Journal / About
About This Journal
A record of bench decisions, not a showcase
Kettlestitch started as a shared notebook among a few people who repair books for a living and got tired of writing the same reasoning down separately. It became a public journal because the reasoning turned out to be more useful shared than filed away.
What we're trying to do
Most writing about book repair either sells a service or performs a transformation — a battered book made to look new, filmed in under a minute. We wanted something slower: an honest account of what a repair actually involves, including the parts that don't photograph well and the decisions that don't have a clean answer.
Every entry starts from a real structural problem — a broken fold, a detached spine, a signature that won't sit flush — and works through what the options were and why one was chosen over another. We're not trying to convince anyone that every book can or should be repaired. Some of the more useful entries are about when to stop.
A small, informal group
MMara Voss
Handles most of the structural repair entries — sewing, spines, and text-block problems. Trained through a small bindery apprenticeship before working independently.
DDov Alderman
Writes on materials and paper — thread weight, board choice, grain direction. Keeps the glossary honest and consistent across entries.
RRosa Fennimore
Edits for clarity and maintains Signature Count, the journal's small companion tool for tracking collation on longer projects.
·Occasional contributors
A few working binders send in case notes from their own benches. We credit and lightly edit; we don't rewrite anyone's voice.
How we write and what we don't do
- Every entry is original and based on an actual repair, described in enough detail to be useful, without identifying a book's owner.
- We don't sell repair services, tools, or materials on this site, and we don't accept payment to feature a product or method.
- Signature Count is described accurately as a collation-tracking tool. We don't overstate what it does.
- Corrections are noted at the bottom of an entry, dated, rather than edited silently.
- We link to other entries on this journal when they're genuinely relevant, not to pad word count.
Questions, corrections, or a repair story worth writing up — reach us at hello@kettlestitch.shop.