Holy Bible by M. Carey, 1815

This is an 1815 edition of Mathew Carey's King James Bible. (Not the so-called The Carey Bible with the Douay-Rheims translation.) The original cover was in a horrible shape, so the client wanted a new facsimile full leather binding for it. It's just a simple new binding work, but I decided to post this here because of the custom leather dyeing work I've done on this Bible.

Like many others since I started this blog, one of my dearest regular visitors of this blog, Huhu, inquired of me about my leather dyeing technique earlier this month. I haven't gotten a chance to respond to her via e-mail yet, but as I've always told everyone, what I can say is basically the same; I can't really explain my exact leather dyeing technique over the internet first of all. Every dyeing work I do is unique to the particular job I'm working on and every leather reacts differently to a different dye or chemical. So there isn't really a fixed text-book instruction I can give to anyone. All I can advise is to experiment with the medium that's available to you, and I just hope that people would see my works as a reference, in order to innovate their own unique techniques. :-)

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1798

No sooner had I returned from a week long trip to Canada than I had to leave town again for another week. So, I've been juggling things a bit frantically lately, which is the reason why I've been absent from my blog this month. As I've so far managed to post something every month since I started this blog little over a year ago, it just didn't feel right to miss this month's post. So, I brought a camera with me today to take pictures of this binding that I just finished.

This is a part of Vol. 88 (1798) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, written by George Atwood, for which he was awarded a Copley Medal. This Atwood's thesis section was separated specifically from the original journal, so it needed a new binding. The client asked for a quarter leather binding with marble paper and a set of simple gold lines on the smooth spine, along with the author's name and the publishing date stamped on the bottom. I had to resew the book with five cords, so it would have been more fun to bind it if he asked for raised bands on the spine. But well, a simple gold lines on a smooth spine seems more traditionally accurate when it comes to academical periodicals of the era. So, the book collector client always knows best.

I dye, antique or mottle leather for most of my bindings, but I left the leather untouched for this particular work. It's sort of rare for me not to alter the texture of leather even a little bit, so I decided to post it on my blog.

By the way, in case you are interested in science and mathematics, PDF archives of all the Philosophical Transactions issues from the very first edition of 1665 are available online here for "A", (mathematical, physical and engineering sciences), and here for "B". (biological sciences)