Daniel Essig draws his inspiration from the ancient Coptic style of book binding: chain-stitched bindings and wooden covers, engraved and decorated with found objects. peacay, of course was onto this stuff ages ago.
The site isn’t that great: it’s all in Flash, there’s way too much heavy background texture, and the images of the work are rather small. The work itself looks lovely, though, and it prompted a trawl in search of Coptic bindings, the who and the how and the why and the where and when. These are the chief findings:
- Coptic Bookbinding – Between Book Historians and Biblical Studies from Ekthesis blog earlier this year, offers a link to the most basic instruction for the method, and goes considerably further, unearthing a fascinating relationship between the developing technologies of book binding and boat building.
- Historical bindings gives an overview of the development of the book.
- Ethiopian binding offers clinically modeled exemplars of the method.
- Sewn boards binding offers some refinements of the method for modern binders, but lacks basic instruction.
- Coptic book – soft cover variety, clear and fairly easy to follow directions.
A highlight amongst the various book artists I’ve found lately is 
Oooh. Good one. I saw an inbound link and was curious – I’m just getting a post on Ethiopian manuscripts together so I’ll have to add your finds to my *getting-too-bloody-long* list of things to peruse when I’m at the stage of scratching my head and wondering how to get 5 centuries worth of outrageously unknown and foreign material squeezed into a few magical paragraphs of words. Heh. Perhaps more interesting would be the psychology behind the joys of masochism ;- )