Gabrielle Fox
Cincinnati, Ohio
Gabrielle Fox received a diploma in Bookbinding from the Guildford College of Further and Higher Education in the United Kingdom. Her binding instructors there included Maureen Duke, Daphne Beaumont-Wright, and Tony Miles. She travels often to care for collections and teach. This autumn Gabrielle will return to the American Academy of Bookbinding to teach miniature design binding. She has published two books, The Essential Guide to Making Handmade Books (2000) and Larkspur Press: Forty Years of Making Letterpress Books in a Rural Kentucky Community, 1974–2014 (2016). Her article on early bindings of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica will appear in the next issue of the Guild of Book Workers Journal.
Example Binding:
Roots to the Earth.
Monterey, Kentucky: Larkspur Press, 2014.
Poems by Wendell Berry, wood engravings by Wesley Bates.
The poetry, illustrations, and the countryside Wendell Berry describes inspired this design. Soft, rolling hills are shown using the bas-relief areas and the crops are represented by the rough green leather onlays and gold tooled lines with a dusting of surface gilding. Headbands have been made with gold tooled leather and the leather jointed endpapers are a lamination of eastern papers tooled in gold. Structurally the binding is laced-on full natural goatskin with joints and hollow tube sized more generously than traditionally to allow for a more flowing movement in the binding.
Design Description:
This collection of other, less readily accepted, biblical accounts has been magnificently designed and printed by the Doves Press and for that reason this book is an outstanding example of typographic history. After exploring various design options, the typeface and the large red A stand out. This proposed full natural goatskin binding would have the single letter A raised in bas-relief below the covering leather with rough, red goatskin onlays and the title tooled in a similar typeface of hand letters in blind along the foredge of the front and back boards. The structure would be the same as Roots to the Earth, using a similar design of the binding represented in paper on the doublures and flyleaves. To be housed in a protective box with the original binding and a portfolio of information about the binding.
