Inside the Bindery: A Handcrafted Photo Album for Mother's Day

The morning starts the way most do, a  coffee on the bench, a stack of book covers left to dry the night before, the smell of leather from the new order over by the press. There's a photo album (amongst other things) to finish today, and it needs to be in the post this afternoon.

This is one of our Mother’s Day commissions. Her daughter emailed us three weeks ago. “She’s got a drawer of prints from the kids’ school years,” she said. “She keeps meaning to put them somewhere properly.”

Here is how that book gets made.

The brief

Most custom binding begins with a phone call or an email. We ask three things: what is it for, how big should it feel, and what about cover options - cloth or leather, name, title or date? 

In this case the answer was simple. Leather that will age beautifully over time.  Big enough to hold proper photos — not phone screenshots — and to lie flat on a coffee table.

The same afternoon we sent the daughter a photo of leather samples and the internal black card with interleaving tissue. She said yes within an hour.

Materials and choices

Materials are the part most people don’t see, and they are what makes a hand-bound album outlast a printed one. For this album:

• A chestnut brown leather cover — the kind that softens beautifully with a decade of being lifted off a shelf.

• Archival, acid-free black paper for the album leaves. 

• Hemp tapes for the spine, hidden under the cover but doing the structural work.

• Waxed linen thread, black to match the card.

Every choice has a reason. Most of those reasons only become obvious in twenty years, when the book is still flat and the photos are still where they were placed.

The making

The making takes a few days, spread across the week. No bookbinding step is fast — they are all the kind of slow that you only notice if you try to rush them.

First the card gets scored, folded and pressed. Then they are sewn together, one at a time, with interleaving tissue added to each fold. The spine is rounded and backed before the cover ever comes near. The boards are cut, the leather glued, the corners turned. Then the casing-in — the bit where everything either lines up perfectly or it doesn’t.

The handover

The final step is to wrap it in tissue paper and place it inside one of signature black boxes.  

For new commissions like this album, we are closed for Mother’s Day work, but if you have a special occasion or milestone you would like to mark, reach out via our contact page.