Richard Beadsmoore

Matriarch of the Forest by Abigail Rorer
Illustrated by Abigail Rorer
The Lone Oak Press, Petersham, Massachusetts, USA, 2009
185 x 170 x 15mm
Bound in 2024
Collection of the American Bookbinders Museum, San Francisco, USA

Bradel binding, sewn on stubs. The spine is bound in green goatskin with the boards in a deeper green. Tooled in 23.5ct gold leaf and carbon. Top edge coloured with acrylic paint; leather endbands. The doublures and endpapers are images of white pine tree cones printed on Zerkal paper.

The old tree is dying but still amongst the dead branches there are signs of life. The Matriarch of the Forest is a meditation on death and the need for dignity in one’s final moments. The gold and black branches symbolize the ongoing struggle between light and dark, life and death.

Providence Improved
A manuscript by Ed. Burghah (Burghall)
Illustrated by Nicholas Parry
Tern Press, 1993, 7/200. Signed by Nicholas Parry
Bound in October 2023
Private Collection, USA

Link-stitch with full-linen board attachment. Top edge is dyed red with acrylic ink and then gauffered with silver metallic foil and real gold foil, the other edges left with their natural deckle. The endpapers and doublures are of red Zerkall paper printed with illustrations from the text. Red silk endbands. Covered in red goatskin and tooled with palladium and 23.5 carat gold leaf.

Providence Improved consists of extracts from the diary of Edward Bunghall, the Puritan vicar of Acton in Cheshire, between the years of 1628 and 1663. ‘May you live in interesting times’ may be applied to our modern world but it certainly held true for the life of Edward Bunghall. His diary starts with noting the death of a ‘bear-ward’ killed by his bear, he then lived through an outbreak of plague, before his world was engulfed in the English Civil War. Descriptions of events during the war form the bulk of the diary and my design, although abstract, was inspired by the conflict between the Cavaliers of Charles 1st and the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell.

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1966
255 x 195 x 45mm
Bound in 2025
Collection of Nottingham University

A Bradel binding with archival linen and leather joints. Bound in blue and black Harmatan goatskin. Top edge painted with blue acrylic paint and sprinkled with gold leaf, the other edges left untrimmed. Double-core, hand-sewn silk endbands. Endpapers and doublures ink-jet printed on Zerkall paper. Red leather inlays with images made using acrylic medium transfer. Tooled in 23.5 carat gold leaf and palladium leaf.

‘Speak, Memory’ is a memoir of the first forty years of Nabokov’s life but with an emphasis on his childhood and adolescence in Russia and Europe, as the eldest of five children in an aristocratic family living in Saint Petersburg.

The starting point for my design was this quote: “Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration.” He went on to spend seven years as de facto curator of lepidoptery at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

From a distance the binding looks like a butterfly and one might expect it to be a guide to ‘butterflies of the world’. On closer inspection, however, the ‘eyes’ on the wings of the butterfly are small images relevant to Nabokov’s text: his own map of the family estates, a map of Tsarist Russia, a Russian steam locomotive of around 1900, a chess problem, St Basil’s cathedral, the hammer and sickle of the Bolshevik revolution, a butterfly on a spreading board, and a dachshund.
On opening the binding the endpapers reveal some of the family photographs: the Nabokov house in St Petersburg, Baroness Maria von Korff (paternal grandmother), Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov (grandfather), Vladimir (aged 7) and his father, his father and mother, a portrait of his mother by Leon Bakst, Vadimir in Cambridge, and his father as a young boy. These are all set against a background of rippling water.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Viking, 2024
210 x 140 x 35mm
Bound for the 2024 Booker Prize
Collection of the author

Sewn with unsupported link stitch and full linen attachment. Edges coloured with acrylic paints and tooled with real gold foil. Handsewn silk endbands. Various shades of red leathers scarf- and butt-jointed. Inlaid lines of black leather and black ink. Tooled in palladium and 23.5 carat gold-leaf.

One could argue that ‘The Safekeep’ has three main characters, Isabel, Eva, and the house, which Isabel’s family moved into as a child when they evacuated from Amsterdam during the war. The novel begins in 1961, Isabel is now in her twenties and living alone in the house that her uncle has promised to her elder brother, Louis, for whenever he has a family. For Isabel the house is a place of safety and comfort. “There you are, said the dim light in the kitchen, left on for comfort. I’ve waited up for you, said the rattle of the key in the door.” When Louis has to go away for work he deposits his current girlfriend, Eva, on an extremely unwilling Isobel. Soon various items around the house start disappearing, such as the spoons which Isobel obsessively counts as they gradually decrease from twelve down to five.

