My 78 year old neighbor saw my sewing frame and asked why I gave up on the old way

Margaret Nelson · 2026-10-09T17:15:09.141393+00:00

So my neighbor Ed, he is 78 and used to do book repair at the library in Dubuque before he retired, came over while I had the garage door up and saw me stitching a signature on my sewing frame. He watched for a bit and then asked why I still do it by hand when everyone just glues up the spine now. I told him it is slower but the book opens flat and the pages stay put, and he nodded and said that is how his mother learned it back in the 50s. Then he mentioned something that has been rolling around my head since. He said the reason hand sewing is vanishing is not that it is worse, it is that nobody has time to teach a kid to do it right anymore, and the trade goes where the teaching goes. I have been binding for 11 years and I learned most of it from a 1970s library book and YouTube, which I guess is its own kind of teaching. But standing there with Ed it hit me that I have never once sat down and shown another person how to do a French link. Do any of you run a class or teach a friend, and how do you keep the old methods from just walking out the door when the old timers do?

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My 78 year old neighbor saw my sewing frame and asked why I gave up on the old way | Bookbinders - HW Forums