ABOUT ME
Important Update 11/07/24
Back in the workshop!!!!!
I am back in the workshop this week!! A huge thank you again to everyone who has been so patient over the last six months whilst I've been severely hampered by an old hand injury. Its now thankfully fully healed and I am using the next couple of week to ship any outstanding orders, catch up on all my missed correspondence, and get my custom calendar back into some semblance of order. I have also added a new SIGNED VOLUMES section to the website featuring some very nice limited edition and slipcased books. I will be adding to it weekly coming into Christmas so keep an eye peeled.
During my time away from the workshop I've been making some changes to the way I will be handling custom orders in the future so please stand by for some updates there over the next month. With so many custom projects underway in partnership with various collectors, I really want to try and focus my time into that area now that the website is well established and flourishing. Once again, my sincerest thanks for all the patience and support over the past months.
Joshua
The Casemaker
Welcome to my bio page. I hope you enjoy your visit and please use the contact form at the bottom of the page for any inquiries about placing a custom order or general questions. The link below is to a specific reference relative to PERMISSIONS & COPYRIGHT which you can also find in the menu at the bottom of each page.
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Books have been a large part of my life since I first purchased a paperback copy of Henry Treece's Viking's Dawn as an 11 year old. Since then I have been at various points in my life a book reader, a book seller, a book collector - and finally - a book protector. Some of my earliest memories are relative to the books I remember reading, and in particular the art on the dust jackets. I come from a background which includes a couple of history degrees, along with a short lived attempt at commission and gallery artwork in my younger years - predominantly graphite and pencil portraiture - followed by a schooling in high quality joinery and cabinetmaking. Combine all that with a love of books, and you've got a skill set perfectly suited to making beautiful slipcases with an eye to detail....
Most memorable project/slipcase to date -. I've undertaken quite a number of interesting projects over the last few years, and certainly too many to list here. Though to be fair every custom job is interesting to me because, regardless of any other consideration, I'm hopeful that by the time I am finished, due to my work and that of the collectors who purchase my cases, and the publishers/artists who provide permission, there will be literally thousands of volumes safely enclosed in beautiful boxes that will now make it to the next generations and beyond. I am always hopeful with every project and every new case that somewhere down the track in a few hundred years they will still be there for the pleasure of others in some anonymous collection, museum or rare book room.
The Stephen King cases I enjoy at all levels and for many different reasons. I know and have met so many King collectors recently, and I also send some of those King cases overseas. I'm never able to really determine if its the artwork for those jackets, the lettering, or just the fact that so many of those books form such a large part of my teenage reading years that I find them so enjoyable to make. Every time I do a case for The Shining, I see it again on a bookshelf in my fathers workshop, my mother refusing to even have it in the house after being traumatized by Kubrick's movie. I find the art on book jackets the equivalent of smell when it comes to bringing an unexpected memory to the surface.
I'm currently working with a longtime customer to create a complete set of slipcases for the full Pulitzer Prize Fiction canon. An ongoing process of period jacket art and wonderful snippets of obscure publishing history. Princeton University Library's Rare Book Room will also be receiving some of my cases in the near future.
I also really enjoy creating sets of slipcases for complete series. Chris Paolini's Inheritance Cycle and George R. R. Martin's Game Of Thrones books in the first printing UK issue have become recent favorites. A giant custom case for a copy of Carl Jung's Red Book which was almost two feet tall and five inches wide was another one I won't forget in a while.
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Favorite Slipcase - Difficult. It would probably have to be The Stand with jacket artwork by John Cayea, in the original Doubleday issue from 1978. The Gunslinger Grant 1st Edition artwork by Michael Wheelan is also up there as I really like the colors, along with the depiction of the story scene and matching title lettering which beautifully captures the essence of the book. It was a stunning way to start the Dark Tower series and was followed by some equally wonderful contributions throughout by artists like Phil Hale, Dave McKean, and Bernie Wrightson.
