Notes from the bench.
Occasional writing about materials, repairs, and the jobs that taught us something. Roughly monthly, sometimes not.
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14 May 2026
Cooking paste badly, on purpose
We spent a week making wheat starch paste at four different consistencies to find out which one actually fails first. The thinnest one surprised us.
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2 April 2026
A spine that had been repaired three times already
An 1897 bible arrived with tape, glue and a previous binder’s good intentions. Undoing the repairs took longer than the repair.
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9 February 2026
Why we stopped trimming edges
A tidy fore-edge costs you three millimetres of the book’s history. We now trim only when the sheet folding leaves no choice.
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11 December 2025
Forty boxes, one measuring jig
What we learned building an enclosure batch for a photographic archive: measure the object, never the last box.