Both ‘Haratii Flacci Carmina Expurgata’ and ‘Sacred Dramas’ make me think of an inverted Susan Collis’ approach. Whilst she carefully inlays precious materials to look like accidental marks or splashes, you have preserved such marks to look like themselves, but highlighted. Is that a fair assessment? Not marks as such, but I have chosen to highlight what is missing: the loss that was incurred during the book’s journey.

That your ‘work done’ in both of these bindings is so subtle, suggests these books were in relatively good condition when they came into your possession. Is that right? ‘Sacred Dramas’ had lost its spine and the boards were detached, but otherwise the book was sound. ‘Horatii’ however, was in very bad shape: the sewing was broken in many places, the cover was torn and peeling back at the spine and the whole book was filthy. It required a lot of difficult conservation to get the book into a state where I could then highlight the missing areas: its appearance of simplicity belies the fact that this was one of the most complicated and challenging books I have ever had to repair.

Is that subtlety typical of your Tomorrow’s Past activities? Subtlety is typical of ALL of my work!

How did you determine your contextual object for ‘Sacred Dramas’? For my Tomorrow’s Past work, I always respond to physical properties of the books: colours, engravings, form, etc. For ‘Sacred Dramas’ I responded to the colours found in the edge marbling. To me, these colours were hugely reminiscent of the colours of a Jay bird (which happens to be my favourite bird). Throughout the whole binding process, the image of a Jay never left my mind and I think the colours I have used, reflect this.

How did the content of Ovid’s Metamorphoses influence its new binding? If at all? For this book I responded largely to the engravings on the half-title and title page, but I also wanted to evoke a little bit of the ‘transformation’ elements into the structure and by using a very marked skin of vellum. The book was originally in a battered, but later (in date), very traditional/formal binding. I wanted to make a much less formal and more flexible binding to ‘transform’ it into a much more comfortable and sensitive object.

Approximately how much time did the making of each of these bindings take? From making a decision on what to do, to completion. They took about four months each. Most of that time was thinking time: working out how the book will engineer to its best ability and how it should look. Then it’s down to making maquettes and sample pieces. The actual re-binding time is probably only a matter of days.

1 Sacred Dramas, hannah More (c. 1818), 2013
Original boards, cotton, hand-decorated hand-made paper, Kozo-shi Japanese tissue, acrylic paint.

2 Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1807), 2013
Original boards, linen thread, mottled vellum.

3 Haratii Flacci Carmina Expurgata, Josepho Juvencio, (1784), 2011
Original binding, hand-gilded hand-made paper, hand-dyed alum tawed thongs, linen thread.

Jay bird.
Photo of kin-tsugi restoration on a Japanese Heian period (797-1185) sake cup.