Threads that bind: how Percy So is keeping the art of bookbinding alive

Five flights up a faded tenement building in Causeway Bay, you’ll find a quiet workshop tended by an individual with a particularly rare skillset Percy So  has cornered a niche market making and repairing books – one of very few who practise the trade in Asia.

The quiet, painstaking, manual nature of her work is at odds with the designer shops, giant video screens and bustling streets of one of Hong Kong’s busiest districts outside her artistic garret. Although each of her clients has their own unique story and reasons for preserving something tangible, there’s a running thread: “All my customers have one thing in common: they really love books,” she says.

The techniques of So’s craft are time-honoured, and many of her tools have been inherited from former artisans. “Most of my equipment is quite old and was definitely built to last,” she says, guiding me around her workshop and introducing the machines of her trade. 

The largest is a guillotine, which is used to cut paper in stacks and was bought from a retired Australian bookbinder, who, in turn, had bought it from a printing shop where it’d lived for 40 years.

She also has various presses: a laying press and a nipping press, both from England, and there are two finishing presses she uses to clamp books when cleaning and titling the spine during restoration. One was hand-made by Louis Kwok, a master Singaporean woodworker, now based in Taiwan.

Finally, there’s a sewing frame. “A gift from my brother and sister-in-law in the US – that’s the one thing that was new.”

So’s working life has not always been so hands-on. She grew up in Hong Kong, attended boarding school in the UK, and then went to Carleton College in Minnesota, US, where she majored in studio art before returning to her home city to begin a career in the finance industry.

However, having studied art, she couldn’t shake the sense that she was square peg in a round hole. She’d been inspired by a visiting lecturer at Carleton, who had taught papermaking and book arts, a memory that led her back to the US in 2010 to attend a beginner’s course at the American Academy of Bookbinding in Michigan. This two-week trip was all it took to realise she’d found her métier. 

“I knew then and there that I’d found my passion and purpose, so I quit my regular job, set up my studio and haven’t looked back,” she says.

Much of the work that So takes on comes with some sort of personal story attached – stories that stay with her, such as the one client who was researching his family tree. He wanted to restore some books that his great-great-grandfather had written, including the first English-Chinese dictionary that was published in the US. 

Another man wanted to bind a book of 30 poems that he’d written to give to his wife as a birthday present. “I read the poems and tears came to my eyes, as they were all beautifully written and about his love for her. I got to know him quite well, and he subsequently wrote a poem for me about my studio and my craft. When he gave the book to his wife, she burst into tears and later emailed me and thanked me for my work.”

So is also keen to share her skills with others, hosting bookbinding workshops for youngsters, their grandparents and anyone in between. She also has protégés who come each week to work on more technical and intensive projects like fine binding and restoration. 

“Essentially, it appeals to anyone who loves books and working with their hands, no matter how old they are,” says So.

In her beginner’s workshop, made up of four three-hour sessions, students learn to bind one book each session, starting with simple three-hole pamphlet stitch-and-stab bindings and progressing to more advanced techniques like stitch leather binding, and Coptic binding, which dates back to the 2nd century CE. 

Since So began binding books, she has watched as her historic trade become popularised via social media, driven in part by the younger bibliophiles of BookTok, the TikTok genre credited with boosting sales for the publishing industry. “At first, I was shy about telling people I’m a bookbinder, but more recently there’s been a surge of interest, and I’ve had some incredible commissions,” she says.

So’s mentor, the former director of the American Academy of Bookbinding Monique Lallier, continues to work in her 80s. Briton Bernard Middleton – known in the trade as The Great Man – was still bookbinding until the day he died in 2019 aged 94. And So herself has no plans to quit any time soon.

She’s glad to have found a path that fulfils her – not least because there’s always something new to learn and new projects to start. “I have always wanted to make my own paper, typeset and print it and do paper cuttings as the illustration, and then bind it into a book,” she says. “If you love what you do, then it’s not really work.”