Discerning their book choices can be a real challenge; the covers always face the floor, forcing me to adjust my line of vision with every subtle movement to catch a glimpse of what they’re holding.

He’s done book covers with relief before, by painstakingly carving each letter out with a knife, then gluing leather onto the cover, pressing it into the indent left by carving. It’s not easy.

In contrast, hand bookbinders create books from nothing but paper, leather and paste. They also restore older books by removing the pages from the original cover and designing a case, or cover, to ...

Binding a book with leather is a careful, step-by-step process. “If the leather is cut too thin it’s like working with toilet paper. If it’s too thick, it’s like cardboard,” James explained.

Anthropodermic bibliopegy —or binding books in leather made from human skin—is a practice that dates back to the 13 th century (although it didn’t truly take off until the 1500s and 1600s).

This ingenious dos-a-dos by Claudia Cohen is one book that holds two titles: Bookbinding Ephemera and Paper. Each work can be read front-to-back and back-to-front thanks to the accordion-fold binding.