PBFA Book Fair

 The evening before the Book Fair at Hay Castle, Hay Cinema Bookshop invited all the booksellers to a reception in the garden.  The weather was perfect for it, there was wine and delicious nibbles made by the lady from Chapters, and I met some really interesting people.  I ended up discussing South African archaeology with a lovely couple.

The book fair itself didn't feel quite so crowded as last year, but I did go quite early.  There were 18 different booksellers, and the most interesting book I saw was the original novel of The Prisoner, the 1960s TV series starring Patrick McGoohan - whose picture, in the iconic Village blazer, was on the front cover.  It's by Thomas Disch, who was a reasonably well known SF writer from the 1960s onwards.

I had some jobs to do at home that didn't take as long as I thought, so I turned up just in time to get a ticket for the bookbinding talk.  There were about a dozen people there, who all seemed to be very knowledgeable.  It was a fascinating talk by Arthur Green, who is a book binder, book conservator, and also teaches bookbinding and bookbinding history.  He is based near Malvern, and has a website at greensbooks.co.uk

I now know a lot more about how books are put together as physical objects, from the original leather bound books that were stitched and laced together, to the common hardback today which became a common style in the early 19th century, where the boards of the book are printed separately to the interior of the book, and then glued together. He made a passionate case for the second volume of the 1832 set of Byron's Life and Works being the most important book in bookbinding history.  The first volume was made with a flat spine, with the title on a piece of paper stuck to the spine.  The second volume was case-bound - with the boards produced separately and glued on, and so were the other books in the 17 volume set.

 Even though the process became mechanised, though, there was a lot of handwork, often done by women who hand stitched the sections of the book together.  One of the ladies in the audience has done research on the suffragettes, and talked a bit about the numbers of women bookbinders she had come across.

He also talked about the invention of book cloth, which made it feasable to use cloth rather than leather to bind books.  This is a starched cloth (so that the glue doesn't soak through the fabric) which was mainly produced in Manchester.

 Françoise, from the Cabinet of Curiosities, had an interesting snippet of information to add, too.  The early Beatrix Potter books were bound in calico from the Potter family business.  When we left at the end of the talk, through the book fair, it was quite exciting to find a pretty Beatrix Potter board game on one of the stalls, Paths and Burrows, with four adorable little model rabbits as playing pieces.