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.
Autobiography
I was looking for a biography and ended up in something else entirely.
It was Autobiography by Sol LeWitt, first published in 1980.
Page after page of black-and-white photographs arranged in a strict grid.
Objects, walls, fragments of a life reduced to structure.
An autobiography, in title only.
He never once appears.
It is hard not to think of Instagram.
The same grid. The same accumulation.
The comparison feels almost too easy.
Because the structure is the same.
The intention is not.
LeWitt removes himself completely.
What remains is a system.
Now, the same language is used to do the opposite.
To be present. To be seen.
What was once deliberate returns as something continuous, almost unconscious.
And there is something reassuring in that.
That a medium like the book continues to carry these experiments, shaped over centuries.
Ways of arranging images and text, long before they become familiar.
Or perhaps before we notice them again.
Threads of Life
I visited Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life at Hayward Gallery.
Walking into the space, you’re immediately held.
Beds suspended in a dense field of thread.
Lines crossing, tightening, almost vibrating.
During Sleep sits somewhere between weight and suspension.
Between what is there, and what is no longer.
I found myself standing still for longer than expected.
What struck me most was not the scale, but the restraint.
Very little, in the end.
Thread. Objects. Space.
And yet, within that, something vast opens up.
Something like memory, or the trace of it.
Something that stays without being fully there.
It made me think about how little is actually needed.
When the form is clear, and the intention precise, the work carries everything else.
When Anything Is Possible
Most projects start with constraints.
Projects for pitches.
Milestones to celebrate.
Portfolios to shape.
They usually arrive with limitations.
Materials.
Format.
Page count.
Often defined by what a streamlined, semi-industrial process allows.
Then something changes.
Some are not willing to give up on the original vision.
And with handmade books, suddenly anything becomes possible.
Or almost.
There are still limits.
Budget.
Time.
What the studio can physically do.
At first, that openness feels overwhelming.
But it does something very important.
It forces you to ask:
What is actually needed?
What should it feel like?
What should it mean?
For whom?
And why?
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.
A Place to Work, A Place to Think, A Place to Connect
I’ve been speaking with different people about making books.
Different backgrounds, same instinct.
To create something that didn’t exist before, to share with others.
What interests me is not only the object, but the encounter.
The studio becomes a place of connection.
Each project carries a story, not just of the book, but of the person behind it.
In that sense, the relationship is rarely transactional.
It cannot be.
To arrive at the right outcome, something has to be shared.
Time.
Attention.
Trust.
What is commissioned is not only the final object, but the process that leads to it.
And sometimes, what emerges is not what was expected, but something much closer to what was needed.
Nayan
Yesterday Nayan was launched.
In Sanskrit, the word means “eyes.”
It comes from the work of Ankit Vyas, founder of Niraamish.
Ankit is a London-based lawyer and an independent scholar of Indian miniature painting. What began as a personal fascination slowly became a deeper practice of looking.
Years of studying details in historical miniatures led him to share close-ups online. What started as an Instagram page grew into a community interested in the visual language of the tradition.
From that long engagement grew Nayan.
The book centres on ten eyes drawn from Indian miniature paintings across centuries. Each copy includes ten hand-painted eyes made in Jaipur by the master miniaturist Riyazuddin ji.
Ankit approached me with an unusual challenge: how to house ten miniature paintings within an artist’s book while still allowing them to be seen and, if desired, removed and framed.
The solution is an unfolding structure containing ten small frames (10 × 10 cm), alongside a monograph examining these eyes across centuries of miniature painting.
The project brings together historical research, close visual analysis, and contemporary miniature practice, with a chapter devoted to each selected eye.
What I admire most is the way the project moves between places and disciplines.
Between scholarship and making.
Between Jaipur and London.
Between historical tradition and contemporary form.
Above all, it is a book about learning how to look
Edition of 25 copies.
For acquisitions and enquiries please contact Niraamish.
The Antilibrary
19 February 2026 marked ten years since Umberto Eco’s death.
Eco owned around thirty thousand books.
When asked why, he questioned measuring a library by what had been read.
The value of a personal library, he suggested, lies as much in the unread as in the read.
Books as potential.
Books as reserve.
Books waiting for the right moment.
It’s tempting to treat books like consumer goods.
Buy one.
Read it.
Move on.
But that misses something essential.
A library is not an archive of what you know.
It is a map of what you don’t.
Some books sit for years before they find you.
Others arrive exactly when needed.
On Hubris
In Ancient Greek, hubris meant excessive pride.
The kind that invited a fall.
Craft knows that definition well.
You make a prototype.
You’re 90% happy.
Which is dangerous.
Because that last 10% whispers,
“Just tweak it.”
A millimetre here.
A “small” improvement.
You convince yourself it’s refinement.
Two days later you’re still undoing everything.
The tweak made it worse.
Not subtly worse.
Catastrophically worse.
Forty-eight hours to return to where you started.
Hubris.
