About

Tracey Rowledge demonstrates how to make a book structure that she devised for Tomorrow’s Past, an international bookbinding collective. Tracey can answer any questions about Tomorrow’s Past and its importance to the group and beyond.

This is an opportunity to learn how and why a Tomorrow’s Past binding is made, beginning with how a book is selected for this approach, the importance of time spent handling the book, the thinking stage of the process, through to making a maquette of what’s likely to be a new book structure devised to meet the needs of that particular book. The final part of the process is to commence work on the actual antiquarian book itself! There are examples of Tomorrow’s Past book structures for you to see, alongside demonstrations by Tracey Rowledge (a Tomorrow’s Past founding member) on different aspects of making the particular book structure she’s created.

By sharing the ideas and thinking that lie behind Tomorrow’s Past books, Tracey hopes to broaden the discussion and attitude toward how best to preserve the integrity of books as artefacts. For Tomorrow’s Past, it’s about maintaining and championing an informed sensibility, so that the needs of the book remain paramount and the object’s past life sits seamlessly within their work, resulting in a book that opens beautifully and looks in balance with the time in which we live as much as with the time and place in which it was made.