not necessarily about paper stocks, printing techniques, or binding structures.

Just someone who cares about the thing they are trying to make.

Once that exists, everything else tends to follow.

The work becomes collaborative rather than transactional.

After the call, I found myself wondering whether there should be a question on our contact form.

Not about budgets.
Not about timelines.
Not about specifications.

Just a simple question.

Do you care?

Everything Was, Is and Always Will Be

Recently I completed a limited edition for visual artist Haroon Mirza.

While working on the book, I found myself returning to its title more than anything else.

Everything Was, Is and Always Will Be.

The pages move between creation myths and cosmology, artificial intelligence and ancient scripture, sound, technology, consciousness, and the origins of life.

At first, they feel like separate subjects.

Then slowly the boundaries begin to dissolve.

One idea leads to another.

A scientific theory sits beside a myth.

A machine appears next to a ritual.

The distance between them becomes smaller than expected.

One of the privileges of my work is spending time inside someone else’s way of seeing the world.

Not just their finished ideas, but the connections between them.

For a while, you get to follow the connections they notice.

And occasionally leave with a few of your own.

Full Circle

At the end of last year, I completed a limited edition called Nayan that has been accepted into this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

What I find myself thinking about is not the exhibition itself.

The project began because its creator had seen another book I made several years earlier, Anansi Tales .

That book was also exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Somewhere along the way, one object led to another.

A conversation carried through paper, stories, time, and people.

Now the new book returns to the same place.

There is something very satisfying about that.

Not because it feels like an achievement, but because it is a reminder that work has a way of travelling further than we expect.

The theme of this year’s exhibition is Interconnectedness. 

It feels strangely fitting.

One project opens the door to another.

Often through paths that only become visible in hindsight.

The Perception of Time

I spent the day at the Michelangelo Foundation gathering at City and Guilds of London Art School during London Craft Week.

More than sixty makers and artisans connected through the Homo Faber Guide.
Different disciplines, materials, and lives organised around the same impulse.

To spend enough time thinking through a craft to slowly develop a language of your own.

In the afternoon the workshops opened.
Stone carving, wood carving, paper conservation.

The one I instinctively gravitated towards was stone carving.
Dust suspended in the air, the repetitive sound of tools against stone, small decisions repeated thousands of times.

Something that felt both familiar and completely distant from the way I normally move through the world.

Not through the objects themselves, but through the mindset behind them.

The concentration and patience required to shape something slowly, over time.

I connected with that immediately.
Less so with the repetitive movement and noise.

There is also something particular in the atmosphere around these spaces.
A sense that time moves differently there.

The Cock and the Bull

The other day, Harriet Bruce came by the studio.

Harriet did a residency at Mazzotti Books in 2019.
It culminated in a collaborative project, I Do I Undo I Redo, which went on to win the International Bookbinding Competition.

The residency programme started a year earlier, in 2018. The intention was simple.

Open the studio.
Invite new perspectives.
See what happens.

Since then, it has brought in people with very different ways of thinking and making. Each one leaves something behind.

The image above is a woodcut Harriet made earlier this year in Oaxaca.
A calendar. Wood, ink, time, pressure.

The visit turned into a conversation.
Then into a direction.

Something new is beginning to take shape.

The studio does that sometimes.

It brings people together.
That’s where things begin.

P.S. If you’d like to peek into Harriet’s woodcut project, click here.