Workshop on blind tooling and panel design

The New York Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers presents:

Blind Tooling and Panel Design
A Workshop with Tom Conroy

At the Gladys Brooks Book and Paper Conservation Laboratory, The New
York Academy of Medicine

September 24-25, 2010
9:30 am - 5:30 pm

For more information or to register, please contact Erin Albritton
<ealbritton<-at->nyam<.>org> or call 212-822-7364

Workshop Fee: $250 (GBW members)/$300 (non-members)

This workshop will explore two parts of traditional tooling and
design.  Blind tooling indents and darkens a leather cover, giving
an understated, elegant effect.  Traditional panel design can be
built up from guidelines boned directly on the cover, without a
paper pattern.

After examining, analyzing, and discussing examples of traditional
panel design bindings in the collection of The New York Academy of
Medicine, we will shift to tooling blind panel designs directly on
plaquettes.  A steel or brass creaser (not a roll) will be used to
line-in a double panel.  A creaser slides in the guideline like a
bobsled in a run, running more by touch than by sight; this sets,
darkens, and polishes the lines.  Then corner tools and ornaments
are struck into the frames made with the creaser, designing directly
on the leather while tooling.  Finally, smaller ornaments are added
to fill the empty space and intensify the design.

Before 1800, the sequential elaboration of designs based on these
techniques was used to produce anything from mass-production single
panels to the most elaborate overall gold tooling.  Frequent use of
simple panel designs trained finishers' eyes to good proportion; and
elaboration on a familiar simple skeleton helped to keep complicated
versions in proportion.  The combination of blind tooling with
layout on the book still has much to offer modern binders.

Instructor:

    Tom Conroy is a professional book restorer, toolmaker, and
    binding historian.  His main benchwork training came from Anne
    and Theodore Kahle at Capricornus between 1981 and 1988.  He
    holds an MLIS from the University of California at Berkeley, and
    worked there toward an MS in Wood Science and Technology.  He is
    the author of Bookbinders' Finishing Tool Makers 1780-1965 and
    many articles, and he has taught workshops all over the country.
    Currently he is affiliated with the American Bookbinders' Museum
    in San Francisco, where he describes himself as "one of the
    exhibits."

Please find directions to The New York Academy of Medicine at

    <URL:http://www.nyam.org/about/directions.shtml>

Erin Albritton
Book Conservator
Gladys Brooks Book and Paper Conservation Laboratory
The New York Academy of Medicine
1216 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY  10029


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