Whitefield book binder Celine Lombardi poses with two of her sample books that demonstrate her hand-cut leather details at the Whitefield Library on Friday, April 4 in advance of her solo show. (Sarah Masters photo)
Whitefield Library’s artist of the month is grateful for the opportunity to share what she does with her neighbors and friends. Celine Lombardi is a custom bookbinder, which means most of her work is in private collections. Over the years, she has built up her own collection of her work of workshop sample books and exhibition pieces. This month marks Lombardi’s first solo show.
Lombardi was raised in New York, N.Y. As a young adult, she volunteered and took classes at the Center for Book Arts. She found a part time job assisting an older bookbinder. His pace of life appealed to her and she began to think of bookbinding as a possible career.
Bookbinding is engaging and challenging, in that it requires a bit of engineering to find solutions, Lombardi said. It also appeals to one of innate characteristics.
“I’m a little bit fussy, I like to fuss about details,” said Lombardi. She found working in gardening and farming was OK, but more chaotic and thus less satisfying.
She attended the North Bennet Street School, a trade and craft school in Boston, Mass. She learned about the historic evolution of the book, how books function, and how to repair them. She graduated in 2011 and within two years launched her own business: Celine Marie Bookbinding.
She began teaching workshops at the Center for Book Arts with occasional day trips to Philadelphia, Penn. to teach workshops there. She built up a large sample of blank books demonstrating various techniques, such as braided bindings from the 13th and 15th centuries, leather detailing, and book boxes.
Lombardi creates fine edition bound books and matching book boxes. Many of her orders are one-of-a-kind. Customers, mostly artists themselves, submit their “artistically conceived” book materials and it is up to Lombardi to figure out how to bind them, she said.
She can gilt edges, add gold tooling, create marbled end pages, and more. She can rebind books with fun, custom covers. Her shop machines are all antique, large cast iron machines such as a guillotine which can cut the thinnest vellum or thick cardboard. The hot stamp press for adding gold foil is from the 1940s and is probably the newest thing in her shop, Lombardi said.
That shop is a converted tool shed with a space heater. Lombardi and her husband bought their land in Whitefield in 2016 with the dream to build a home on it someday. That day came sooner than they thought. The family, including their young daughter, was camping on the land in early 2020 when they got caught in pandemic shelter-in-place restrictions.
As restrictions dragged on, they chose to stay, living in a trailer for years until the house was complete enough to occupy. It is still in progress with plans for Lombardi’s studio.
Lombardi once felt tied to New York and her client base. One benefit to come of the restrictions is that many of Lombardi’s clients became used to shipping their work. Her clients generally figured “if we have to send it across town, we might as well send it to Maine,” she said. She is grateful they stayed with her.
Lombardi built her business on word of mouth. She has worked with some of the same clients for years. One client orders custom sketchbooks in unusual shapes, including a circle and a cinquefoil.
Another client adapted multiple copies of a vintage Florida tree guide and asked Lombardi to use bark for the cover. She figured out how to make the book able to be held by adding strips of leather along an edge.
Lombardi recently completed her largest commission: a 2-foot-tall sketchbook. Whitefield’s Grand Army Arts cut the pages, which were the absolutely maximum Lombardi’s binding equipment could handle and required a bit of fussing to fit correctly, said Lombardi.
Lombardi’s show at the Whitefield Library includes samples of many of her skills plus a photo book she recently created to document some of her client commissions.
One set of sample books includes pages from natural materials: bark, cattails, and leeks. Lombardi said she once created pages from milkweed. The covers are also pieces of art with tiny, hand-cut details and letters or lacunose onlays. Many books have matching boxes to protect them, and boxes that are stored within other boxes for their own protection, Lombardi said.
Lombardi said she has fun expressing herself with her craft. She has submitted her artwork, those fun pieces, to three separate exhibitions. Those instances have been the only time she felt any deadline pressure.
“Everything I do is slow. There are no book emergencies. I go at my own pace. I’m grateful not to have high speed profession,” said Lombardi.
Lombardi said her pace of work goes well with life in her new community. Every Saturday, she and her daughter “make the rounds” of the Sheepscot General Store and the Whitefield Library.
“We love this community, it’s no mistake we ended up here,” Lombardi said.
Lombardi’s books will be displayed at the Whitefield Library, at 1 Arlington Lane, through April.
