The Binding Brothers

I really enjoy making books, it is an easy process that is very difficult to do well. There is something about taking the raw materials needed, binders board, paper, thread, your tools, and mixing it all together to yield a book. A blank book is a powerful object, it inspires some, scares others, intrigues, confesses, and remembers what ever you want it to.

I knew I would want to take a lot of pictures when I arrived in Chile, but I didn`t think I would want to start making books. Upon arrival I had almost forgot I knew how, but that soon changed. I think it was because I wanted to find a good sketch book and wasn`t quite happy with the options. It is easy to find a nice calendar, one that is well put together with a design to top it off, but finding a blank book is a different matter in Chile.

I looked around in some of the liberias, the stores that contain office supplies and a few supplies for art. It lacked a lot of the essentials: glue, binders board, thread, tools, to name a few. I knew that there had to be some where that had a better selection. About a week later I was having a conversation with Keka, the daughter of Angelica and PePe (my host family) at a going away party. She told me she used to work at a store that made notebooks and calendars, but not bound books. She asked her husband, Diego, about where I might be able to find some supplies, he looked in a phone book and found a business Diwehr that looked like it had everything I needed.

When I finally made time about five days later and got on my bike to scout out the store, it was fairly hot and around midday. I jumped on my bike and started riding in the direction of Arturo Pratt, which was about 20 blocks away. I meandered the the pedestrian and auto traffic, stopping to look at a large cathedral that I passed. It was a busy part of town just south of the centro. The neighborhood of the binding store was a neighborhood full of stores containing all sorts of materials, paints, car parts, shoe repair. sewing stores, fabric stores, anything you would need to make something else seemed to be in the area.

I got to the store Diwehr and thought that maybe it was out of business. The window were shut, the covers for them had graffiti all over them and the inside looked pretty empty. I made my way in and found that it was open, but that the store was a bit chaotic. There were several stacks of different kinds of paper, and my eyes caught a stack of binders board. I started talking with one of the guys working, trying best to describer in Spanish what I was looking for. I got to talking with the two and learned a little about Diwehr.

Their grandfather had immigrated to Chile after WWI, the only member of the family that did so. He was a bookbinder and eventually opened up a store in Santiago, now, three generations later his two grandchildren; Roldofo, and Roberto, were running the show. They have been making books since they were born, or so they say. I looked at a couple of books that were lying around and saw that they weren`t joking, they make important books, books for graduations, or for government offices to commemorate something.

I was able to get almost everything I needed, including a bone folder, which in the US can cost quite a bit of money (dick blick I think its like twenty to thirty dollars) in Chile, 1000 pesos, or about a dollar fifty. Not only that, but they told me the words for the materials and tools in Spanish and what items they didn`t they told me where to go, even printing a map off the internet and marking where the stores were and what I would find there.

So I went home feeling enthralled, some many times I had set out to look for something in Chile and hadn`t found it. Everything is rearranged differently and searching for something, especially something as specific as bookbinding materials can be a frustrating experience. Not this time, I was able to make my first book last night, I'm a bit rusty, but I got plenty of time to work that out......