About
The bindery is located in Vellano, a little mountaintop town in Tuscany, Italy, where I transform second-hand books into something to treasure for years to come.
About Maeyke
The first official book I ever bound was my own version of The Book of Shadows from the series Charmed. The series aired when I was around 11/12 years old and I was a big fan, so my dad helped me make a ‘book of shadows’ by covering an old binder with velvet, sewing together some folded paper and gluing it all together. It fell apart almost immediately, so I don’t have it anymore, but I suppose that was the first seed.
I started actually learning bookbinding when I was getting my Bachelor’s degree. I took a course on medieval manuscripts and got the opportunity to hold some old leatherbound books in my hands. I was immediately fascinated by the practical aspects and decided to do a short course in basic bookbinding techniques.
This only fuelled the fire, so after my Bachelor’s degree I started a 2 year program in bookbinding at the Grafisch Lyceum Utrecht, while at the same time getting my Master’s in Modern Literature, writing my thesis on science fiction! This is when I first started my own studio, selling notebooks and photo-albums, around 2015. At the time, I didn’t see it as a real job yet, so after graduation I got a job as a translator and kept bookbinding as a hobby.
I couldn’t really let it go though, so about 2 years later I looked for a studio space, went freelance with my translating and started teaching workshops and bookbinding for a small press called KNUST in Nijmegen. Here I fell in love with bright colours. I did a lot of paper marbling in my studio, and all the artbooks I bound were printed using risoprint, which uses a lot of very bright inks.
The biggest question I always had was, how do I make a book with text in it? I had a lot of experience making notebooks, I had done some book repair and had bound small print runs at KNUST, but I wanted to make unique books, and bind literature. And that is very difficult at a small scale, especially with the tools available to me at the time. All I had experience with for book titles was hot foil stamping, and that was inaccessible to me.
It wasn’t until I saw others rebinding mass market books that it really clicked for me, that I could create one-of-a-kind rebinds in unique colours using a Cricut. So, in 2023, right after I had moved to my current house in Italy, I asked for a Cricut for Christmas and started bookbinding again. I started experimenting on my own bookcase, which consists mostly of SF, and everything just fell into place; SF, psychedelic colours and heat press vinyl for the cover design.