Bound to Please: The Custom Bookbindings of Don Etherington and Monique Lallier

November 15-December 22, 2010, Monday-Friday, 8-5 p.m.: “Bound to Please: The Custom Bookbindings of Don Etherington & Monique Lallier.” Martha Blakeney Hodges Reading Room, Jackson Library, 2nd Floor. The exhibit opens with a talk by the bookbinders at 4 p.m. on Monday November 15.

Don Etherington and Monique Lallier are two of the world’s most respected and honored bookbinders. Born in England and Montreal, respectively, they have undertaken projects for clients around the globe, and they have spent much of their careers teaching others the art and craft of what they do. They now live in Summerfield, a short drive from the UNCG campus, where Don’s reference library and papers are in the Special Collections of the University’s Library.

From November 15 through December 22, some of their custom bindings will be on display in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Reading Room on the second floor of UNCG’s Jackson Library. On opening day, Monday, November 15, at 4 p.m. they will talk about their careers and their bindings. The talk is free and open to the public. A reception will follow, and copies of Don’s autobiography, A Sixty-year Odyssey in Bookbinding and Conservation, will be offered for sale.

Don Etherington began bookbinding at the age of thirteen as a student at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and later went on to study bookbinding and design at the London School of Printing. Since then, he has held positions at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, The Library of Congress, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Information Conservation, Inc., and now Etherington Conservations Services in Browns Summit. . In 1982, he co-authored with Matt Roberts Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, the first comprehensive attempt to compile terminology from all the bookmaking and conservation fields.

Monique Lallier began her studies in the 1960s in Montreal at Cotnoir Cappone School of Fashion & L'Art de la Reliure book binding school with Simone B. Roy. She continued on to Paris, with Roger Arnoult, Centro Del Bel Libro in Ascona, with Edwin Heim and Solothurn, Switzerland with Hugo Peller. She has won many awards for her bindings, and is the former Director of the American Academy of Bookbinding. Her work has been exhibited widely in such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in the U.S., and at the Bibliotheque Nationales in both Paris and Montreal. Collections of her bindings may be found in the private library of Pope John Paul II, McGill University, LSU, and UNCG, as well as in public and private collections in the USA, Canada, Europe and Japan.