How did ‘Certain Sermons or homilies’ first come into your possession? About twenty years ago, I found this book lying on the floor in a shop in Great Museum Street, London. It had suffered serious water damage and what remained of the binding, which had been of plain, unadorned dark brown calf, was rotten and extremely distorted. The laminas of thick paper which made up the boards had swollen and separated, areas had disintegrated and the subsequent mould growth had eaten through the binding into the pages of the text-block itself, invading the book much as nature occupies an abandoned building. I could not bear the thought that eventually it would be discarded. It had a certain dignity in its dereliction, a certain poignancy: so I bought it.

Alongside ‘Certain Sermons Or homilies’ you’re showing a full size maquette of the book. Can you say a little bit about how this maquette aided your design process? It was essential. The book itself had already sustained so much damage and repair that it could only support one attempt at binding, so it had to be right first time. Making a maquette helped to establish the correct thickness of the linen cords on which to sew the text-block; the correct thickness of thread and method of sewing (so that the spine area didn’t have too much ‘swell’); whether the proposed binding structure was technically viable; and gave me a chance to practise the best method of doing particular tasks.

In our conversations, you explained that the original intended use of this tome was readings at a pulpit, how did that knowledge shape the restoration work you did to it? And did that prior use inspire the addition of any elements? As the original purpose of the book was for clergy to read it aloud from the lectern of a church pulpit, it was important – as for all books, but the more so for a lectern book – that the book should open to its fullest extent, easily readable, and remain flat when lying open. This required a highly flexible structure, creating no impediment to the flow of the pages.
Aesthetically, the rather austere contents and purpose of the book suggested a similarly ‘pure’, ascetic approach; so I chose white alum-tawed goatskin. It is also very beautiful, so I aimed at combining the quiet beauty of plain, unadorned material with simplicity of structural presentation.
As the original book was written during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, I thought to introduce a hint of the rich- ness of some of the garments and furnishings of the Tudor court by incorporating a gilded bookmark. This was made of alum-tawed goatskin backed with a piece of gilded vellum, the gilding visible through excisions in the leather, to be attached with a purple, silk ribbon to the tab at the head of the book, with the title of the book written on the vellum side of the bookmark. However, I decided that the whole concept didn’t work well enough, so I abandoned it.

David Chipperfield’s neues Museum is your contextual object. your ‘La Favola di Orfeo’ has a particular resonance with Chipperfield’s phrase, ‘the new reflects the lost without imitating it’. Chipperfield uses this passage to describe his wish to ensure the construction of new parts worked with the existing damaged structure of the museum. Is that an accurate sentence to hone in on? Yes, exactly.

David Chipperfield on the Neues Museum project

“In 1997, we inherited the enormous physical context of what remained of the Neues Museum. There was something both sad and beautiful about it...time had created a strange monument that was neither building nor ruin, and yet both...we didn’t want to spoil what remained of the original material. It’s our physical connection to history – not interpretation, not projection, but reality.”

Approximately how much time did the making of each of these bindings take? From making a decision on what to do, to completion. Hard to say, I just keep going till I get it right. Thinking probably started in April and came into sharp focus by July; work on the maquette took roughly through August. The actual book took from August/ September through till end October. Sewing the maquette, for example, took roughly a day and a half; sewing the actual book took a day.

1 Certain Sermons or homilies Appointedto be Read in Churches (1673), 2013
Sewn on five linen cords with 25/2 linen thread; covered with alum-tawed goatskin.

2 La Favola di Orfeo, Angelo Ambrogini, known as Poliziano (1749), 2013
Hand-made paper; silk threads; ‘Dutch Gilt’ decorated paper.

David Chipperfield Architects revivification of The Neues Museum, Museum Island Berlin (1997-2008).