Books rebound by Britain O’Connor. Photo by Tom Groenfeldt.
Local family medicine doctor Britain O’Connor has always liked books.
“When I was in middle school, actually towards the end of elementary school, I would ride my bike to the library almost every day in the summer,” she said. “I was a book-every-two-to-three-days kind of reader. I’m not anymore because I can’t stay awake that long.”
When she moved to Sturgeon Bay, Novel Bay Books became a favorite haunt, and she became its best customer.
“I don’t know if I still am, but it kind of happened by accident,” she said. “I like physical things; I prefer them over an e-reader any day. And I also like physical books that are pretty. You look at what Easton Press does, and they’re absolutely beautiful.”
Britain O’Connor at work. Photo by Tom Groenfeldt.
But their books, especially the volumes bound in full leather, are expensive.
“So instead of spending the money on something from Easton Press, why didn’t I just pick up an even more expensive hobby and do it myself?” O’Connor said.
Now she is selling rebound books in handsome designs as Be Kind Rebind (bekindrebind.com.) On Aug. 23, she will run a table outside of Novel Bay Booksellers, 44 N. 3rd Ave. in Sturgeon Bay.
Figuring out this new hobby was often frustrating. O’Connor figures it has taken her two years to become proficient.
“The learning curve is steep,” she said. “In the last six months, I’ve actually figured out most of the kinks and gotten good at it.”
She starts with a quality paperback, usually from a library sale or Goodwill, then measures it and follows a formula to size the book boards correctly. When she began, she cut the boards with a box cutter. She has since graduated to a Cricut, designed for bookbinders.
“It took me a long time to figure out how to cut efficiently because I’m not good at measuring,” O’Connor said. “Sometimes, I can measure three times and still have it come out incorrect. I don’t know how it happens, but it does. And so with the Cricut, I can just type in the size that I want, and then it’ll cut it out for me. It’s much more precise.”
Each book takes three pieces – two for the front and back covers and one for the spine, wrapped in book cloth and glued to the boards, with just enough room for the book to open. O’Connor decorates the inside covers with endpapers, sometimes with a design that fits the book’s content.
A bookbinder’s somewhat dismissive label for the book’s pages is a “text block.” From a binder’s perspective, the book itself is just the support mechanism for the fancy cover.
Sometimes, O’Connor decorates the cover using patterns from a library of designs; other times, she uses designs she makes on her computer, transfers to the Cricut machine to cut out in foil, and sticks to the cover with glue or heat. She also uses the Cricut for the print on the cover and spine.
“A sheet of foil feeds into the machine, which does a shallow cut, so that there’s still a backing on it,” O’Connor said. “Then you still have a plastic sheet that you can flip over and iron the design onto the cover without melting the vinyl.”
Books rebound by Britain O’Connor. Photo by Tom Groenfeldt.
One recent cover with an intricate design took an hour and a half of “weeding,” or taking out the pieces of foil that had been cut by machine but required removal by hand.
Most of her designs are one-offs, unique to a specific book, but she did recently find a set of fantasy books at a thrift shop that she plans to design in a consistent pattern so they can be sold as a set. She won’t do sets on demand, though.
“I don’t do commission work because I still want to enjoy this as a hobby,” she said.
A self-taught artist, O’Connor ranges widely across the internet in her learning, using YouTube, TikTok and blogs to further her craft. So far, she has stayed away from one recent trend – spraying color onto the page edges. Some book designers even clamp the book down to paint a picture on the exposed edges.
“I’ve dabbled in it, but I am not that talented, and I haven’t been real happy with the results,” O’Connor said.
Artists dissatisfied with the final product can either run the book through a huge paper cutter to chop off a fraction of an inch, “or sand it down, which is imprecise at best,” O’Connor said.