Blank spring-back book

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Private Collection

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Between 1986-1988 Chris Collins studied bookbinding and conservation under Romilly Saumarez-Smith, the first female forwarder to work at Zaehnsdorf’s. Collins was then awarded a scholarship by the Stationer’s Company, London to study Islamic bookbinding in Istanbul. He has worked for James Brockman, a bookbinder from Oxford who made real some of Edgar Mansfield’s book designs; the Public Records Office in Kew; and a number of institutions in the UK, mainly as a conservator. Collins first came to New Zealand in the early 1990s and subsequently settled in Dunedin. This spring-back (a type of binding that enabled the book to lie flat) is an example of his work from 1996. It is bound in white vellum with green leather onlays which are embellished with an interlacing cross hatch pattern made from thin vellum thongs.