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North Van bookbinders restore tomes to former glory

Reading a book can offer a gateway to a magical world, but for master bookbinder Richard Smart the magic can be found in the object of the book itself.
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Reading a book can offer a gateway to a magical world, but for master bookbinder Richard Smart the magic can be found in the object of the book itself.

“I came into it as a craft,” he tells the North Shore News, admitting he loves literature – but there’s more to the story than just what lies waiting inside the pages.

Smart sells rare and antiquarian books and ephemera at his E.C. Rare Books store and performs restoration on antique books through its sister business, Old English Bindery, both located at 1455 Crown St. in North Vancouver.

On March 11, Emilie Crewe of E.C. Rare Books and Old English Bindery demonstrated some gold tooling on the inside edge of an antique book during the North Shore Art Crawl, opening up the storefront to the public and encouraging people’s exposure to the craft of book restoration.

“Most of my customers are antiquarian book dealers, so they will buy books out of collections, auction, various places, and if they need restoration they will send them to me,” Smart explains. “I’ll do the restoration and send them back and they catalogue them and put them up for sale, either at book fairs, catalogues, that go out to collectors worldwide.”

He says he works mostly with leather-bound books and if a leather binding, for example, is falling to pieces he’ll put it back together using original leathers and techniques. It can be a long, involved process.

“It’s like … if you’re restoring a classic art,” he says. “It’s all done by hand, there’s no machines involved, it’s all hand done so every part is very labour intensive.”

Smart dates his involvement with the ancient craft of book restoration, as well as the conservation of paper, documents, and bindings, to three generations ago.

His grandfather Charles E. Smart began a seven-year apprenticeship in bookbinding in the U.K. in 1920. In the late 1920s he joined Zaehnsdorf’s in London, a large bindery, where he specialized in restoration of antique books and paper. 

“My grandfather started binding books when he was 13, 14, went off to a bindery in London and learned from there, and then worked several commercial binderies,” Smart says. “And commercial binderies at that time were doing fine leather books – it’s not like today where they’re just printing out and getting out paperbacks.”

Charles would eventually open his own shop, C.E. Smart Bookbinder, in the late 1930s.

Smart’s father, John Smart, started working in the family business following the Second World War. “My father just carried on,” Smart says. “He’s still doing the same thing back in the U.K. now, been working in the trade for 50-odd years, if not more now. I started working with my father when I was about 18, 19, and then decided to go out on my own.”

Smart came to Canada in 2000 and set up shop in North Vancouver.

Throughout the years Smart has restored or bound books for many notable customers and has been part of several esteemed projects, including binding books for Hunter S. Thompson (“Any interaction I had with him was just amazing. Blew me away obviously.”), Charlton Heston, and even the Government of Canada, who in 2005 commissioned him to bind the Seventh Book of Remembrance which commemorates Canadian Service men and women whose deaths are attributable to military service.

Asked how the art of antiquarian book restoration is faring in today’s online and over-digitized culture, he says his consistent customers have been loyal for decades, while many others are only now having an epiphany when it comes to their own reading – or lack thereof.

“I think there’s certainly people that are beginning to realize that they haven’t touched a book for so long, all they’ve had are electronic devices and they’re now becoming more interested in actually holding a book, and the tactile side of books,” he says.

And while Smart’s book restoration work is important to him, he specifically touts E.C. Rare Books, where he specializes in selling antique works of European history, classic literature, children’s illustrated books, and more.

“I think that’s one of the appeals of antique books – where the book has been,” he says. “Recently we managed to purchase through the bookshop a first edition Anne Frank’s Diary, which is quite rare. … It had hardly ever been opened, probably just was left around right from the original printing in 1947, I think it was.”

For Smart, the story contained in a book is clearly important, but it’s not the whole picture.

“You’re definitely handling a work of art in a way that it was put together and bound over hundreds of years – as well as the story inside,” he says.