Printing Fair

For those interested, news has reached me of a printing fair next Saturday, 5 July, at Langdale Hall, Witney, Oxon. I have not been to a fair there before, so I have no idea what to expect, but entrance is free, so....why not give it a go?

Work Ethic

At Libre Livre we believe in hard work 24/7.

Here is a snap of our head marbler going flat out

Peter Harrington

Peter Harrington, the Kensington rare book dealer has also run the Chelsea Bindery since 2000. This top notch bindery specialises in traditional bindings of rare and valuable books. To see the bindery and photos and price list of some of their recent work click the site on the right

On blog News

Hope you enjoy the new feature "What's happening in the World of Bookbinding" added to the blog this morning

Groans of a letterpress printer

Last week Libre Livre was lucky enough to be offered some second-hand type at a very ccompetitive price by a retired printer who just chanced to be walking by our workshop. The only snag is that he wants to keep the trays in which it is held.

For those who don;t know, a type tray is a wooden tray about 30 inches long and 14 wide. It is divided up into around 75 compartments to keep each letter and character separate. To empty one tray into another (no, you can't just swap them over, type trays come in matching sets) takes about two hours laboriously picking up the contents of each compartment with tweezers and transferring those that don't ping away to the correspondong compartment in the other tray. And I've got 14 trays to do. Ahhhhh

Libre Livre Web Site

Completed the first draft of the Libre Livre web site today, and managed to get it all written and uploaded using Open Source software, which was gratifying. For those who are interested, click the site on the right to take a look.