I bind and mend books on a kitchen table in Hackney, one evening at a time, and write down what worked so that the next book goes together a little more squarely than the last.

Tallow Lane Bindery is not a workshop. It is a kitchen table in a second-floor flat in Hackney, a board that goes over the table to protect it, a shoebox of tools and a stack of heavy books that doubles as a press. I started binding in the winter of 2022, after a short evening class and a long spell of mending my own falling-apart paperbacks with the wrong glue. Most evenings the table is for dinner. A couple of evenings a week, once the plates are cleared, it becomes a bindery for a few hours.

What I make is modest: notebooks for friends, a few sewn case bindings, and a steady trickle of repairs to paperbacks and hardbacks that people bring round because they know I will not laugh at the sticky tape. I am an amateur and intend to stay one. The notes here are written the same evening or the morning after, while I can still remember which step I skipped, and they include the failures, because those taught me more than the books that came out right.

I use simple tools and common materials on purpose: a bone folder, an awl, a metal ruler, a set square, linen thread, wheat starch paste and PVA. Nothing on this site is a recommendation to buy anything, and nobody pays for a mention. Where I give a measurement, it comes from my own table, my own paper and my own flat's weather, which in winter includes a radiator that makes everything curl. Adjust for yours.