Craft has impeccable timing.
It waits until you feel certain
and then reminds you
who’s really in charge.
One Work. Many Ways In.
I’ve been thinking about this for years.
If you buy a book, you should be able to access it in every format.
Print.
Digital.
Audio.
One purchase.
One work.
Multiple ways in.
The physical book remains the anchor.
But the experience should move.
You read at your desk.
You listen while walking.
You switch back without losing your place.
Technology makes this possible.
Publishing still treats formats as separate territories, divided by contracts, rights, and revenue models.
Last week, Spotify announced a partnership with Bookshop.org.
If you discover an audiobook, you can buy the physical edition directly.
More importantly, with a feature called Page Match, you scan the page you’re on and continue listening from that exact moment.
It isn’t seamless yet.
Scanning feels transitional.
Voice will likely replace it.
But the direction is unmistakable.
The book is becoming fluid.
I’m currently listening to Kitchen Confidential, read by Anthony Bourdain himself.
It feels less like consumption and more like conversation.
His voice adds texture the page cannot.
The page holds density and a personal rhythm that the voice cannot.
Why should I have to choose?
This isn’t about replacing print.
It’s about continuity.
The infrastructure is ready.
Readers already move between formats.
Question:
If books can move effortlessly between formats, would you want that?
Or is the integrity of a single format still part of what makes a book a book?
I’d genuinely like to hear how you think about this.
On Felice Beato
I came across Felice Beato again this week.
Again, because his images have been part of my visual vocabulary for a long time.I just hadn’t followed them back to the man.
Beato, an Italian–British photographer, was working across Asia at the end of the nineteenth century.
Among the first to photograph war.
Running a studio that developed its own methods for hand-colouring photographs, in collaboration with Japanese watercolour artists.
Learning that changed how I read the work.
The images didn’t change.
My distance from them did.
What I had taken as historical records began to read as deliberate constructions.Images made with an awareness of how they would circulate, how they would be seen.
It left me with a deeper appreciation, not just for the photographs,
but for the intention and labour behind them.
Sometimes that’s all it takes.
Not a new image.
Just the story around it.
The End & The Beginning
Happy New Year.
This was one of the last photos I took before the break.Under that pile of improvised weights there’s a book I can’t show (NDA): engraved marble front and back, sitting in a leather case.
Sometimes a job asks for more than what you already know.
You use what you have.You make it work.
Looking at it now, thinking about what’s next, I’m reminded how far resourcefulness carries the work.
You rarely have every tool, nor the right one.
If you stay calm and deal with the next constraint, things move.
A good reminder to start the year.
Less drama. More inventiveness. Same high standards.
Question: What’s one workaround you’re weirdly proud of?
The Ephea Book
Ephea gave me an open brief. Not an object, but a manifesto of materiality: something to slow us down and reawaken the senses. Before decisions or meaning comes feeling; it leads intuition.
From my piece in the Ephea Journal:
“When I first envisioned the Ephea Book, I thought about creating something far beyond a simple sample collection. I wanted to create an object that would function like an archive, but feel like a gallery, a space where each element had time and room to tell its own story.
I drew inspiration from vinyl records’ cases, yet I reimagined their structure to frame each sample as a unique material narrative. Every sheet of Ephea carries its own expression: textures, tones, densities unfolding one after another, designed to be explored slowly, by hand, with presence.
I wanted the structure to guide the journey, to decelerate it.
Not just a swatch book to flip through, but an instrument of discovery: tactile, intuitive, crafted to invite care and curiosity. Each gesture becomes a moment of encounter with the material, a silent dialogue between fingers and paper.
This is what makes the Ephea Book unique: it transforms consultation into experience, samples into stories, choices into discoveries.”
Question: are you familiar with Ephea's mycelium based materials?
Take a look here.
P.S. I’ve collaborated with Ephea and Mogu (Ephea’s sister company for architectural materials) for some time, and the evolution of their materials has been remarkable. Here is an interview in The New Bookbinder, Vol. 40 (2020), where I tested their early materials.
On cheating gravity
Last weekend I bound an A2 portrait book (420 × 594 mm), about 800 pages, almost 20 kg.
One of those commissions with an insane turnaround: if anything slips, you fix it on the fly and race the clock.
People imagine a bookbinding studio as a relaxing space.
The reality, especially in a big city like London, working to fashion and communications agency timelines, is the complete opposite.
We planned six working days. Files arrived two days late.
Then the printing press went down, twelve hours lost, and the first run arrived with issues that needed reprinting; another day gone.
2.5 days left. What do you do? You decide it’s personal. You make it happen.
I delivered at midnight on Sunday. I always swear I won’t take these jobs again. But there’s something powerful about making to the highest standard within a tiny window: a kind of total focus that turns down the noise.
When it’s finally done, it feels like cheating gravity for a moment.
P.S. Special thanks to Simon and Ira at LCBA; Nicky Oliver of Black Fox Bindery; and Francesco of Studio Bergini.
