Our next meeting will be a Zoom meeting. Tuesday evening 22nd September, thats next Tuesday, 6.30pm to 7.30pm after the committee meeting at 5.30pm. Visitors are welcome.
Important!! you will need to email Robert, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to receive the link for the Zoom meeting. We will have a book clinic, so bring along your binding project, or binding challenge so we can all look at it and perhaps be able to see it and maybe help to move the project ahead. It will be good to see some faces again, and perhaps arrange some ideas for further virtual meetings.
From the President.
Greetings to you all. It has been an interesting and sometimes confusing period in lockdown. Bookbinding, being essentially a solitary operation, has meant many of us have been enjoying not being out and about, but using the time in our binderies. I know I have tackled a couple of interesting projects, and finished up a number of those, I must get to it projects. At the same time some major projects outside the bindery have taken me away from books to dirty messy stuff, like gardening and tile laying. And there is always the children and grandchildren living with us. Dad, this is broken can it be fixed? Pa can we go for a walk?
I have made a joke of the government being responsible for the quality of my wife's garden. Take 40 years of business documents, which must be kept for 7 years after last trading, (I come from an era when most .docs were hard copy) about 3 or 4 cubic metres of it, sort it , keep the interesting bits of history, spread the rest across the garden, section by section, and then mulch thickly. Ten barrow loads of mulch a day, 3 days a week for a month or so. Over there is the tax office docs, on this side the freight docs, in the middle customer correspondence, and down south the general purchase docs, and customer correspondence.
A delight reading again many of the inwards letters, much better than old emails. Do you know they used to use pens for correspondence? First task every day, read all the mail. After all, it was a mail order service. Then all the stamps were removed and sent off to the Salvo's for resale. Over the years many thousands of stamps. Sort out and keep all the shiny catalogues and gloss calendars for use as rubbing down in the bindery.
Suddenly a month has gone by, and many of the memories have also been recorded (in digital form) for the children and grandchildren. And now the roses are blooming, the veges are sprouting, and the garden looks great.
So back to the bookbinding, a couple of special birthday books, a batch of solander boxes,and a pile of repairs. Another month, then a few pallets of tiles still to lay, I am only good for a few hours each day, but I am down to the last 300 slate tiles still to lay.
Now, I better get to some web work, write a few articles for my business page (yes I still can't quite retire) and a few more pages for the poultry books website, and so we arrive here. Some bookbinding articles soon.
And inbetween is the reason for the binding. Books! I like reading books, so there has been quite a few of those read over the past 6 months. Lockdown? Give me a good book, and a comfy chair and the world is mine. Some old , some new, some to study, some read again, and some read often enough to go back to the bindery for repair.
We cannot of course at this time have Guild meetings but they will come in time. We are always open to ideas of what you might like to do once Victoria reopens. Don't hesitate to send me or any of the committee an email or two with any ideas for us. I tried video recording me working on some books, it was painful to watch. Like watching a tap dripping, or water coming to the boil, so I gave that idea away. Plenty of others doing well at it on the links page. No open bindery either, but here is hoping we can soon. No workshops, the quarantine is too costly for binders to come here to teach, and its not permitted anyway, and too costly for us to go there and sit in a hotel for 2 weeks! But we will find a way when the time is right.
Our next meeting will be a Zoom meeting. Tuesday evening 22nd September, thats next Tuesday, 6.30pm to 7.30pm after the committee meeting at 5.30pm.
Important!! you will need to email Robert, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to receive the link for the Zoom meeting. We will have a book clinic, so bring along your binding project, or binding challenge so we can all look at it and perhaps be able to see it and maybe help to move the project ahead. It will be good to see some faces again, and perhaps arrange some ideas for further virtual meetings.
Hoping we will have an interesting evening, and I look forward to seeing you there.
Jim Finger
