"Dressing books in leather"

Holding a copy of *The Mystic East* in my hands, I assumed this exquisitely crafted parchment-covered book was made abroad. Therefore, I was very surprised when Tran Trung Hieu revealed that he was the one who bound the cover. At that moment, I understood why, in the world of book collectors, this young man born in 1998 has become so well-known in recent years despite his young age.

A workspace of Tran Trung Hieu.

The journey of self-learning a trade.

To learn more, I visited the Biennales Mondiales de la Reliure d'Art ( World Exhibitions of Bookbinding Art) website, where Hieu mentioned he had submitted a book to the competition in October 2024. It was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's famous Vol de nuit (Night Flight). Hieu recalled that it took him over two months to complete the entry and send it to the Biennales Mondiales de la Reliure d'Art in France. He hoped his book would pique the judges' interest in Vietnamese bookbinding.

The Biennales Mondiales de la Reliure d'Art then described Hieu's book as follows: "Congratulations to Tran Trung Hieu, from Hanoi (Vietnam), for receiving the Coup de Coeur des Biennales award at the 17th Biennales Mondiales de la Reliure d'Art."

The book's cover is entirely leather-bound, using Prussian blue goatskin, stitched with hemp cord. The edges are painted and sprinkled with gold. The top and bottom are stitched with silk thread. I was inspired by the image of pilots thousands of kilometers above the ground. No matter how beautiful the sky and clouds are, they remain lonely, vulnerable, and battling the darkness.”

Interestingly, unlike some people who usually start by repairing and mending books before moving on to bookbinding, Hieu came to this profession entirely through self-study. Furthermore, he changed course after studying Interior Design at the University of Industrial Fine Arts because he felt it wasn't a good fit for him.

Hieu said that his time in university wasn't entirely disappointing or meaningless. He met some great friends, and one of them introduced him to the bookbinding industry by making notebooks. Back then, students used sketchbooks a lot, and sometimes notebooks bought from art supply stores were quite expensive and often not up to par. To save money and to have a notebook that was special to him, Hieu started learning how to make notebooks himself.

Notebooks were produced one after another, but wanting to make them more beautiful and better, Hieu began seeking out professional bookbinding channels, such as Mie H. Radcliffe's Bookbinder's Chronicle, to learn how to sew and leather-cut. However, what truly made him want to pursue this profession professionally was after watching another video on YouTube, a documentary about the bookbinding workshop of John Newman & Son in Dublin, Ireland. Thanks to that, he saw how a professional bookbinding workshop operates, the tools he had never seen before, the terminology he had never heard – everything was so new and beautiful.

After that, Hieu tried to find documents about bookbinding. He even wanted to learn another foreign language besides English, such as French, to access more resources. According to him, the difficulty at that time was that Vietnam did not yet have a bookbinding industry, lacking professional bookbinders and tools and machinery. Regarding small tools for working with paper, cover, leather, measuring, decorating, and gilding, besides ordering them from abroad, his father, a former carpenter, made him machines such as vertical presses, table presses, horizontal presses, decorative presses, and sewing tables…

And in his mind, he told himself he needed to continue improving his skills and knowledge of bookbinding. He even set a goal to acquire all the knowledge about the bookbinding industry, try to obtain an international "Master Bookbinder" certification, and then bring this art form back to Vietnam.

Live with your passion.

In his book *The Joys of Book Collecting*, Vietnamese cultural figure, scholar, and antique collector Vuong Hong Sen likened bookbinders to artists in the West, saying, "Book covers are to books what clothing and jewelry are to women." Indeed, in France, bookbinders like Marius Michel and Pierre Legrain are as famous as painters and sculptors.

Hieu doesn't dream of one day being known as the bookbinders of France (Le Gascon, Jean Grolier, Antoine Michel Padeloup, Marius Michel) or England (Roger Payne, Samuel Mearne, William Morris, Cobden Sanderson), but he has pursued and continues to pursue Western bookbinding styles and techniques. In fact, he sees the opportunity to admire the works of ancient artisans – those who pioneered their time, possessed the best techniques, and had the finest aesthetic sense, leaving behind works that served as standards for their time – as a motivation and inspiration for him to improve his bookbinding techniques.

Thanks to this, from his first book, "Mirror of Customs" (special edition, 2020), Hieu has completed hundreds of books for bookstores and collectors. However, his most special and honorable memory is probably binding two music notebooks of composer Pham Tuyen, as a gift to celebrate his 93rd birthday in 2023.

According to Hieu, these two notebooks were meticulously filled with all the songs that musician Pham Tuyen had composed nearly 60 years ago. Coincidentally, the musician's daughter knew him and contacted him to have the two notebooks restored to their best condition, so that the family could store and use them.

Currently, and indeed for the past few years, Hieu has been associated with Papelytinta-Sao Bac Bookbinding (Hanoi), a place that proudly boasts being one of the few bookbinding workshops in Vietnam that uses traditional techniques and materials in the industry. Notably, Papelytinta-Sao Bac Bookbinding always aims to provide readers with books that are completely sewn and bound using traditional European methods, which perfectly aligns with Hieu's aspirations.

Thanks to bookbinding, Tran Trung Hieu has achieved almost everything he desired in his career, and I am very impressed with Hieu's thinking that bookbinding is a synthesis of the ABCs of what he loves: Art, Book, and Crafts. He has a profession that can satisfy his creative needs, manual labor, and intellectual labor because there is so much knowledge to learn.

It's no surprise that Hieu revealed he's choosing to start from the basics: learning bookbinding at Papelytinta-Sao Bac Bookbinding. There, alongside brand-new book covers, he now interacts daily with books that are faded, have broken spines, and yellowed pages due to time. Touching them, he realizes that the lifespan of a book is much longer than the process of creating a beautiful cover. Bookbinding gives a book a new look, while bookbinding keeps the knowledge and memories within the book alive.

And so, Trung Hieu's apprenticeship journey seems to return to its starting point: becoming a patient apprentice amidst the smell of old paper and the gentle sound of turning pages. For him, making leather covers is not just about making books more beautiful, but also about ensuring they can pass through generations.

MANH HAO

Source: https://nhandan.vn/mac-ao-da-cho-nhung-cuon-sach-post956728.html