The Designer Bookbinders Annual Competition 2011   Once again, Glenn Malkin is pleased to announce that one of his bindings has won a coveted award at the 2011 Designer Bookbinders competition. His binding of Bruce Chatwin's songlines was fully bound in dark blue gaotskin which has been airbrushed with leather dye. Leather onlays have been applied along with gold and silver tooling giving an accurate representation of the stars of the southern hemisphere.   Glenn's book, along with other selected entries in the competition will be on exhibition at the John Rylands library in Manchester throughout December and will go on to a further exhibition in London in January. The binding has been bought by a private collector.
	The Society of Bookbinders International Competition 2011   The Society of Bookbinders held its 2011 annual conference at Warwick University in August. This included a wide number of workshops and presentations about bookbinding techniques, new and old. There was an extensive suppliers' exhibition and a display and competition of designer bookbindings produced by members. Glenn Malkin of Signature Bindings exhibited a design binding at the conference - this year a Folio Society copy of 'Out of Africa' (left).   Glenn's binding was awarded third prize in the hotly contested fine binding category, and has been exhibited at the V&A Museum in London and is currently on tour around the UK.
	Workshops     Glenn Malkin has launched a series of one-day bookbinding workshops. These will initially be run in Hull, but are also available to interested groups around the country since they can be run at any suitable location. Aimed at those with no or little experience of binding, these workshops will give participants the skills and knowledge to make their own similar books at home since they have been designed t without the need for specialist tools or equipment.    Workshops are expected to include making a hand sewn book with decoratiove covered boards, making an album or scrap book, creating a presentation box, making a wrap around leather book and binding your own stories.   For information on workshops and availability, please e-mail Glenn at glenn@signaturebindings.co.uk or click here for further details.
	Glenn Malkin of Signature Bindings has been working with Beverley Treasure House in East Yorkshire to repair and restore an important collection of mainly 18th and 19th Century books bequeathed to the town by a benefactor at the beginning of the last century.   John Champney was a successful industrialist in the 19th Century textile industry, and he funded the original development of a library, art gallery and museum in the ancient market town of Beverley. With the help of Heritage Lottery Funding, the town's Treasure House, a public access repository of local archives, records and documents, is restoring many of the several thousand books that Champney bequeathed to the town on his death.   The most important of the books were included in an exhibition about John Champney last August at the Beverley Treasure House (left). Glenn also gave an illustrated talk on this conservation work at the Treasure House in October 2010.
	Designer Bookbinders Annual Competition 2010 The Designer Bookbinder's Society holds an annual competition to encourage the artistic development of designer book bindings. Glenn Malkin of Signature Bindings has successfully taken part in this prestigeous competition for the past two years which attracts entries from the best binders in the business. Each entry takes several months to produce, working to the highest possible standards and attracting the interest of discerning collectors and bibliophiles.   Following on from his suuccess in 2009, Glenn was awarded another coveted prize in the 2010  competition for his binding of 'The Collected Stories of Nikolai Gogol' (left) . The awards ceremony took place at the historic John Rylands Library in central Manchester on 4th December, and his book was on display there in the exhibition of bindings until the end of January 2011. Subsequently, all the prize winning bindings from the competition were on exhibition at a London gallery during March.   (Below: 'Le Grand Meaulnes' on display (top left) at The John Rylands Library (2009))

 

 

Glenn at the Harrogate Flower Show, Arts and Crafts Exhibition