Books in the World
Now shipping Anchor Edition, Ideal Book redux redux, and other updates from the Studio
I have lots of wonderful news and some more musings about book design. The TL;DR version is…
We will start shipping copies of the Anchor Edition Master and Commander with the accompanying solander boxes in batches starting at the end of this week;
There is another brilliant binding of The Ideal Book that I printed back in 2022; and
Come visit my display at 2025 Tucson Festival of Books – the second largest book fair in the U.S. on March 15 & 16.
For details, read on!
Shipping Anchor Edition with Solander Boxes – Batch One
The work to complete the solander boxes continues apace. However, in order to make them as finely as possible, each box is taking about an hour more of labor to produce than originally scheduled. That does not sound like much until you multiply it by eighty boxes. As of today, two dozen boxes are completed and ready for packaging and shipping. Rather than waiting for all of the boxes to be finished – the rest are closer every day – I want to begin getting the books out to backers ASAP. I will begin shipping them in batches over the coming month as they are finished. Late this week, I will be shipping the first two dozen copies with solander boxes:
Copies will be shipped in the order in which backers supported us during the original Kickstarter campaign.
I will be reaching out to the first 24 people who ordered the Anchor Edition with the solander box on Tuesday, February 4 (via email).
If you receive the email and have not already done so, please complete your final payment within 48 hours using the link provided. Make sure to confirm the correct mailing address in order to ensure that we can ship your copy this week. Otherwise, we may need to push back shipping your copy.
If you receive the email and have already made your final payment, you do not need to do anything further. It will just alert you to look for the book in the mail.
If you do not receive an email on Tuesday, you will be included in one of the subsequent batches.
With that, all that still needs doing is carefully wrapping and packing everything in shipping boxes, printing of shipping labels, and a trip to the post office. I am delighted that the Anchor Edition of Master and Commander – with the custom solander boxes – will be getting released to my wonderful supporters. Thank you all for your support, encouragement, and patience.
The Ideal Book Redux… Redux
As I have previously mentioned, there are many more bookbinders in the world than there are people letterpress printing entire books. As a result, it is often difficult for them to find high-quality texts for their fine bindings. From the start, one of my commitments was to make a small number of copies of our books accessible to others in the hope that it would provide the foundation for inspired bindings beyond those of Ampersand Book Studio.
In February 2024, I wrote about the remarkable bindings that Karen Hamner created using our printed pages of The Ideal Book by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. This week, Toben Lewis of Baile Mòr Books shared his equally stunning binding of our printed pages.
A self-described “bibliopegist” – a word of which I had been ignorant and with which I am now obsessed1 – Toben handcrafts books in his studio on the small Isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland:
My binding of The Ideal Book or Book Beautiful by TJ Cobden-Sanderson, beautifully reprinted by Ampersand Book Studio, has been chosen to be part of the Open•Set exhibition currently on at @sanfranciscocenterforthebook. The exhibition will be open until 23 March and the books will then move on to the University of Denver from 2 May to 10 August.
T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, the author of this tract, is known for both his complex and refined full leather bindings and the austere simplicity of his limp vellum bindings. This binding explores the space in between these two, pushing a limp vellum binding in the direction of a fine design binding. The covers feature an abstraction of a layout pattern often employed by Cobden-Sanderson in his fine bindings. The painted endleaves showcase letters from the renowned Doves Type, echoing the printing of the book itself. And also an ampersand, partly as a nod to the modern day printer, also because the character is a beauty.
As much as I love the binding created by Toben, the endpapers really speak to my heart.
Here, Doves Type (about whose design, demise, and resurrection I have previously waxed poetic) is scaled up to emphasize the perfect balance of each letterform. Hand-painted by Toben in a set of subtle – but not pastel – hues, it is a lovely ode to “the especial beauty of the headings of chapters, capital or initial letters, & so on” about which Cobden-Sanderson wrote. In the endpapers, I believe that Toben fully unifies form with the essay’s content – an of exploration of the roles of calligraphy, typography and illustration in the Ideal Book. In doing so, he truly captures what Cobden-Sanderson referred to as “the book beautiful as a whole.” Needless to say, large ampersands are always welcome!
As of this posting, Toben’s one-of-a-kind binding is still available for purchase at the Baile Mòr Books online shop. And for other bibliopegists who are interested in creating their own version, I have just a few remaining copies of the printed pages of The Ideal Book available on my website.
Join me at Tucson Festival of Books
For the first time, Ampersand Book Studio will be joining 450 authors, hundreds of exhibitors and over 130,000 readers at the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books on March 15 and 16. Now the second largest such gathering in the U.S., the Festival takes over most of the campus of the University of Arizona. It is truly a wonderful event for all book lovers and well worth planning a visit to Tucson around.
Of course, I will have lots of things to share in the booth including…
A brand-new, letterpress-printed, hand-bound prospectus for my next project… Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge;
Display copies of both the Anchor and Victory Editions (complete with the custom hand-carved wooden case) of Master and Commander;
Display copies of my two long-sold-out titles: T.J. Cobden-Sanderson’s The Ideal Book and Long Ago Told, a book of traditional Tohono O’odham legends;
Ephemera, such as letterpress printed broadsides and posters, and sets of notecards of the illustrations from Master and Commander;
I plan to bring some of the wonderful tools I use in book creation as well.
I hope to see some of you in mid-March.
Of course, there also seems to be a difference of opinion on the internet of the proper pronunciation of this new-to-me word. Is it bib-li-OP-e-gist or bib-li-o-PE-gist? I lean toward to former. But I am now crowd-sourcing opinions so that I sound like I know what I am talking about.