About
TOMORROW’S PAST is a small international group of bookbinders who make modern conservation bindings for antiquarian books.
The collective developed as an alternative way of thinking about repairing or rebinding antiquarian books that are damaged or decayed beyond conventional repair. The basic premise of Tomorrow’s Past is to apply our knowledge and skill in the context of the times in which we live, rather than adhering and resorting to the habits of artifice and convention. For example, instead of making a faithful facsimile of what we perceive or presume was the book’s original, historical state. We explore and expand the structural and aesthetic language of our own time.
Each book is its own advocate: there is no ‘standard’ response, and the demands on the skill and aesthetic sensibility of the binder are considerable each and every time. All of the participants work professionally as bookbinders, some as teachers, and most handle work of differing types and periods. This fusion of experience and historical awareness with modern conservation materials, techniques and skill has produced work that is radical in its simplicity, ingenuity and truth to materials.
Established in 2003, the number of binders in the group has varied, but the binders presently making work for Tomorrow’s Past are Kathy Abbott (UK), Cristina Balbiano D’Aramengo (Italy), Charles Gledhill (UK), Peter Jones (UK), Jen Lindsay (UK), Sol Rebora (Argentina) and Tracey Rowledge (UK).
We are not claiming to be unique in this approach – there is much thoughtful conservation work quietly going on – but as the doyen of twentieth century bookbinding, Edgar Mansfield (1907-1996) put it: Surely it is better to create tomorrow’s past than to repeat today’s.
