[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.

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