[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 31 (Tuesday, February 25, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1042-S1043]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HOLZER BOOK BINDERY
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, in this age of digital readers and
electronic books, the fine craft of bookbinding may seem to some
archaic. On the contrary: the fine skills, patience, and dedication
required to mend the pages of some of our greatest treasures have
become all the more critical to preserving printed books--for classics
printed decades or centuries ago, to cookbooks or children's books that
have been in our families for generations.
At Holzer Book Bindery in Hinesburg, VT, Marianna Holzer, a third-
generation bookbinder, is doing just that. Her shop is lined with
leather bound books, many restored by her own hand, and hand operated
cast-iron presses that help her with her handcraft. Her clients range
from towns and municipalities, to personal collectors, and extend far
beyond the mountains of Vermont.
In 1960, her father, 30 years her mother's senior, closed down his
own bindery business in Boston to settle in Putney. Marianna was in
high school when, years after her father passed away, her mother set up
their own bindery in the basement. Here, Marianna learned the basics of
bindery from her mother, using the storied tools of her father. After
studying plant and soil science at the University of Vermont, Marianna
found herself working at Four Seasons Garden Center in Williston before
longing for something new. She ultimately returned to her bookbinding
roots, joining a small bindery in Jericho before opening her own shop
in 2008.
Marianna now works alongside her husband and folk musician, Rik
Palieri, who assists her. Today, her challenges are even greater, as
she battles multiple sclerosis. People send their books and heirlooms
from around the country, seeking her dexterity and her expertise. For
Marianna, it is her true love of preserving the past and the sentiment
it brings others that makes her excel at her craft. She honors her
family legacy by using her grandfather's logo as her own.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article
about this exceptional Vermonter who has dedicated her life to bringing
joy to others by repairing those precious keepsakes we chose to pass on
to our loved ones: ``At Holzer Book Bindery, Repairing Old Volumes Is a
Labor of Love.'' [Seven Days, February 19, 2014]
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Seven Days, Feb. 19, 2014]
At Holzer Book Bindery, Repairing Old Volumes Is a Labor of Love
(By Ethan De Seife)
Any author who gets a publishing deal these days knows the
importance of e-books: Many readers now opt for pixels over
ink. At Holzer Book Bindery in Hinesburg, though, the book's
the thing. Owner Marianna Holzer, a third-generation
bookbinder, appreciates books as objects. Her love for
beautiful volumes and the increasingly rare craft of making
them by hand is evident in her shop, located on the ground
floor of her home. The place is filled with drawers of old
metal typesetting letters, rolls of buckram and leather, and
hand-operated, cast-iron book presses. Many of the hand tools
that Holzer, 58, uses were inherited from her father, Albert,
and grandfather, Ulrich, both of whom ran bookbinding shops
in Boston. Both men were known not only for the high quality
of their work, but for their personal investment in the books
they repaired. Said Holzer, ``My mom used to say that people
would bring their books to have them bound at the Holzer
Bindery, but they'd have to wait until everybody in the
family had read the book before they got it back.''
As a child, hanging around her father's shop, Holzer picked
up many of the finer points of this specialized art. A career
shift in the early 1980s brought her to Brown's
[[Page S1043]]
River Bindery, an operation that started in Jericho, then
moved to Essex. Holzer worked her way up to various
supervisory positions within the company.
When Brown's was reorganized and folded into a larger
bindery called Kofile, Holzer decided the time was right to
set up her own business. As it happened, her mother had
recently moved out of the downstairs apartment in Holzer's
home. That freed up the cozy space that, in 2008, Holzer
turned into her own bindery. To honor her family's craft
legacy, she still uses the logo from her grandfather's shop.
Though Holzer can and does create entire bound volumes from
scratch, most of her projects are repairs, often on the
beloved literary heirlooms of private clients. She can fix
torn pages or create new ones for old books, trimming new
folios, stitching them into signatures and assembling them
into custom bindings.
During Seven Days' visit to the bindery, Holzer was
performing surgery on some old, careworn, hardback copies of
two of L. Frank Baum's Oz novels. The client who'd brought
them wanted to resuscitate the books for sentimental reasons,
and they needed a great deal of attention. Nearly all of both
books' pages were brittle, tattered and detached from their
bindings, from which the glue had long since cracked and
flaked off. Still, Holzer estimated the job would take her
just a couple of days of mending, and only an hour or two to
sew the pages back together.
