Christopher Shaw’s Bookbinding for Hansel & Gretel

 

Hansel & Gretel was published last year by Random Spectacular in paper covers, which had always been the plan. I was enormously pleased with the edition as it was extremely thoughtfully produced.

Nevertheless, because the project had been a long one – it had taken me two years to produce all the illustrations as I was having to work on them between other projects – I was keen to celebrate the achievement with a ‘special’ binding of the book for my shelves.

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Bookbinder Christopher Shaw and I talked about the possibility of a special binding at the Hansel & Gretel book launch in London last September, and then over a period of weeks we discussed ideas in more detail. He sent me samples of cloth for the cover, and I began to make some paper oak leaves that he would apply to the cover after blind stamping shapes into the boards to receive them.

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Oak leaves had appeared in some of the images in the book, and so felt like an appropriate motif for the cover.

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We decided to have them looking as though they’d been blown across the covers.

Christopher’s beautiful binding for the book has far surpassed any hopes I’d had for it. When I opened the parcel from him today, I was overwhelmed by what he had made. The culmination of a long road of endeavour from the first tiny, dummy copy made for Random Spectacular, through the the many stages of creativity leading to this final, much appreciated keepsake, I find that I can’t stop looking at it and smiling.

Below: the dummy copy of Hansel & Gretel, made in 2014, helped establish the layout of the book.

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