Dominic's Gallery

Full black goatskin binding with inlays of sanded leather with additional gold leaf, and gold tooling.

This book depicts artifacts that survived the Great Fire of 1666. My binding shows the original City on fire, with the modern skyline and all the fabulous buildings that have emerged since then. The inside shows the two greatest domes in the City, one from then, one from now: Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s, and Norman Foster’s Gherkin

Full brown goatskin binding with vellum inlay, acrylic paint, and gold tooling.

In the madness of a lightning storm, the electrical power is channeled through the discs that are put on the monster’s head to rejuvenate the body. The title is tooled across the discs, as well as the lines of electricity between them. The tooling on the doublures is the forked lightening, in the same shape as the discs. The discs are made from vellum, which best represents the look of human flesh.

Bound in orange goatskin with blind and silver tooling.

The binding is a physical manifestation of the Old Medicine House: the orange plaster and the brown beams. The title ‘Treacle Walker’ is tooled as little stars across the cover with glow-in-the-dark foil, augmented with ordinary silver dots so that the actual letters are obscured, and can only be read in the dark after exposure to a bright light. The book begins and ends with these words: ‘Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags!

Donkey stone’. 48 characters. Because of the mirror theme that is part of the story, I tooled these words, backwards, on the inside of the front and back covers because any mark you make here will be off-set in reverse, but right-reading, on the soft suede flyleaves. 

Box construction: covered in multi-coloured goatskin with feathered onlays and gold tooling. 

This is an extraordinary book by Kitty Maryatt, a facsimile of the famous book from 1913 by Blaise Cendras and Sonia Delaunay. The binding celebrates the colourful shapes in the pochchoir. It is bound in the ‘Paul Bonet’ format – a tribute the great French artist. Twenty three binders from around the world created a special binding for the book, which together became a superb travelling exhibition. 

Bound in dark green Harmatan goatskin, gold tooling.

This is a marvelous book printed by the famous Grabhorn Press to celebrate the building of the Bay Bridge. It was a joy to work on: my design came from a simple sketch I made of some of the buildings referred to in the book: the Palace of Fine Arts, the ‘Painted Ladies’, the Coit Tower, City Hall and the Ferry Building. And towering above them all, the new Bridge. The tooling is done partly with my adapted finishing tool (known as the ‘Dominic tool’) which allows for a more free-form approach to applying gold to leather.

Bound in Harmatan and Hewitt’s goatskin. Vellum inlays and gold tooling.

After winning the Sir Paul Getty award in 2013, I was asked by the family to create a special guest book for their yacht, Talitha. This was a very exciting project: I got to go to Barcelona to see the boat, and make sketches. The resulting binding, I hope, looks like a piece of fine furniture in a gentleman’s club. Ten years on, the book was full, and so, round two. The 2024 binding is very different, covered in the Tudor style — overlapping strips of leather — which here depicts, what else, but the waves of the sea that Talitha majestically rides upon.

Bound in grey Harmatan goatskin with addition red onlays and silver tooling.

Another of my Booker bindings. This is a haunting tale of four brothers who play down at the forbidden river. A mad soothsayer prophesizes that the elder brother will be murdered his younger one and that the river will run red with blood. It does, but with the blood of the soothsayer that the boys murder for his prophecy. The overlapping strips are the river, the additional strips the blood, and the tooled silver dots the reflection of the moonlight on the water.

Extracted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Old Style Press, 2003

Woodcuts by Chris Nurse

Bound in overlapping strips of black goatskin, with inlays of layered and sanded brown and black leather. Inlay of the moon made from sanded white and blue leather. Silver tooling.

The rude mechanicals gather in the forest to rehearse their play. One actor plays the wall through which the lovers speak (this is the spine of the book, dividing the two worlds of Pyramus and Thisbe). Another plays the moon, and another the chink in the wall (this is represented on the box of the book). Finally, the lovers themselves have their names ‘forever writ among the stars’. I have tooled their names in such a way that you should only be able to make them out faintly.

Bound in light brown Harmatan goatskin with multi-coloured feathered onlays and gold tooling.

Two ravens nesting in an oak tree are killed when the tree is felled. Thus begins the earliest known book of natural history. Gilbert White studied everything in his environment and I have tried to do the same with this design: wildlife, trees, rocks, leaves and even fossils are all coming together in a giant collage. 

Bound in pink Hewitt’s goatskin with multi-coloured onlays and gold tooling.

This binding was my first big commission. The owner of this book works in the oil industry so I decided to make the Emerald City an actual oil refinery, with gas flares instead of flags, pipes instead of turrets etc. I like to use puzzles and visual puns in my binding, so if you search you can find Dorothy and Toto being attacked by the trees in the forest, the Lion triumphant in his forest and the Wicked Witch in hers. The Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the rainbow are on the inside.

Bound in Harmatan and Hewitt’s goatskin in the Tudor style. Silver tooling

A very simple binding on a theme. I was living in the Lake District at the time, where it rains all the time. So the binding captures the heavy Lakeland downpours which blurred my view of the Fells. The overlapping strips of leather were a perfect way of representing the rain, especially when the additional strips and tooled dots were added after the book was bound.

Bound in dark blue Harmatan goatskin with light and medium brown onlays and gold tooling.

This was bound for a Designer Bookbinders group show: we were all given two copies and asked to produce different, but matched, bindings. Kyffin Williams was a great Welsh artist who illustrated many books for Gregynog. I produced abstract shapes taken from his artwork, and added my own gold flourishes. I like the tension created by overlapping the gold onto the leather onlays. The lines were tooled in opposite directions, so that the gold really shimmers.

Bound in medium and dark brown Harmatan goatskin with light brown feathered onlays and gold tooling.

This is the only binding I have made where I didn’t read the book. The imagery of the Great War is so bold and obvious — almost clichéd — that I decided the only approach was to tackle it head on. So trenches, barbed wire and helmets represent the death. The barbed wire is liberated from the trenches into the sky (the uncut wire being one of the causes of the carnage) and references the legend of the Angel of Mons, the mass hallucination. The little tool is both the ladders and the machine guns’ magazines of bullets, and the helmets are feathered so thin that they are broken.

Bound in purple Harmatan goatskin with multi-coloured leather onlays and gold tooling.

This is a charming little alphabestiary with illustrations by Enid Marx. I had great fun inventing my own birds and beasts to create a colourful, playful design. It was a welcome relief from the grim task of binding The Somme, which was made at the same time for the DB competition.

Bound in pink Hewitt’s goatskin with multi-coloured feathered onlays and gold tooling.

Elizabeth David introduced simple cookery with good ingredients in the UK, after spending the war years in France, Greece and Italy. My binding depicts the Mediterranean, simplified and stretched. The green of the northern part is contrasted with the more sandy south. The gold dotted lines are some of the journeys she describes in the book, with the small circles being provincial towns, the larger one capital cities. 

Bound in multi-coloured goatskin. Sanded, with additional onlays and gold tooling.

This is my first binding commissioned by Neale Albert, the great collector of miniature books. They are very difficult to make because of their small size. The design is playful and abstract, but you should be able to make out in the collage of shapes and colours, the figures of the owl and the cat as they tumble across the sea in their beautiful pea-green boat. The inside suggests the sails of their little craft blowing in the wind.