Holzer has multiple sclerosis, which can make such detailed
work difficult, so she's glad, she said, to have assistance
from her husband, folk musician Rik Palieri. In between his
concert tours, Palieri helps out on the larger binding
orders, including the municipal records of a number of
Vermont towns. (Holzer is reluctant to say which ones.)
Palieri professed admiration for the kind of beautiful,
hand-bound books that Holzer Bindery produces. The couple has
preserved and bound their own cherished keepsakes, such as an
original program from one of Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows.
Palieri's own daily journal is a huge, green, handcrafted
volume that would look right at home on the shelves of a city
planning office.
Repair jobs come into the bindery in what Holzer described
as a ``steady but not overwhelming supply.'' Every one is
different, and, she said, without first inspecting the book,
it's difficult to estimate the cost of the repairs. Prices
per piece range from about $100 to more than $1,000.
``It will depend on what needs to be done, what the
customer wants, if we are trying to save all the original
material or make a new cover, and then that will depend on
whether it is in leather or imitation leather,'' Holzer
explained.
Demonstrating her craft to a visitor, Holzer smiled and
laughed frequently. She took particular delight in the gold
stamper, with which she embosses books' spines and covers
with shiny letters and designs. With this device, Holzer can
also turn strips of scrap leather into personalized
bookmarks, mementos that she gives visitors to the bindery.
Holzer's shop--along with the handful of other small
bookbinders scattered around the state--embodies the spirit
of quality artisanship associated with Vermont. Case in
point: Holzer mentioned a client from Houston, Texas, for
whom she bound a memorial Bible. Its owner had found Holzer
Bindery online and chosen the company specifically because of
its Vermont location, she said; to him, this guaranteed
careful craft.
Over cups of tea served beneath the cuckoo clock in her
kitchen, Holzer talked with Seven Days about the fine art of
fine books.
SEVEN DAYS: How did you get started in the bookbinding
business?
MARIANNA HOLZER: My father was 70 when I was born--30 years
older than my mother. I was pretty young when [his bindery]
was still going in Boston. He closed the business in 1960,
when he was 80, and moved to southern Vermont, to Putney. He
passed away when I was 11, and my mom set up a little bindery
later, when I was in high school, in the basement of our
house. She taught me a few basic things.
I went to UVM, [where I] studied plant and soil science. I
got a job at Four Seasons Garden Center [in Williston]. I
kind of got sick of that, and found out that there was this
small bindery [Brown's River Bindery] in Jericho, and went to
see them. That's how it began.
SD: What are all these tools used for?
MH: The board shears are basically a huge paper cutter; the
guillotine, which needs to be super-sharp, is for trimming
the edges of a book's pages. I use a lot of mending tissue,
which is a Japanese tissue used to fix rips and tears. The
rounding or backing hammer--one of my father's tools--I use
for rounding a book's spine. One of my favorite things to do
is the gold stamping, which presses down on a thin piece of
Mylar covered with 22-carat gold. That's how you decorate a
binding, letter by letter.
SD: What services do you offer?
MH: One thing I do here is deacidify paper. Anything before
the mid-1800s was printed on rag paper, which holds up quite
well. Newer paper is made with wood pulp, and we didn't know
until more recently how acidic it was. It gets really brittle
and cracks when you turn the pages. So we can deacidify the
paper, and it'll stop the progression of [the decay]--though
it won't bring it back [to its original condition].
SD: Bookbinding is such a niche field. What challenges does
your business face?
MH: It seems to me, in some ways, books are becoming more
precious as people realize they have certain books that they
want to preserve and pass on. Bibles are one thing. It's
cheaper to buy a new one, but [the owner has] written all
over it. Children's books--people have grown up with a book.
And cookbooks! People have written in them, or they have
their mother's cookbook. The newer versions they don't like
as much.
These days, newer bindings are single sheets that are just
glued in. When you open them up, they sometimes crack and
fall apart. And those are kind of hard to fix, because they
don't have enough of the margin that's necessary to drill the
holes for stitching. Older books tend to be in better shape.
SD: How does having MS affect your work as a binder?
MH: I just get really tired sometimes. It's almost like I'm
walking through mud or something. It's a big effort to do
things. It's also dexterity, fine motor control.
SD: Are you concerned about the new all-in-one machines
that can print a book from a digital file and then bind it?
MH: Not particularly. You see a book, and you never think
what goes into making it. They [bind books] by machine
nowadays. But if you want to repair a book, you can't do it
by machine.
____________________