Most of what we publish leaves the printer as a finished paperback, ready to ship. Our fine editions do not. They leave the printer as loose, unbound pages, and from there they go to a bindery in the Pacific Northwest run by one person: Nate McCall, of McCall Co. Bindery and Book Arts, in Poulsbo, Washington, who restores, rebinds, and hand builds books for collectors, libraries, and presses, ours included.
Who Nate McCall Is
McCall spends his days at something close to the opposite end of the publishing timeline from where a poem starts. Long after a manuscript has been written, edited, and typeset, McCall takes the printed pages and turns them into an object meant to survive for generations rather than a season. We spoke with him at length for our Substack, in a conversation called Bound Voices, number four, about what draws him to the craft and how he thinks about the materials he works with. This piece pulls that conversation into the main library, since it belongs alongside the rest of what we have written about what a fine edition actually is.
Why Hand Binding Still Matters
It would be easy to treat hand binding as pure nostalgia, a decorative flourish added to a book that would function perfectly well as a machine bound paperback. McCall's own view, as he described it in that conversation, is closer to the opposite: that a book is not a relic to be preserved behind glass, it is a ritual object, meant to be held and used, and that the choice of material and method shapes how a reader actually experiences the text inside it. A hand sewn binding opens differently than a glued one. It lies flatter, it survives being opened and closed thousands of times without cracking, and it ages in a way that machine binding generally does not, softening and settling rather than simply wearing out.
The book is not a relic. It is a ritual, and the choice of material shapes how a reader actually experiences what is inside it.
What a Fine Edition Actually Involves
A fine edition from McCall Bindery starts the same way any book does, as flat, printed sheets, but from there almost every step is done by hand rather than by machine. Sheets are folded and gathered into sections, sewn together along the spine rather than glued, and the spine itself is built up and shaped before the cover boards are attached. The materials, the binding cloth or leather, the endpapers, the thread, are chosen for a specific title rather than pulled from a single standard stock, which is part of why no two presses' fine editions look quite alike even when the underlying process is similar. For a title like Sesquipedalian Rain Chant, this has meant a small run, three to five copies, each one built individually rather than produced on a line.
What Makes It Worth the Price
We have written elsewhere about what makes a limited edition book worth collecting, and hand binding is one of the clearest, most literal answers to that question. A machine can bind several hundred paperbacks in the time it takes McCall to complete a single fine edition. That difference in time is not inefficiency. It is the entire value proposition. When you buy or receive a hand bound fine edition, you are not paying for the paper and thread as raw materials. You are paying for the hours of a single craftsperson's attention, applied to one object, which is a genuinely different thing from a book that came off a press by the thousand.
Seeing One for Yourself
Our fine editions are not sold through the store. They are placed as gifts with the press's sustaining supporters, through our donation page, for supporters giving at that level. If you want to see what one actually looks like up close before deciding whether that is a level of support that makes sense for you, the images on our fine art book page show a fine edition of Sesquipedalian Rain Chant in detail. McCall's own account of the process, in his own words, is still the fullest version of this story, and it lives on our Substack rather than here, which felt worth fixing.
