Late Coptic Binding

The class at the North Bennet Street School was everything I had hoped. There were seven of us plus instructor Shanna Leino. We had five sessions, 8:30 to 4:30, in which to complete our Coptic book. Shanna had set up our schedule so that we moved along at a good pace, accomplishing a great deal each day but with never a sense of being rushed or pushed. The first day we developed our cover design, made the cover boards out of papyrus, stained the text paper for an antique look, folded and cut the paper, and pared the leather strips for the inner cover edge. Day 2 was devoted to completing the design and transferring it to tracing paper, punching and sewing the text pages and end band, putting on the edge strips, glueing linen to spine, and paring the leather for the cover. On day 3, we transferred our design to the leather followed by doing the cut-outs, appliques, punching, inlays and blind tooling. Day 4 was for covering the book and day 5 we made the brass pegs and leather loops for fastening it. I was a little slow so it took me right up until 5 pm on Friday to finish. I also took pictures of everyone in our class with their finished book. These are posted on both Picasa and Flickr.