GAVIN DOVEY, designer bookbinder. MONGIN, Morina. MOUCHA, Miroslav. ~ Touchez Voir.
Foreword poem by Bernard Noël. One of the 40 edition de tete (this no.6) signed by the author and artist of a total edition of 99. 3 dry point engravings by Miroslav Moucher. Produced by Yann Launay with extra pages hand-printed by Michael Caine. Printed in Gill extra light on Zerkall paper. 26.5 x 17.5 cms, bound by Gavin Dovey at his Paper Dragon bindery (with his binder’s device on the inside of the chemise) in full white goatskin with black and yellow inlays and hand-tooling of black lines, mirrored on the doublures with printed black endpapers with onlays of white and yellow circles on the pastedowns and matching holes on the free endpapers. Housed in a chemise-etuis in the French style, with the slipcase sides covered in stone-leaf.
The binder writes that “the design reflects the modest and minimal nature of the illustrations, with the cover in white and the inside mirrored in black, with the ends printed from acrylic sheets, mirroring the tooling and inlays on the cover.
A remarkably fine binding by Gavin Dovey who, after training the UK, set up shop in the US in 2004 and now works as a book artist out of his New York State bindery known as Paper Dragon Books. He is renowned as one of the most accomplished binders of our time being technically brilliant as well as having a true artist’s approach to binding design. The binding was selected from 90 entries for exhibition in Paris in 2019.