Fine Bindings by Douglas Cockerell

Recently I had an opportunity to see a collection of fine bindings made by Douglas Cockerell. Cockerell is well-known to students of bookbinding. He is the author of the enduring instructional book, Bookbinding and the Care of Books, first published in 1901 and still used by many today. Also these small booklets, "Bookbinding as a School Subject" that he wrote. These are my own copies shown here. In this photo, books one and two are from the second printing; books three, four, and five are from the third printing.

Cockerell is especially known for his skills as a fine binder. The Killam Library at Dalhousie University here in Nova Scotia, has a collection of about a dozen books bound by Douglas Cockerell which I was able to see firsthand last week. There is a digital exhibit on the library's website with really great photos, better than any photos that I'd be able to take, so, have a look at the online exhibit at digitalexhibits.library.dal.ca/exhibits/show/cockerell/ which has multiple photos of each book as well as information about Cockerell's life.

Of course, Cockerell's bindery also developed a distinct style of marbled papers that have been used widely by binders around the world. Cockerell, and the others who worked with him, developed their own style and techniques for marbling that allowed them to produce high-quality marbled papers, replicating their patterns with ease, which is incredibly difficult to achieve with hand-marbled papers. There is a video available showing the Cockerell marbling process, where you can see how they manage to get consistent patterns every time: https://youtu.be/Vyga8VMWXKg. And here are a few pictures of the marbling on the books in the Dalhousie collection that I saw last week.

The Dawson Print Shop

The first bookbinding course that I took, was at the Dawson Printshop. At that time, it was located in the Killam Library at Dalhousie University. There was a bindery room set up for classes, but primarily it was full of antique printing equipment with over 1000 cases of wood and metal type.


I was reminded of my time at the Dawson Print Shop recently becuase I am running low on hard drive space. I suppose I should explain that a bit better.

While I was at Dalhousie and taking bookbinding classes at night, I was more officially a student at the School of Information Management. One of the projects I worked on as a graduate research assistant, was the History of the Book in Canada project. Specifically, I was the computer nerd making the databases work for the HBIC Electronic Resources component of the project. (And just having visited the website, it appears the database search interface isn't working...is it possible that Lasso is not compatible with new browsers? what a shock!) So, anything computer-related or website-related was handed to me. During the development of the project website, I was given a key to the Dawson Printshop and sent off to take photographs of the equipment so that we might use them on the website. So, I was alone in the print shop with a camera, poking around taking pictures!

This is a replica of a 17th century Plantin-Moretus common press.

So recently when my C drive complained about being low on free space, I went through some old folders looking for stuff I could delete since I tend to save everything. One of the things I found, was a folder containing some of the photographs that I took that afternoon.


The Dawson Printshop has been moved to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I have been to visit since the move and the new space is much more vibrant compared to the no-window zone of the Killam Library. I discovered some photos of the new Dawson Room, on Nik's blog, who has been fortunate to work and study there.