At 125 years old, Harcourt claims to be the oldest firm in the United States that binds books only by hand.
“Everything is hand-tooled at the Harcourt Bindery,” owner Matthew Raptis said. “The whole process is just anachronistic.”
When he was eight years old, Raptis paid $50 for a rare copy of Ulysses Grant’s memoirs. It was the beginning of a lifelong obsession. A quarter-century ago, he launched Raptis Rare Books in Vermont, as a mail-order business. Ten years ago, he moved the company to Palm Beach, Fla. and opened a retail store. All the while Raptis relied on Harcourt to repair and rebind his up-to-date acquisitions before selling the books to collectors.
Meanwhile, ownership of Harcourt had passed through multiple hands since 1900, the year of its founding. In 2022, Raptis acquired the company, and his stores remain the bindery’s biggest customer.
There are no ink-stained printing presses here. The books are already printed, often decades agoearlier. Carts in one corner of the room are stacked with “text blocks,” the actual pages of books with their old covers stripped off.
Jeidy Ryan, a 21-year employee, sits at a wooden book-sewing frame, where she uses fine linen to stitch together the pages a few at a time, then binds the entire stack together.
Frank Jones compresses books in an archaic hand-cranked press, and uses a small, broad-headed hammer to pound on the pages. He’s giving the book’s spine a rounded shape that will make the book more durable.
Later, Jones will sort through shelves piled high with animal hides–calfskin, pigskin, goat, sheep, even kangaroo. From these he’ll choose the correct texture and color of leather that the book demands. The leather must be cut to the correct dimensions, but also painstakingly thinned out along the book’s hinges so it’ll close properly. That means using a razor-sharp knife to slice off thin layers from the backside of the leather without piercing the surface. One slip, and the leather is ruined.
Still, at age 63 Jones has had plenty of time to master the art, and no intention of stepping away anytime soon.
“I’ll die at my desk, most likely,” he said.
A few steps away, Samantha Griglack is heating her stamping tools on a small gas stove. They’re like small branding irons, but with clamps that hold small pieces of type containing the text that will appear on the book’s spine.
When the type is hot enough, Griglack brushes it against a cloth saturated with Vaseline, then covers it with a thin piece of pure palladium, cheaper than gold but still $1,400 an ounce. Guided only by eye, she presses the tool onto a book that sits spine-up on her workbench, gripped in a wooden vise.
It’s not a volume of Thomas Hardy or Toni Morrison. It’s titled “Delirious New York,” a 1978 work by Harvard University professor Rem Koolhaus that’s unknown to most of us, but renowned among architects. A first edition in its original binding can sell for $3,000 or more. Raptis will soon see how much he can get for it when it’s wrapped in black goatskin and etched with palladium.
The markup can be considerable, especially if the book has great intrinsic benefit. Raptis remembers purchasing a Harcourt-bound 19-volume collection of the works of William Faulkner, created for the author’s daughter, and then reselling it for $350,000
It can cost as much as $1,000 to hand-bind a book. But some collectors treasure the original cover, no matter how tattered. So Harcourt makes handcrafted clamshell boxes of cardboard covered with leather or cloth, priced at around $500. The boxes resemble newly-bound books, right down to their gold-stamped spines. And inside, the original book remains intact.
Griglack and a new Harcourt employee, Francesca Santiago, have teamed up to complete a trio of clamshell boxes. One will eventually contain the libretto for the musical “West Side Story,” while the others will house the first British editions of two James Bond novels, featuring slipcovers painted by famous watercolor musician Richard Chopping.
Flecks of gold and palladium dust the benches and drift to the floor. It’s all carefully swept up, along with ordinary trash, and put into special bins that are trucked to Pease & Curren, a Rhode Island firm that specializes in jewelry scrap. These days, gold costs $4,000 an ounce, so a full trash bin can contain a few hundred dollars of recycled metal.
Jones said that in the 1970s, when Harcourt moved from a previous location in Boston, the company cut up the floorboards in search of gold dust, and got a check for $3,000. He figures it would come to about $30,000 today.
Apart from keeping Raptis supplied with rebound books, Harcourt serves individual book lovers, as well as hobbyists such as coin and stamp collectors looking for distinctive storage albums.
The company also repairs old books, a job that can have unexpected hazards. Longtime employee Patricia Rosen remembered fixing the cover on a 1953 special edition of Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451.” Since the book is set in a future society where books are burned on sight, some clever marketer had 200 copies issued with fireproof covers, made of toxic asbestos.
“That was probably the most dangerous book that I’ve handled,” Rosen said.
Harcourt owes a debt to former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. In 1990 he issued an executive order requiring that vital government records, like birth and death certificates, must be recorded on paper and bound in books. When you see one of these big volumes in a county clerk’s office, there’s a good chance it was bound by Harcourt, using inexpensive buckram cloth. The company charges about $125 per volume. It’s unglamorous work, but it’s steady.
Harcourt employs just six people, and the company is looking to hire. But skilled bookbinders are scarce. Griglack learned her trade at Boston’s North Bennet Street School, which offers a two-year course in bookbinding.
DeCristoforo said Harcourt provides in-house training to promising candidates. Jeidy Ryan arrived at age 19 knowing nothing about bookbinding; two decades later, she’s stitching together a set of rare century-old volumes about the birds of the United States. And the recent hiring of Santiago, a 23-year-old graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, shows that the talent pipeline hasn’t run dry.
And that’s just as well. According to one estimate, worldwide sales of rare books will reach $2 billion this year and keep right on growing. Not a massive market by global standards but quite enough to keep Harcourt’s bookbinders busy.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.
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