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on. I used to go along at weekends and progressed from there." To bind you need a love of books and a knowledge of technique. You also need to be able to use physical strength in the right way. "If you're forming the spine you have to be able to put it in a press and hit it with the right pressure, otherwise you either smash it or you don't do anything," Wilkie says. Traditionally the craft has two parts: forwarding, which is the process of binding the pages together, and finishing, which means embellishing the work with a title and other forms of decoration. Forwarding is mostly a Binding is a labour-intensive Among other steps in binding Cathy process. a year's Rondow 1920s and 1930s and they want to read them to the grandkids." Repairs pose their own problems for the binder. How a book responds depends firstly on what it's made of, on whether it's a soft paper or a hard paper or a coasted paper or an account ledger paper. "Each book is different," Wilkie emphasizes. "A lot of modern books are mass-produced and made of poorer-quality pulp. Some of them look better because they have a really high kaolin coating and kaolin makes the pages bright. But when you bend them it cracks, it doesn't last." It's not just the material, though. All books have their own history, an often sorry tale of neglect, even of violation. "They all bend in a different way, and they all have memory in the paper. It holds the fold. If you get an existing book that's been abused and bent backwards and folded and left on a bookshelf it remembers that and it's sometimes very hard to get rid of. Sometimes you have to take the book completely apart right down to the bare pages and signatures and then resew it. But even then it sometimes remembers. "You've just got to look at each book and get a feeling for what you can do with it." If you'd like to try your hand at bookbinding, Centennial has a series of courses. "People come and learn the basics," says teacher Cathy Rondow. "They learn to cut paper with a knife and a cutting mat, to cut millboard (the thick cover board), and to make something in the basic album style. In more advanced classes they learn Coptic binding, which is one of the original styles." Binding is an old skill, but it still finds new uses. "We had one guy who'd met his girlfriend over the Internet," Rondow says. " N o w he's binding all the e-mail messages they exchanged." For more information shops at Centennial binding.bc.ca traditional about bookbinding go to work- worth of magazines, sews the tapes on ... ... while keeping everything square... "We had one guy who'd met his girlfriend over the Internet/' Rondow says. "Now he's binding all the e-mail messages they have exchanged." hidden art, and if a book has been made properly the reader will be unaware of the skill that has gone into the making of it. But evidence of it can been seen in the way a book opens, and lies flat. This is a subtle delight, though. More obvious is the pleasure that comes from good finishing -- the gold lettering that gleams on the spine, for instance. Each book has its own material personality, coming from how it looks and how it feels. "We do poetry books, and family histories, and quite a lot of theses," Wilkie says. "And we do some binding, general binding, for the hospital." The binder doesn't always start from scratch. Much of Centennial's business comes from mending the damage done by age and frequent use. "We do a lot of repairs of family cookbooks. And we repair children's books, brought in by the grandparents.Many of them have kept their family books from the and flattening the assembled volume. attaching the endpapers... www.centennialbookThere are also or call 604-983-3506. classes in papermaking dyed rice paper. and chigiri-e, a form of Japanese collage which uses hand- M a r c h | A p r i l 1 1