SPELLBOUND Love of reading leads Thomaston woman to the craft – and art – of fine bookbinding

Julie Stackpole of Thomaston lives a life bound up in books – literally and figuratively. You only have to walk into the 149-year-old house she shares with her husband, Renny Stackpole, to know: This is a woman of books.

Books abound everywhere – shelved and stacked and left lying open on chairs and sofas. Conservatively estimated, there are 6,000 books in the Stackpole residence. Some represent the maritime history and music book collection of her husband. Former director of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, he is also a jazz musician. Other books stem from the couple’s years on Nantucket, where they spent the early part of their marriage.

Still more books were amassed by Julie Stackpole – and they speak volumes about her reading taste and her work. “I think about 3,000 are mysteries. One hundred are children’s books, 2,000 are general history and fiction, and I don’t know how many more are cookbooks and gardening books,” she said during a recent interview.

And that’s only in the living space. An upstairs room that she devotes to costume making holds another 200 or so books about costume design and history. In her home’s large basement – which holds various-size presses, paper cutters, many-sectioned boxes filled with type, and countless implements used for tooling designs into leather – one can find another 200 books about Stackpole’s main occupation, bookbinding.

So accomplished that she has been invited to exhibit her work in exclusive exhibitions – including one in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and some put on by the Guild of Book Workers – Stackpole has devoted 34 years to learning and refining her craft – and art. While many of the 24 steps entailed in binding a book depend upon craftsmanship, one look at the fine bindings Stackpole produces makes it clear this is an art, too.

Her most accomplished work today may be her fine bindings of Stephen King’s novel “Misery,” and another of Bret Harte’s “Tales of the Gold Rush.” These bindings make it clear Stackpole not only knows how to bind a book with care and expertise, she also brings to her work an appreciation of what’s on the pages within those bindings. The King volume sports a leather cover depicting a view through a doorway into a room with a blood-red floor. The same color bleeds down the edges of the pages. This may sound grim, but there is a beauty to the work, too. Like King’s opus, the binding is clearly the work of a master who knows how to take the elements that frighten and make an art of them.

The gold-hued binding of “Tales of the Gold Rush” – which Stackpole produced in time for the Guild of Book Workers’ 100th anniversary exhibition to be held at the Grolier Club in New York in October – shows to advantage Stackpole’s artful daring with bright colors, and also showcases her expertise in manipulating layers of leather.

Another fine binding of local interest is Stackpole’s treatment of Gordon Bok’s songbook “Time and the Flying Snow.” Although Stackpole noted that the paper quality of the publication is not superb, she said, “Gordon’s woodcuts are wonderful. I took the inspiration for the sailing vessel” worked in leather on the binding “from one of his woodcuts in the book.” The folk singer inspired the bookbinder in more ways than one. “I always listen to his music while binding,” she said, “so it seemed appropriate to make a fine binding for Gordon’s songbook.” The finished project – with the blue-gray toned binding set off by pages edged in deep gray graphite – was shown in a past Guild of Book Workers show.

Stackpole bound the King, Harte and Bok books as challenges to herself but also with the hope of selling them. She also undertakes commissioned projects including binding a copy of each new book by David McCullough for the author. Her skills are in demand for binding blank books, guest books, wedding guest books and dissertations. In addition, she undertakes book conservation, restoration and repair, and she is working on binding local 19th century newspapers for the Thomaston Public Library.

Stackpole also constructs boxes in which to store individual volumes or collections of books. A glorious example is the box she built to contain her own collection of Mary Stewart’s “The Crystal Cave” series of books. Here a dragon and Neolithic spiral design worked in leather are inset with a sparkling agate geode.

Bookbinding came quite naturally to Stackpole. The daughter of Mary Anne Beinecke and stepdaughter of Walter Beinecke Jr., after whom Yale University’s rare book library is named, she grew up in a household where the love of books prevailed. As a girl, she was one of that legion of bookworms who enjoyed reading books not just in daylight but at night, under the covers by the beam of a flashlight. There was even a period of time when her illumination of choice was the red nose light on a Santa Claus pin, Stackpole admitted, adding, “Thank heaven my vision survived that!”

After she graduated from Kirkland College in Clinton, N.Y., she sat herself down and thought about the ideal career. “I wanted something that was a craft but also an art,” Stackpole recalled. “Something that has intellectual and scholarly aspects and that deals with literature. I wanted to be my own boss and to work in a job that would allow me to live wherever I wanted, preferably Nantucket. I decided bookbinding would satisfy all those requirements.”

After study with experts here and abroad, Stackpole did just that, establishing herself as a bookbinder on Nantucket until, in 1985, she and her husband and two daughters made the move to Thomaston – with thousands of books, of course.

Rosemary Herbert can be reached at rosemaryherbert@rcn.com.

Julie Stackpole works on a first-edition book by David McCullough for the author. She uses linen thread to sew the pages together. She says it can take as many as 80 hours to complete a binding.

Tools for gold tooling on center or corner pattern on book bindings.