A great Oriental stab binding resource

For the record, this post is nearly identical to one I made in the handmadebooks Yahoo! group last week. If you've never checked the group out, I highly recommend it!


I've been very focused on stab binding lately (I made twelve stab bound books in one week for the arts fair I went too), so I dug up an old (very good) internet resource on Japanese bookbinding.

I have never found any resource as good as Graeme Dawe's history of traditional Japanese binding! It's truly incredible: it's the bulk of his dissertation on the subject for the University of Brighton in the UK! He's very generous to make this available on the web. The full resource is still available at his original site (above); he is working on a new site, though, so the old one may disappear at some point.

One really cool thing about this is that I learned something my book arts instructor didn't know: the correct terms for the binding elements of a Japanese stab book! The little twist of rice paper for the inner binding is called "nakatoji," and the optional corner piece is the "kadogire." (Useless knowledge, I know, but still very cool!)

Hope this is of use to someone besides me! I will post more resources when I find them. When I figure out how, I'll even post the pdf handouts I created for the classes I taught.

Xandria