Julia is a bench trained book conservator who worked at the University of Michigan lab for almost ten years. She left U of M in 1994 to stay at home and continued to do conservation work in private practice. She also began to teach at Hollanders and from the beginning of that relationship her classes have concentrated on historical structures. The earliest classes on tacket binding and the Nag Hammadi codices were designed to teach book artists some new approaches using old structures. For the past five years Julia’s classes have concentrated on historical structures combined with lectures on specific aspects of the history of binding, and Julia has left the book art applications to her students, who have creatively applied what they learn to their individual style.

Julia has taught all around the United States: Hollanders, OCAC in Portland OR, the Delaware Chapter of the GBW, Center for Book Arts NYC, Garage School Annex, Paper and Book Intensive; in 2007 she taught at the Montefiascone School in Italy. She loves teaching and she loves the research into the history of bookbinding that now occupies most of her time and gives her many ideas for classes in the future. She is studying bindings periodically in the superb collections at the University of Michigan as an independent scholar, and volunteers time each week at the William L. Clements Library of Americana to study bindings and write binding descriptions that are added to the online catalog. She is volunteering for a similar project at Michigan State University in the Special Collections Library, where she recently completed the study of over a thousand German bindings from the 16^th to the 19^th century.

A recent event that continues to shape Julia’s approach to the study of bookbinding was a first trip she made in August 2007 with Pamela Spitzmueller to Cairo to study the leather covers of the Nag Hammadi codices; she plans to return to Cairo in the near future to continue her research at the Coptic Museum on the NHC but also simply to learn Cairo.

Julia feels that perhaps the greatest single project she is involved with that has grown out of her conservation training, her historical bookbinding research, her teaching, and her proximity to great book collections began when she received a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Conservation Publication Fellowship in March 2008 to write a book. The working title of her book is Books Will Speak Plain: A Handbook for Identifying and Describing Historical Bindings and she recently completed the first half of her writing. The handbook is intended to give conservators, collectors, booksellers, curators and librarians a synopsis of the history of bookbinding and provide identification aides that will help them identify and describe historical bindings and thus contribute to the preservation of information on the history of bookbinding structure and style.

Julia read lines in a poem by Emily Dickinson once that have come to represent to her the beauty and fascination of historical bindings, however plain or magnificent, dilapidated, damaged, or repaired:

To meet an Antique Book -

in just the Dress his Century wore -

A privilege - I think -