Not wanting to give too much away about the end of the novel I decided to concentrate on the house and how it gradually changes from being almost like a benign prison for Isabel until finally becoming a place of joy. To that end the design is a geometric design of different shades of red leather, like a floor plan. Superimposed on that are the outlines of doors and windows. The back board has darker reds and is tooled in cool palladium to reflect Isabel’s character and her emphasis on order and routine, a life that will be disrupted by the arrival of Eva. There is also a reference to the disappearing spoons. By contrast the front board is tooled in gold leaf to express the burgeoning of love between Isabel and Eva.

The Revelation of Saint John the Divine
Illustrated by Frances Clayton
Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 1931
Private Collection, UK

Bound with asymmetric boards in black goatskin with exposed core endbands. The endpapers and doublures, based on Durer’s ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, are printed with added acrylic paint and collage. Carrying on the theme of the Apocalypse on to the covers there are four panels symbolising pestilence, famine, war, and death. Materials used include snakeskin, fish skin, vellum, eggshell, wood, locust wings, ball bearings, and 23.5 carat gold leaf.

Happy Abstract by William Blake
Illustrated by Richard Beadsmoore
Russell Maret, New York, 2019
220 x 165 x 17mm
Bound in 2019
Private collection, USA

The text of this letter was specially printed as the set book for the American Academy of Bookbinding Open/Set Competition, 2019.
A single line of the letter is printed on each double spread leaving space for the binder to create their own response to the text – the letter is an apology to a client for not finishing the commission as he keeps getting side-tracked by “happy abstractions”.

The text has been illustrated with watercolour pens then bound in the style of the French binder Jean de Gonet. The boards are covered in fair goatskin that has been airbrushed, as has the spine leather. The straps are yellow goatskin with red leather decoration. The tooling is 23.5ct gold, palladium, and black ink.

Awarded Highly Commendable for Tooling, Open/Set, 2019

Goethe : Poems
Edited by T J Reed
Gwas Gregynog, 2000
298 x 180 x 20mm
Bound 2022

For Sale: £1800.00

Sewn on five Pleister tapes which were then laced into the boards. Top edge rough gilt with other edges left with their natural deckle edges. Leather-jointed endpapers of printed facsimiles of Goethe’s handwriting. Hand-sewn, multi-coloured endbands. The covering leather is fair goat that has been dyed using Fiebings leather dyes. There are inlays, onlays, and 23.5 carat gold tooling. Doublures of red goatskin tooled with gold leaf and palladium.

The design of the covers is based on Goethe’s illustrations for his “Theory of Colours” published in 1810. The tooling on the doublures is a representation of the concept of ‘liebestod’ (love and death) in Goethe works and German Romanticism in general.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Illustrated by Karen Klassen
Folio Society, 2013
230 x 150 x 20mm
Bound in 2013

For Sale: £960.00

The textblock has been sewn on five Pliester tapes with endpapers of red Mingeishi paper. The text is rounded only, as there are only eight, quite thick, sections. The text was then edge-gilded in Caplain leaf and hand-sewn silk endbands added. The text-block was then laced into paste-paper boards and covered in full black goatskin with red and white inlays and onlays. The tooling is done with Caplain leaf.

The design seeks to convey the gradual disintegration of Holly Golightly’s world as “the mean reds” take over and “pearls roll in the gutter”.

Tom Thumb by Anon
William Walker, Otley, West Yorkshire. C.1870
110 x 80 x 12mm
Bound 2022

For Sale: £800.00

The endpapers are of light- and dark-blue Moriki handmade Japanese paper. The cover is slate veneer tooled with 23.5ct gold leaf and palladium leaf. This is a ‘non-adhesive’ binding with the text-block being held in place by four 18ct gold staples.

The text is a juvenile chapbook of about 1870 with a number of woodcut illustrations. The design follows Tom’s wanderings through life surviving any number of disasters but, ultimately, he cannot escape “the spider’s poisonous breath” and dies.

Hokusai by David Burnett
Lino-cuts: Hui Fang Lee
71/140
Signed by author
Incline Press, 1996
267 x 165 x 12mm

For Sale: £1500.00

‘Hokusai’ is a poem by a British author so it seemed appropriate for a British binder to bind it in a Japanese style (Yamato Toji). It is also housed in a Japanese Hakochitsu box.

The single section book has endpapers of hand-made Moriki-Tozo paper. It is sewn on a stub which is then sandwiched between two boards covered in Hewit’s alum-tawed goat which are then held in place by ribbons. There are recessed inlays of dyed alum-tawed leather and tooling, both blind and in palladium leaf, using a tool especially made by the binder to reflect the shape of Mount Fuji.
The design was inspired by the lino-cuts on the cover of the book.

The binding was awarded second prize in the Clothworkers’ Prize for Open Choice section at the 2020 DB UK bookbinding competition.