Lesson from la Tourette
Some buildings you simply visit. Others seem to visit you, shaping your thoughts, slowing your pace, and leaving an imprint that lasts long after you’ve gone.
In mid-July, while driving from London to Marseille, I had the pleasure of staying one night at Sainte Marie de la Tourette, a monastery near Lyon and the final building designed by Le Corbusier.
What struck me most was how light becomes an active participant in the architecture. It doesn’t simply illuminate; it moves freely, sliding across walls and floors, inviting you to follow.
The building uses undulating glass panes to control the light entering its large public spaces and long corridors, creating a rhythm of shadow and brightness that changes throughout the day.
With so little else competing, mind settles. Focus arrives. Attention deepens.
It’s a powerful reminder that inspiration doesn’t require abundance; the minimum, handled precisely, is enough.
Do you rearrange your space to think better, or let the space arrange you?
I’m exploring how studio layout affects error rate and flow.
If you have any tips, I’d love to compare notes.
P.S. The last picture shows my favourite architectural detail: the “sugar cubes.” They are everywhere. They serve no structural purpose; they’re there to frame the view, compelling you to focus more intently on what’s in front of you. Genius.
MAZZOTTI BOOKS' Manifesto
At the end of March last year, I attended an unforgettable workshop in London organised by the DO Lectures and run by David Hieatt and Mike Coulter. The focus? How to write a manifesto.
A manifesto is more than a set of rules or aspirations; it’s a compass. It’s what you return to when decisions get tough, when the path isn’t clear, or when you need to remind yourself why you started in the first place.
It’s taken me almost a year and a half to distill my ideas, challenge my assumptions, and put the words in the right order. But today, I’m happy to share the outcome, the foundation of what Mazzotti Books stands for and where it’s heading.
At Mazzotti Books,
We believe in the transformative power of books
Every book we create embodies our passion for curiosity and imaginative thinking, helping to shape a future where diverse ideas and perspectives are celebrated and treasured.
We are committed to those who care
The individuals and brands that dare to think bigger and strive for quality and individuality.
We uphold a standard of excellence and purpose
Ensuring that every decision we make reflects the integrity of the project and the creativity that defines us.
We thrive on challenges
Every day we receive ideas that no one else has been able to give shape to. We see them as opportunities to discover and play.
The approach is as important as the outcome
Creating a book is a multilayered process of navigating and discovering physical nuances.
We take you on a journey.
Craft matters
Craftsmanship infuses our work with meaning.
We care about our craft and the people we do it with.
We don’t just produce books, we breathe new dimensions into stories
Through form, structure and materials, we recontextualise narratives.
Daily Practice
A different way to approach thinking and making
The idea was born from a peculiar Instagram phenomenon in which makers feels the urge to post at least one picture of their paper offcuts, sharing their innate beauty and incredible potential, but rarely exploring it further. As Martina Margetts[1] wrote:
“Today’s internet deprives us of a connection with things: obsessed by surfing images, we consume superficially and judge prejudicially.” [2]
It is not enough for me to make useful objects. My aim as a bookbinder, artist and maker is to understand, deconstruct and reveal the physical nuances of my favourite medium: the book.
I started to collect offcuts because I felt that some of them were much more than merely the residues of processes. The simple act of accumulation led me to see them as a new raw material to be explored and used in different ways.
At the same time, I was inspired by Gongshi – spirit stones (popularly mistranslated as Scholar’s Rocks in English) after I worked on the seminal publication Crags and Ravines Make a Marvellous View published by Sylph Edition. In China, in the middle period of the Tang dynasty, during the first half of the 9th century BC, an enthusiasm for rocks developed in Chinese culture which gradually spread to Japan and Korea, and has continued to the modern age.
Rocks are venerated with all the respect that we would accord a work of art; except that what is really being honoured is the power of nature rather than the human hand. In a similar manner I started collecting urban debris from all around my studio, an area with an ever-increasing rate of development. By recasting the construction debris, I detached them from their past and gave them a new life, a new perspective through which to be seen. The appreciation of these objects, being man-made, becomes a starting point for reflecting on the power of creation and destruction contained within human hands.
I crystallised this current idea by creating a series of four new sculptures that explore the complex relationship between process and outcome, utilising the ‘in-between’ materials to capture nuances of the process that are otherwise invisible. At the same time, I wanted to create a departure from the linear narrative of binding a book – an object that itself is inherently linear – by developing a new visual language rooted in its physicality.
Daily Practice is now exhibited at “The Art of the Exceptional’ WOOD-GLASS-PAPER hosted by Fortnum and Mason on the third floor of their Piccadilly store until the 8th of May 2022.
[1] Martina Margetts is a Senior Tutor of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art in London. She was Editor of Crafts magazine, and has curated a number of exhibitions for Britian's Crafts Council.
[2] Documents on Contemporary Crafts No.5, Material Perceptions published by Norwegian Crafts Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2018