About the Film

Binding the Bard is a bookbinding documentary film made for Palace Green Library at Durham University, following judge Dominic Riley as he demonstrates the craft of bookbinding in his studio in Sandiway, near Northwich, and then introduces the entries to an international design binding competition. The competition, held in 2024 and 2025 as part of Durham University’s Shakespeare Recovered research project, invited bookbinders from around the world to submit proposals for how they would bind a modern facsimile reproduction of the Durham copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio. The winning submission was commissioned as a design binding and added to the Palace Green Library collection.

The film opens in the studio, where Dominic works slowly and methodically through the stages of creating a binding — paring leather, sewing on cords, working the spine — before the film moves to Palace Green Library and the judging of the competition entries. Stuart Hunt, Director of University Library and Collections at Durham University, introduces the range and quality of what the competition produced. The panel of judges included Sir Gregory Doran, Artistic Director Emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Professor Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford.

This bookbinding documentary film sits alongside Alan Fentiman’s series of films about printmakers and artists at work — a record of a craft practised with patience, skill and deep knowledge of materials.

In the Studio

The first part of the film was shot over two days in Dominic’s studio in Sandiway — a working bindery filled with the accumulated tools, presses, boards and materials of a practice spanning more than thirty years. Dominic trained at the London College of Printing and has since created around a hundred design bindings held in collections including the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bodleian in Oxford and the Grolier Club in New York. He has won over thirty prizes for his work, including first prize in the Designer Bookbinders’ International Competition in 2013.

Filming in the studio meant working slowly and close to the work: extreme close-ups of hands paring leather with a knife, cords arranged on a sewing frame, thread pulled through the spine of a gathering. The pace of the filming follows the pace of the craft itself — patient, deliberate, attentive to each stage. Dominic talked throughout, moving between demonstration and reflection with the ease of someone for whom bookbinding has long been, in his own words, in his heart as much as his hands.

“Our job, our responsibility, is to finish off the book by creating the first thing that you see when the curtain comes up. So it’s a big deal. It’s the first impression.” — Dominic Riley

The Craft and the Art

One of the things Dominic talked about at length during the studio days was the relationship between craft and art in bookbinding — between technical mastery and the creative decisions that sit above it. His view is that a design binding should respond to the work it contains without illustrating it too literally: it should leave the viewer something to do, just as a good play leaves the audience something to feel. He drew the parallel with theatre directly, describing the binder’s role as analogous to an actor’s: trust the craft, trust the material, and let the response come from that rather than forcing it.

The anecdote he told about his teacher at the London College of Printing — a quiet, fatherly man who paused at Dominic’s bench and told him to wait until bookbinding was not just in his blood but in his heart — was the kind of moment that only surfaces in a long day of filming, when the conversation has had time to settle into something more reflective. It is one of the most quietly affecting moments in the film.

“I feel like bookbinding is in my blood. And he said, wait till it’s in your heart. And I had to look away because I got choked up.” — Dominic Riley

The Competition at Palace Green Library

The second part of the film moves to Palace Green Library in Durham, where the competition entries were laid out for judging. Durham’s First Folio has a particular history: it was stolen in 1998, returned damaged, and subsequently disbound as part of a conservation project. The competition asked how the modern world might rebind it — not just any First Folio, but this one, with its specific losses and recoveries. Entries arrived from Spain, Italy, the United States, Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom, each taking a dramatically different approach to materials, structure and design.

Dominic served as one of the judges alongside Stuart Hunt, Sir Gregory Doran and Professor Emma Smith. Stuart Hunt speaks in the film about the range of what the entries demonstrated — not just at a surface level but in the techniques visible on close examination of the spines, covers and boards. The winning binding, by César Fariza-Navarro of Spain, was delivered to Durham University in February 2026 and now sits in the Palace Green Library collection alongside the actual Durham copy.

“It’s appropriate that a new binding to a folio reflects the contemporary time in which we find ourselves, but also looks back to Shakespeare himself — and also as the plays are performed today. It’s a really interesting juxtaposition between Shakespeare as a historical playwright and also as a living set of plays which are performed and will continue to be performed.” — Stuart Hunt, Director of University Library and Collections, Durham University

Filming Dominic Riley

Two days in a bookbinder’s studio is a particular kind of filming experience. The work is quiet, precise and largely done at a bench. There is no performance for the camera, no moment of reveal or crescendo — just the steady accumulation of stages, each one dependent on the last, the book gradually becoming itself under hands that know exactly what they are doing.

Dominic was generous with his time and his thinking, moving easily between demonstration and conversation, between the technical and the philosophical. He has been teaching bookbinding for decades and speaks about the craft with the kind of ease and precision that only comes from knowing something very deeply. The bookbinding documentary film tries to hold both sides of that: the hands at work and the mind behind them.