That said, the two cavorting medieval grotesques depicted on The Stand jacket are very hard to go past. Its such a simple design, but there is just something about it that grabs your eye in the same way a Dali or an Escher does. The colors and the movement in the figures combine to give a real sense of unease before you even open the volume. I've heard and read numerous theories as to what those figures represent - Jesus fights the Bird Guy etc. - Personally I think it was executed deliberately in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, and is very much a representation of good versus evil, light interacting with dark. The eternal battle which never begins and never ends, and which is essentially the circle and nature of life. Another reason I also like it is due to the fact that the Doubleday issue Stand jacket was also the first in a decades long series of books to introduce millions of readers to the now iconic spiked Cortez like font that was used so often as the lettering for Stephen King's name and book title.
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Favorite Custom Work - I really like the early science fiction dust covers, so whenever I get to make those early Heinlein and Asimov cases its always very enjoyable. Like being in a time capsule. You'll also note from my inventory that I have a weakness for Stephen King cases.
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Influence of Dust Jackets - I think its fair to say - and authors hold your missiles - that jacket art is something that does have an influence. If it didn't, it wouldn't have become such an enduring part of the publishing process for the last hundred years. I actually feel that dust-jackets are to art, what song lyrics are to poetry - this sort of poor cousin that has a foot in the door, but isn't quite recognized for the actual genius that a lot of them really are. For example, there were many detractors at the time, but I actually think that Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize was fully deserved, despite not necessarily being a fan of his music.
Another contribution to be considered is the number of covers that have also become cultural icons in their own right. And perhaps even more so than anything you would have found hanging in an art gallery of the era. Peter Benchley's Jaws dust-jacket comes to mind. That artwork is instantly identifiable and very much entwined within the lore and imagery of the 1970's. There is nice article here about the creation and influence of such work.
I also think its fair to say based on the above, that you can't underestimate the amount of impact that the jacket art - and in particular the very recognizable proprietary font used for Stephen King's name on those early issues - has had on his overall sales figures. With that spiked style lettering that is featured again and again on his book jackets - and again, first featured on the jacket for The Stand - he was branding as a young author before others in the same boat really knew what branding was.
The publishers themselves use a brand name/logo emblazoned onto at least the book spine and title page in exactly the same fashion. A bookshelf is a big place, and there are lots of them in book shops. Anything that you can do to get that first book sold to that first reader, you're going to do. People often actually do judge a book by its cover and I think Stephen King and his people always manage to get it right. More so in fact by some distance than any other author. I don't only think he's a magnificent writer, I also think his instincts and connection - that plug in to who and what we are as human beings that shines through in his writing and makes him so readable - also shows in his decisions in the publishing world far away from his typewriter.
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I would also like to add a very large thank you to David from Betts Books, and two of my oldest customers, Richard and Mike, all of whom contributed many of the measurements not just for the Stephen King cases, but many of the Pulitzer ones as well.
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I'll be updating this page with work in progress pictures and custom projects as I go, so do check back.
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8-1-22 *Work In Progress Image* I was asked to design a slipcase for the following event - On June 8, 2022, The Hoffman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. held their annual "Pink Pages" fundraising event. As part of the event, seven well-known authors, including Stephen King, gathered to talk in-person and virtually about a particular incident in their lives. In addition to their regular admission tickets, the Center offered 100 "VIP" packages. The patron who purchased one of those packages also received the most recent book from each author, an author-signed bookplate laid into each of the seven books, and a hard stock card promoting the event. The cases pictured are specifically designed to hold the Stephen King's BILLY SUMMERS copy from that VIP group.
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3-28-23 New Workshop Space. As some of my long time customers are already aware, the last couple of years have been for us, along with many small business owners, a real challenge. Between Covid and a couple of recent deaths within the family - at least those were somewhat expected - it has been a struggle to maintain an even keel. I decided mid-way through last year to start trying to take tome to time to step away and relieve the stress a little with some hobby projects. One of the first on the list was to build a new workspace more suited to my needs and I finally managed to get it finished early this year.
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Joshua
The Casemaker
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