About the bench
I learned book repair from an older bench in Cork between 2004 and 2009, and have kept my own since 2012. This log started in October 2020 because I had begun to notice that I was repeating mistakes I had already made and forgotten.
What the bench is
One room, about eleven square metres, one bench, a press, a sewing frame, and a shelf of materials. It is not a studio and it is not a workshop with apprentices. I work alone and I work slowly. A single spine lining can take three days across two weeks, which is normal and not a complaint.
Why there are no photographs
When I had a photograph in a record, I stopped describing the object. The photograph did the noticing for me and my written notes got worse. So from the beginning of this log there have been no images, only measurements and descriptions. If a description is unclear, that is a fault in the writing rather than a missing image.
Why I do not take commissions
I earn a living partly from this work and partly from other things. This page is not part of how I earn. Turning down commissions also produced the number 22 on the front page, and I keep a reason for each one because the reasons are the interesting part.
How corrections work
When I find that a record is wrong — a mis-identified material, a wrong measurement, a method I no longer think works — I do not delete the entry. I add a dated line at the end of it and a line in Changes. An entry that says I was wrong is worth more to me than an entry that was never wrong.
Contact
There is no form and no comment system. Correspondence about this log goes to bench@tw0-3.godeove.xyz. I answer questions about methods. I do not answer requests for valuations, and I do not answer requests to repair something, which is consistent with the section above.
How this page is built
Plain HTML files and one stylesheet written by hand. No trackers, no analytics,
no external fonts or scripts. The feed is a static Atom file at /feed.xml.