Linette Withers: The bookbinder born to a crafting family who creates by hand from her workshop in Leeds

“I’m very much a magpie in terms of what I do,” she says. “I find it difficult to stick to one single thread.” When we speak, Linette is at her home in Leeds, working on sewing a collection of miniature books. Her core creations are available from the Fabrication stores in Leeds and York, as well as through Wobbly Bobs Crafts in Otley, but she also produces specialised stock including for the likes of The Brontë Parsonage. "I once joked to someone that I make the museum shop gifts that I would loved to have bought when I was a child,” she says.

Linette’s own childhood was split between Wales and Sweden, where her now-separated parents first met. Both of them were crafters. Her mother, from Stockholm, was proficient in weaving, crochet and knitting; her father, a pyrographer and calligrapher ran his own craft shop, along with a wood turner. “We didn’t have a lot in terms of money growing up but we made everything,” Linette says. “We always shopped second hand, so sustainability was baked in from the start and we were constantly making. The craft centre my dad was part of was one of the first to pioneer where you could see the maker making it as well as just selling it.”

It was somewhat inevitable that Linette – and her twin sister, a cabinet maker – would end up creating with their hands. But it took a number of years before she found her passion. It began during her Master’s course in medieval studies at the University of Leeds, when she became rather taken by the idea of a girdle book, a small portable book that was worn by clergy folk of the period. The binding of such books had a loose, long tapered tail, which could be tucked into the girdle of religious outfits. “I really wanted to make a version of it, but I couldn’t find instructions on how to do it anywhere,” Linette says. Then, whilst working part-time at a haberdashery in Leeds, she came across a craft book that had some answers. “It was about making your own art journals and it featured a girdle book. I bought it, knowing full well that it wasn’t historically accurate but I thought it would be fun to at least create something that had the look of (a girdle book).”

After university, Linette then worked as a conference organiser for the Institute of Medieval Studies but she had now got a taste of bookbinding and wanted to learn more. She took a creative craft qualification in bookbinding at what was then the Leeds College of Technology. "Through work I then ended up buying a copy of a book which a lot of bookbinders will have heard of – Szirmai’s book on the archaeology of medieval bookbinding. I stared at a lot of diagrams and tried to reverse engineer them based on the modern bookbinding I’d been shown.”

Keen to do something more creative, Linette left her conference job to launch her own business, primarily creating props and costumes, as well as doing some bookbinding work. “I realised that every time I had to move my bookbinding equipment to make way for the sewing (of props and costumes), I would spend the whole time hating the sewing because I wasn’t book binding. And I really enjoy sewing so that was an interesting conclusion to come to. But when it came to making things for other people, books was definitely my passion.”

She phased out the props and costumes and used her savings to undertake a bookbinding course in Italy. “It helped me understand more of the historic context and how to accurately decipher the diagrams that I’d been staring at for so long. I’ve been building on that ever since, teaching myself but also taking the odd class with other binders around the UK.”

There’s many different techniques and skills involved in bookbinding. About 50 per cent of Linette’s time is spent sourcing and folding paper, preparing it for sewing. Then there’s the stitching itself, trimming, covering, decorative techniques like embossing and marbling, and the construction and shaping of the spine. “I have some habits that are unusual for bookbinders,” Linette says, “and one is that I tend to sew holding the book in the air rather than on the table but that’s because I work in miniatures a lot. Most of my books are A6 and smaller.”

For several years, Linette also volunteered at Leeds Library on Commercial Street in book conservation and binding – and she’s been teaching bookbinding workshops for around seven years now. “It had been so difficult to find classes that weren’t either in London or in the middle of nowhere, so I thought give back,” she says. “Almost as fast as I learn something, I try to teach that to other people.”

Having continuity of knowledge is really important, Linette says. "If we guard the knowledge too much then it’s gone. It’s nice to pass on, it’s nice to share. I’m more interested in community than competition. There would be enough private book repair work to keep binders going for hundreds of years…There’s space for everybody.”