Plioirs
I bought a clutch of bone-folders from the binding shop Relma, just off Place St Michel.It always seems we must make a pilgrimage there, if only for the singularity of their concern. It’s not that we are overly concerned with those craft aspects of the binding process, and certainly not the use of all that leather to be tooled and embossed. This makes an overwhelming fragrance in the shop, and something quite ancient.
We have been known to buy rolls of astounding coloured bookcloth here, colours which are receding from the range of available cloths everywhere, and some of these must have been from then early part of then last century. We acknowledge that this aspect of our books is very late nineteenth century, and yet there is something wholesome and plain about the simple cloth covered book, especially in the hands of Stuart Settle, our binder, who has often been on the receiving end of big parcels from Paris.
But this time I was getting bone folders for a small edition, a trade sample as it were. They are called en francais ‘plioirs’. I have made an edition of them before in the late seventies as a momento of the focus of some of our activity, but this one I was hoping would have more metaphysical implications! It will be inscribed on one side and then the other. SC
pli selon pli fold upon fold
notes from an urban hibernation 