Cambridge, Massachusetts
Member for 40 years
Trans-Siberian Prosody, Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay
Black, blue, pink, brown and white goatskin, metallic foil, palladium leaf and gold leaf.
33.3 x 35.7 x 1.6 cm
Completed in 2020
For Sale - $3,000
Did you fully plan every aspect of this piece before starting to work on it, or did you make design decisions along the way?
I don’t work from a design, I work from a concept, a visual impression, an intangible sense of what the final binding will look like, how it will feel. Rather than choosing a specific design for a book, I create a binding that looks the way the book feels to me. The process is almost unconscious. I don’t exactly know why my bindings appear as they do.
James Reid-Cunningham is bookbinder and conservator in private practice, specializing in artistic binding as well as the conservation of rare books and manuscripts. He received the DeGoyler Prize in American Bookbinding in 2018. His bookbindings have been exhibited nationally and internationally. See more of James’s work here.