Sün Evrard

Bound 'crossed-structure' with front board of inlaid, compressed and backpared leather; back cover, doublures and flyleaves in pigskin; chemise and slipcase in goatskin; push-button system for extracting the book executed by Martine Mélin. 

Although born in Hungary, Sün Evrard has lived and worked in France since 1971. She studied bookbinding, gold tooling and book design at the school of Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. Since 1978, she has worked as a designer bookbinder. Teaching has always been part of her activities, first at the school where she studied, then at the Atelier d’Arts Appliqués du Vésinet. A book on French bookbinding written by her (in collaboration with the French marble-restorer Annie Persuy), was published in 1984 by the Editions Denoël in Paris; a second edition was published in 1991. As she speaks several languages, she travels a lot, teaching and lecturing on bookbinding. She is one of the nine founding members of the AIR neuf movement. The Historical Library of Paris showed her work at the solo exhibition in May of 1995 and published an illustrated catalogue of the occasion. She is currently teaching master classes at the Bookbindery Wilgenkamp in The Netherlands.

BINDING

“Bernard Middleton’s text is excellent, I enjoyed very much learning about all the crazy things bookbinders of times past would use for binding books. My solution for the binding was to assemble tiny pieces of leather of four and two-legged animals, fish, and also bits of parchment. In the resulting covering material none of their original features is noticeable any more, except their color. I used this inlaid, compressed and backpared leather for the front board. The back cover, the doublures and the flyleaves are in pigskin. The protection is a traditional chemise-slipcase combination covered in goatskin, which is quite conventional except the ‘push-out’ system. It was executed by one of the bookbinders I work with regularly: Martine Mélin. The title was done by Stephane Gangloff. You know of course that we work in France in teams, that is, we have specialists for leather splitting, edge gilding, forwarding, and finishing, to whom we give part of the work, according to our and their special talents. You also ask me about my ideas of designing bindings. I take this work seriously, that is, I design the binding as a whole, instead of making a color drawing on a leather covered, traditionally forwarded book. That means to choose for each book a construction method and materials which seem to me appropriate for the book, and which can make real the dream-binding I see in my head.”