Item Details

Bradford, John; Nunez, Ash [binder].

The Poetical Vagaries of a Knight of the Folding-Stick, of Paste-Castle [Design Binding].

Valparaiso, Indiana: Sandlin's Books and Bindery, 1993/2024. Limited Edition/Unique. Hardcover. "The Poetical Vagaries of a Knight of the Folding-Stick, of Paste-Castle is part bookbinders poetry and part secret society satire. John Bradford wrote this book with a nod and wink at the fraternal orders and secret societies of the day by creating his own version of a bookbinder secret society. This binding is an imagining of what an idealized version of this text as a tome of the secret society might have looked like.
A crest based off of Bradford's illustration of the knight has been created with various bookbinder tools based on a royal coat of arms with the rampant head as the head of the knight, scroll on the bottom with The Garret which is their fictional headquarters. The spine of the book alludes to "Keep Dark" or keep quiet to the secrets of their society and it is titled with Gotham, or New York, as the place of publication/location of their society. The choice to add the black pages into the binding is to highlight the section of the book that was not included by the printer, or the pieces to "keep dark" about in regards to the practices and beliefs of this fictionalized bookbinding society. The colors in the crest are based on the colors of the string orders from the society. The binding overall design was based on records of armorial bindings and historic fraternal order bindings. [artist statement]
Originally published in 1815, the textblock is from the 1993 limited edition. This is Ash's first available binding. Fine in Fine Drop-Spine Archival Box. Tight, bright, and unmarred. Full goat skin, gold, blind, and palladium tooling, leather inlays and onlays, decorative endpapers, sprinkled gold edge, silk sewn endbands. 8vo. 62pp. Illus. Signed by the binder. Item #13682

Price: $2,750.00