Brought to you by the instructors at the Center for Book Arts, Bookforms is a comprehensive guide for making books by hand with a focus on functionality in design.

Written by the experts at the Center for Book Arts in New York, Bookforms presents all the instruction you need to craft by hand a comprehensive array of historic bookbinding styles from all over the world. Bookforms traces the functional roots of each structure, explains their appropriateness for various uses, and provides projects for making an essential structure for each style of binding.

Topics covered include:

• Why books work: General bookbinding principles for functionality and what we can learn from the past


• What you need to know for planning a special book or embarking on an edition


• How materials affect function

Bookforms tackles a wide range of projects for all levels of bookbinders. You'll see everything from sewn and ticketed blank books and traditional western codex book forms, to scrapbooks and albums, Asian stab-sewn bindings, unusual structures, and aesthetics/embellishments. What better time to dive into this venerable and unique hobby than now?