Bookbinders

Creator: AFL-CIO

Format: 16mm

Sound: sound

Description: This film provides a detailed and reverent look at the art and industry of bookmaking in America, focusing on both traditional hand-binding techniques and modern mechanized processes. It begins by placing the craft in historical context, highlighting how writing and book production are essential to preserving human history and culture. The narration emphasizes the skill and care of bookbinders, especially those who restore antique volumes by hand, treating each book as a treasured artifact. Viewers are shown the painstaking steps involved: disassembling old books, resewing signatures, creating marbled page edges, and hand-tooling gold leaf titles onto covers. The film then transitions into the industrial era of bookmaking, showing how printing presses, folding machines, sewing stations, trimming tools, and casing-in equipment operate with precision to produce hardbound volumes efficiently. Parallel to this, workers produce spiral notebooks, ledgers, and ruled paper through mechanical rulings and binding processes that support the business and educational world. The film celebrates the balance of tradition and innovation, spotlighting skilled union labor—folders, gatherers, trimmers, liners, and casemakers—whose dedication ensures the continued transmission of knowledge through books. It ends by honoring these craftspeople as stewards of literacy and culture in modern society.