Gabrielle Fox
Gabrielle Fox is a bookbinder based in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received a diploma in bookbinding at the Guildford College of Further Education where she studied with Maureen Duke, Daphne Beaumont-Wright, and Tony Miles. In the 1980s she taught throughout England and worked from her studio in Sussex before returning to Ohio in 1990. Fox travels to care for collections and teach and her work is represented in many public, private, and academic libraries. Increasingly her focus is the care and treatment of older books and the creation of unique designed and bound modern volumes. They are usually either very large or very small. Fox has had three books published: The Essential Guide to Making Handmade Books, LARKSPUR PRESS: Forty Years of Making Letterpress Books in a Rural Kentucky Community, The Flowing Spine: A Bookbinding Project Book and has produced ten titles in limited editions in miniature. https://www.gabriellefox.com
Example Binding:
Lamia, Isabella.
The Eve of Saint Agnes, & Other Poems by John Keats and illustrated by Robert Gibbings.
Waltham Saint Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1928.
Bound in full alum tawed goatskin with red and green goatskin onlays, raised and recessed images, and gold tooling. Endpaper illustrations created with layers of Tengujo tissue. The design is influenced by the paper, typography and illustrations as equally as by the poems.
Additional work has been done to both the binding and endpapers.
Design Description
It may catch your eye, but it isn’t pretty. Designing a binding for this slim volume has been a true challenge. The poetry and imagery are bold and strong. The combination of these two women’s art is difficult to cover without either stepping back into a safe patterned place or risk the chance of offending both the artists and the audience in an attempt to embrace the strength inside the pages.
The image on the front cover of Five Poems is a weaver’s knot. A weaver’s knot, unlike many others, is one knot that can be unraveled. The threads on the left side of the front board, spine, back board and endpapers are representative of the past and the side of the knot that can be locked. The right side of the knot with threads across the front board and onto the endpapers represents the side of the knot that can be pulled away and untangled.
Five Poems will be bound with laced-in boards and leather joints in a new color goatskin which is a pale turquoise mint. The cords of the weaver’s knot will be in five lengths of goatskin onlaid and back pared before covering. There will be surface gold and gold tooling to highlight the colored threads. Edge decoration and headbands will be determined by the feel of the book after examination. The endpapers will be made with various handmade Japanese tissues layered in a similar way to those in The Eve of Saint Agnes, & Other Poems.
