The Books Arts Center of Kalamazoo preserves book-making traditions. While the shift in printing processes post-Industrial Revolution made books widely accessible, Jeff Abshear founded The Book Arts Center of Kalamazoo to keep the art of traditional book-making alive. Visit kalbookarts.org to learn about upcoming workshops, events, and more.

Amanda Gatewood: How did you get your start in book arts?
Jeff Abshear: My background as a student is in art and literature. I studied both when I was an undergraduate. After I finished my undergraduate degree, John Ridland introduced me to the work of Harry Duncan. Many people have referred to Duncan as the father of fine press printing back in the 1920s. When the industrial revolution had pretty much abolished hand printing and replaced it with mechanical printing, he had gotten an old-fashioned press, like some of the presses that we have here. Duncan started publishing books of poetry, including a book by William Carlos Williams. He did the whole thing with hand set type, on an old-fashioned press, and in small editions that were hand bound. I was inspired by Harry Duncan’s work, and that was what got me interested.
I proposed to do what was my very first book with John, which was was called Palms: Six Ballads. I did a very limited work, only 75 copies. I did a series of aquatint etchings that went in the book, printed all the pages, and bound all the books by hand. After that Western Michigan University gave me a fellowship to come here and set up the letterpress studio. Then I worked as a graphic designer for many years. In 2005 a lot of things came together to start the Book Arts Center. I gathered together a bunch of people in Kalamazoo that were artists, writers, paper makers, book binders, and printers. We didn’t have much of anything except for Paul Roberts’ paper studio and very basic equipment for doing book binding. That was 20 years ago and gradually it grew from there.
AG: Do you believe that it’s very important to handcraft a book? So often publishing houses just put them into a machine and you can almost feel that there is not a human touch to it.
JA: That is correct. I think when a book is made by hand, when somebody reads that book, it’s a different kind of experience. They tend to read more carefully. I think it’s a more intimate experience.
AG: Especially since so much of the publishing industry is just pushing out copies.
JA: Of all sorts of stuff. Maybe you read it and then you throw it away or, you know it gets lost or whatever. Or even if it doesn’t, they use very cheap materials. The books fall apart or the paper has a lot of acid in it and so eventually the pages turn yellow. A book like the kinds of books we make, with archival materials, will last a long time. Books the were printed with movable type on handmade paper in the Renaissance are still perfectly good today.
AG: How does your process differ from historical bookmaking processes?
JA: If you go all the way back to the very beginning of bookmaking, people were making books with animal skins. In the 19th century, with the industrial revolution and the mechanization of book production, books were made by machines, sewn by machines, covered by machines. Often made with cheap materials in order to make a lot of copies quickly and cheaply. The quality of book production kind of fell down. Contemporary mechanically-made books I’d say are better made now, because people have realized that the old books from the 19th century and early 20th century are falling apart, so they take more care. But we [at the Book Arts Center] are sort of anachronistic. We go back to another age, printing and sewing books by hand. We use materials and techniques that would have been used in earlier times.
AG: What are the steps that go into building a book by hand?
JA: It’s kind of difficult for me to just describe it. There are different ways of making books. There are different kinds of book forms depending on what kind of book you’re going to make. If you’re making what we call a casebound book, which is a hardcover book, going from the very beginning, you start by folding the pages in half. You have to lay out the book so that you can put the pages into groupings of pages together, which are called signatures.
Then you poke holes in the fold and sew it together. Take glue, put the book in a clamp, put glue on the spine, and put fabric on that. Then you make a cover out of book board, which is a kind of really compressed cardboard that you cover with cloth that’s specially made to be resistant to the glue, so the glue doesn’t come through the cloth backing. You then glue the book into the board. Once everything’s glued together, you have to put it into a press so that it dries and comes out flat.
AG: You’ve mentioned in class and on the website for the Book Arts Center that you are a researcher in Venice and that was part of your education. Do you believe that’s helped you in this field?
JA: Definitely. I was a Fulbright scholar in 2007, after the Book Art Center had been established for only two years. I had been making books already, going all the way back ten to fifteen years. When I went to Italy that first year, I ended up making contacts with some of the studios. I still bring students to work in some of the studios that I made contact with all the way back then.
AG: Is there any other information you believe people should know about the industry of handmade books?
JA: Here’s one thing that there’s a fairly recent kind of development in book arts. In the last 50 years or so there’s been a kind of explosion in the development of what are called artist books. Where an artist will create a usually very small edition of books, sometimes just one single copy of a book. Often the emphasis is on the book form as a medium for the artist’s expression, so the artist will often write whatever text is in it to create images. Sometimes the books are handmade paper, or they use hand printed imagery. Sometimes they’re even sculptural in different ways. So, the way the book is presented and packaged can be an experience in itself, like experiencing a piece of sculpture.

JEFF ABSHEAR was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Venice, Italy, where he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, and Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione, to study the history of Italian printing and book arts. He has returned to Europe each summer to conduct the Western Michigan University study abroad trip Book Arts in Europe, working in traditional letterpress, printing, and papermaking studios in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He also teaches book arts each summer to children in public schools in Sardinia, Italy. He has a Master of Fine Arts from WMU’s Frostic School of Art, where he has taught as adjunct faculty for 22 years. He is a founding member of the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center.
AMANDA GATEWOOD is a student at Western Michigan University, majoring in art history and creative writing. She is pursuing a publishing career through her Third Coast internship and has a poem in Moonstone Arts Center’s New Voices 2025.