A Creator of Books Carries On Skills Bound to the Past

Construction worker Russell Putnam turned a new page in his life the day he turned 30.

Putnam, of Hollywood, is an aspiring poet. And for his birthday his wife presented him a book of his poems.

Lynda Putnam is a homemaker and mother of a 10-month-old, not a book publisher. Like thousands of others in Los Angeles, when she decided to print a book of her husband’s poetry, she went to see Mariana Blau.

Blau is among the last of a kind--a bookbinder who stitches pages together and creates book covers by hand. It’s an Old World craft that automation has all but nudged aside. Blau has toiled in her tidy South Broadway shop at the edge of the downtown garment district for a quarter-century.

Her work ranges from matchbook-size miniature books that you can lose in your shirt pocket if you are not careful to 2 1/2-foot-wide editions that almost require two people to open and close.

Everything is done by hand at her bindery. Book cover fabrics are individually selected and glued to a hard cardboard backing. Titles are stamped from heavy lead type that is set letter by letter. Pages that customers have had printed elsewhere are sewn together and trimmed, one book at a time.

Blau and her four employees can set up their own hand assembly line and produce up to 5,000 copies of a book if a customer needs that many.

But most of her work is smaller-scale. And just as demanding.

Professional photographers, for instance, may need only a few dozen copies of their printed portfolios to circulate among a small group of local agents and agencies.

“Every one of them wants something different. I’ve been asked to do covers out of aluminum, wood, Japanese silk,” Blau said. “You have to sit down and figure out how you can make it so it’s not going to fall apart.”

Especially fancy books with custom-made matching cover boxes can cost up to $1,500 each. Most jobs run about $65 per book, however.

Blau binds about 1,000 single-copy books a year, in addition to larger orders. Publishers come in with limited edition books and lawyers with legal documents. Families come in to have Bibles restored or scrapbooks or personal memoirs bound.

“Lots of times customers want to tell me the whole story of the book,” she said. “Sometimes we’ll spend an hour talking.

If computerized production lines have spelled the end of other custom book binderies, the Computer Age has been a boon to Blau. Start-up Internet firms hire her to bind elaborate prospectuses to be sent to potential investors.

Blau said a recent customer did not blink when she told him that the 20 copies of a fancy prospectus she had bound would cost him $639.

“He told me that those 20 copies were going to make him $80 million.”

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Born in Romania, Mariana Blau found herself bound to binding by accident when she moved to to Los Angeles 25 years ago.

She had been introduced to Hungarian immigrant Bela Blau by relatives and the two had hit it off and married--despite the fact that he was 38 years older.

Bela Blau had been a printer in Hungary until he was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp during World War II. He had restarted his business after the war, only to lose it again when Communists took over Hungary.

After fleeing to the United States in 1956, he went to work for a Los Angeles bookbinding company. Several years later he opened his own custom binding company and named it A-1 Bookbinding to win the lead spot in the telephone directory.

When he and Mariana married, he told her she could either stay at their Santa Monica home as a housewife or come to work in his shop. She picked the shop.

‘I didn’t know what I was getting into,” she admits now. “He was a perfectionist. He made me do things over and over until I got it right.

“I probably didn’t realize it at the time, but he was looking ahead, looking for someone to take over the business. Bookbinding was his life.”

For fun, Bela Blau produced miniature books, matchbook-size volumes prized by some collectors. His wife soon became expert at the tedious job of binding them too.

When her husband died at the age of 78 in 1993, she bound a miniature 32-page embossed leather book filled with tributes to him.

These days, the memory of her husband is a major reason why Blau, 48, keeps working.

When Blau retires, her Old World binding style may go with her, publishing experts say.

“It’s a lost art, really,” said Msgr. Francis J. Weber, director of the San Fernando Mission who is also a historian and a miniature-book specialist who has used Blau’s binding services.

“You can buy a machine today to do almost anything. But there’s a glory in making a book the old way. There won’t be anybody succeeding her.”

Patrick Reagh, a Sebastopol, Calif., letter press printer whose limited edition books have been bound by Blau for years, praised her work.

But hers is a dying craft. “It’s getting harder and harder to find hand binders now,” he said.

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Lynda Putnam agrees with that. When she set out last month to have her husband’s poems bound into a book, her neighborhood copy shop could not do it. None of the bookbinding companies she initially called were interested in producing just one copy.

Mariana Blau was different. She proudly showed Putnam through her shop and outlined the bookbinding process. She explained the best type of paper to have the poems printed on and told Putnam how to properly calculate the margins needed for the finished text.

Blau held Putnam’s son, 10-month-old Max, while she selected the navy blue leather for the book cover and the title typeface that would be stamped across its front in gold leaf.

The 100-page “Sweet Beat Rhyme Spinner” contains 72 of Russell Putnam’s poems. Compiled over the last 15 years, the collection deals with such subjects as romance, war, politics and homelessness.

Putnam said he was stunned when he unwrapped the book in front of friends at his birthday party. “I didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. I couldn’t,” he said.

With his book in hand, Putnam now has no trouble proving to fellow carpenters and other tradesmen at the Torrance grocery store construction site where he works that he can pound out verse as easily as he pounds nails.

“I’m eager now to go to poetry readings and open up a book instead of holding up a piece of paper with the poem written on it,” Putnam said.

For a poet, a bound copy of his work can speak volumes.

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‘Lots of times customers want to tell me the whole story of the book.’