Contact Us

Use the form on the right to contact us.

You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right. 

Po Box 410963
San Francisco, CA 94141
USA

A close-knit group of hand bookbinders, with shared interests in creating and collecting fine bindings, joined together to promote hand bookbinding and related book arts and to exchange information and ideas. 

HBC MEMBERS RETREAT

HBC Member Event Calendar

Please mark the dates in your calendar and join us!

Back to All Events

HBC MEMBERS RETREAT


The Northern California HBC members will host our Southern California friends for a weekend book extravaganza!

RSVP HERE FOR EVENTS BELOWPlease state which events you wish to attend
 

FRIDAY EVENTS

Exhibition :: Catching the Light :: Bookworks from Southern California
Curator :: Carolee Campbell
Exhibition Run Dates :: February 2 - April 30, 2018
Location :: San Francisco Center for the Book

Catching the Light offers examples of the mature work of selected book artists from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Charting a rigorous course - the braiding of intuition, craft and art.

Opening Reception :: February 2, 2018 from 6:00-8:00pm. Admission is free. R.S.V.P. here...(link is external)

SATURDAY EVENTS

STUDIO DEMO AND SHARING DAY : 

Attendees can move around according to their interests. Coffee and breakfast snack provided, lunch on your own. See link for local options. 
TIME: 9AM - 4PM 
LOCATION: 1890 Bryant Street, San Francisco CA 94110

  • Woven and Interlocking Book Structures:Instructions will be provided and attendees will have the chance to make these elegant yet playful structures.
  • Paste Papers: We will offer tools and techniques to help you create a variety of papers to take home.
  • Washing: We will demonstrate how to wash, deacidify, resize and line an item. This process takes several hours, but it’s intermittent. We’ll have some discussion of the materials used, and people will see how to make up solutions of calcium hydroxide for deacidification and gelatin for resizing. 
     

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY: Pull a Valentine Print on a Hand Press. We will shuttle folks to the San Francisco Public Library to take part in this annual tradition.

TIME: 2PM - 4PM
LOCATION: Meet on the 6th Floor lobby, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA 94102

RSVP HERE FOR EVENTS : Please state which events you wish to attend

______________________________________________
______________________________________________

SUNDAY EVENTS

PRIVATE TOUR SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY:

Before the library opens, we will visit the San Francisco Public Library to look at some highlights from the Robert Grabhorn Collection on the History of Printing and the Development of the Book. The collection ranges from the 1400’s to the present day, and contains not only masterpieces of printing, but also experiments and even mistakes. You’ll find Alastair Johnston’s excellent essay on the collection on the SFPL website.
TIME: 10 AM-12 PM
LOCATION: Meet on the Larkin St steps in front of the Library, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA 94102. Because the Library is closed we must go in as a group all together 

OPTIONAL: SF MUSEUM OF MODERN ART LUNCH & ART: From the Library it’s a quick hop to SFMoma, where folks may want to eat lunch and catch the last day of the Walker Evans show. people on this excursion will need to pay their own entry fee into the museum. 

PRESS & BINDERY TOURS:  Sunday Afternoon 1 - 5 PM,
Four East Bay Artists, Bookbinders
and Printers

RSVP HERE FOR EVENTS : Please state if you need transportation for this tour

JOHN DEMERRITT owns and operates John DeMerritt Bookbinding, in Emeryville, CA. His studio produces books and portfolios for artists, galleries, fine press publishers and institutions. John has taught and lectured at The SF Center for the Book, The Kala Institute, Columbia College Center for Book and Paper, Visual Studies Workshop, Oregon College or Arts and Craft, The Guild of Bookworkers and Mills College. From 2000 to 2013, he taught in the Photography Department of the San Francisco Art Institute, combining the use of digital imaging and book structure with his co-teacher, Michael Creedon. John and his wife, Nora Pauwels, publish collaborative projects with artists under their imprint DeMerritt | Pauwels Editions.
LOCATION: John DeMerritt Bookbinding 1420 45th Street ~ # 21 Emeryville, CA 94608 www.johndemerrittbookbinding.com

NORMAN MCKNIGHT Printer, photographer and collector of antiquities, Norman McKnight was born in West Hollywood and grew up traversing California and Oregon. Norman attended the University of Oregon when it was a small school of four thousand students with an amazing library. For the last thirty years, Norman has owned and operated Philoxenia Press a private letterpress studio in Berkeley, California, specializing in photography and finely printed books and broadsides. The press draws on a very large library of printing types and has two hand presses.

Norman McKnight is offering a wonderful opportunity to pull a keepsake print on Philoxenia's Albion hand press. The text will be a W.B. Yeats poem, "Leda and the Swan", illustrated with a nineteenth-century woodblock print by William Bewick. The print will be bicolored, black for he text, dark green for the illustration, on Rives bfk.
LOCATION: Philoxenia Press 1533 Francisco Street Berkeley, California 94703-2288

MARY RISALA LAIRD has her MFA in printmaking from UW Madison, Wisconsin. She has published letterpress books since 1969 as Quelquefois Press. She partnered in Perishable Press Limited from 1969-84. Ms. Laird loves teaching letterpress. Her ricochets include San Francisco State University, Kala Institute in Berkeley, Naropa University, and the San Francisco Center for the Book; the latter, where rumor has it, for twenty years, editions of chapbooks were cobbled together and printed in a day with six itinerant printer’s devils. Currently, she teaches in her studio in Berkeley. She uses a Vandercook Universal I for all the letterpress. Poetry, jazz, painting, drawing, the mystics of all traditions and participating in long silent retreats all over the country lend meaning to her life and inspiration to her work. Her books may be found in many collections across the country and in London. She has three grown children and lives in Berkeley with her husband. LOCATION: Quelquefois Press 638 Peralta Avenue Berkeley, CA 94707 www.quelquefoispress.com

FRED & BARBARA VOLTMER Havilah Press is small, independently owned letterpress company located in Emeryville, California which specializes in printing limited edition books with original content of cultural or historical interest.  It also serves as a resource for institutions, which own hand presses by providing assistance with restoration, maintenance, and printing techniques. The press is named after the gold mining town that was the first county seat of Kern County in the Sierra Nevada above what is now Bakersfield. The town of Havilah was founded by Asbury Harpending, a land speculator, who led the rush to the promising gold deposits on Clear Creek in 1984. Havilah Press operated from 1971-1978 as a publishing and book distribution business in Richardson, Texas. Barbara and Fred Voltmer were honored last year by APHA NorCal and numerous other Bay Area organizations for their dedication and knowledge of letterpress printing. Together they have single-handedly repaired and-or renovated twenty-one different hand printing presses in Northern California.
LOCATION: Havilah Press 4300 Horton Street Unit 4 Emeryville, CA 94608 www.havilahpress.com  

 

SUNDAY EVENING COCKTAIL PARTY:

The day will end with a casual get together at Vanessa Hardy’s house in Berkeley. Guests and members are encouraged to come even if they are not attending other events. 
TIME: 5PM
LOCATION: Please RSVP or Email Vanessa for the address. 

RSVP HERE FOR EVENTS : Please state which events you wish to attend

Later Event: March 6
MEMBERS SHOW AND TELL