Photo by Karin Strickland
Dea Sasso not only judges a book by its cover — she judges every page inside it, plus the binding, as well. She’s devoted much of her life to the book arts, restoring old and heavily used volumes to near pristine condition.
At first glance, a book can seem unsalvageable. If the paper is acidic, “it fades, turns brown, and becomes brittle, eventually turning to dust,” says Sasso. She describes a recent project, restoring a first-edition copy of The Wizard of Oz. “It had black mold, many detached pages with Scotch-tape repairs, a cover whose image was worn away” — she hand-painted a replacement — “a binding where the covers were separated from the spine, and many pages that were loose and detached.”
Photo by Karin Strickland
Another challenge was the restoration of a large pulpit bible from a Burnsville church. “It was in dreadful condition,” she recalls. “Many pages were detached, as were the covers. Only someone who knew the Bible well would be able to reassemble the pages.” She put together a team of experts to help guide the project.
The first step is the evaluation. Broken joints require new cloth under the old spine, and “bumped” (crumpled or mashed) corners are injected with starch, recovered with a matching cloth, and dried in a splint to assure they are rigid and straight. Sasso says a book’s cover often has its own defects; she fixes cosmetic problems with cleaners and dyes, as needed.
“Sometimes, though, disguising blemishes can actually reduce the value of the book,” she notes. The same goes for the tricky business of adding missing pages back in. After library research, facsimile pages can be recreated, and while this makes the book readable again, it loses its purity from an antiquarian viewpoint.
For years, Sasso was the executive director of an organization dedicated to the prevention and treatment of substance abuse. “It was a high-stress job, and I loved it.” A middle-ear virus that took nearly a year to cure, however, eventually convinced her to seek another, calmer career path. She studied book arts with W.W. Streeter, a luggage proprietor turned bookbinder and published historian. Long after she’d opened her own bindery, she kept picking up new skills from Streeter and other master bookbinders in New England. “If I had two lifetimes,” she notes, “I would never learn it all” — although she’s learned enough to have her own trademarked brand of industry tools, Bindery in a Box.
Thirty years ago, Sasso founded Light of Day Bindery (also trademarked), in Massachusetts. When her then-husband was helping her move heavy bindery equipment, he quipped, “You couldn’t go into fly tying [instead]?” — hence “light.”
Since 2005, she’s been based in Asheville. Sasso is also the Resident Artist for Book and Paper Arts at the John C. Campbell Folk School, where she oversees the studio and hires instructors each year for the 60 intensive classes in her five disciplines: books, marbling, calligraphy, paper, and printmaking.
She creates her brilliantly marbled paper to match antique books and for original works, and she also specializes in making miniature books (less than three inches in dimension) and limited-run editions. The diversity of projects keeps her going, says Sasso.
Saving a relic from the trash bin, “bringing it back to life and use, especially if it’s important to the owner — it never gets old.”
Self Publishing as High Art:
Be Your Own Bookbinder
On Sunday, May 12 through Friday, May 17, Dea Sasso’s colleague Judith Beers will lead a week-long “Single Sheet Binding Class” at the John C. Campbell Folk School, a venerated craft institution founded in 1925. Beers will show students how to bind individual sheets of paper (computer printouts, sketches, memoirs, stories, poems, recipes, etc.) into a hardcover keepsake book. The last step is creating a cover of cloth or leather with gold-embossed name, title, and dedication. Students will bind three books by the week’s end, time permitting. All skill levels are welcome. Sasso will teach Intermediate Book Repair at the venue the week of September 8-14 and Paper Marbling from October 6-12. John C. Campbell Folk School, One Folk School Road, Brasstown. For details, call 1-800-FOLK-SCH or see folkschool.org.
Dea Sasso, Light of Day Bindery, West Asheville, deasasso.com. Call 413-537-2061 or email info@deasasso.com for updates about Light of Day events.