ABOVE: Some tools of the trade.
When I receive a book to fix, I really need to listen to the book," says Tomomi Nakashima at her home workshop in Kailua, Oahu. "I take a look inside, and then I just try to talk to the book: 'OK, tell me which part of you has the problem.' Of course, it's not gonna tell me, but when I start observing page by page and spine and cover, the book usually shows me this is the place I need to fix." Nakashima and Joyce Tuia, who together started Kuro's Workshop in 2018, are book conservationists: They have cleaned and rescued a scrapbook of invitations issued during King Kalakaua's reign (a project that took seven months); restored a hundred-year-old songbook, reinforcing its pages with Mino washi, a traditional type of paper made in the Gifu prefecture, where Nakashima is from; and mended many childhood books and family Bibles. Each restoration is returned with a list of the repairs and materials used, documentation for future conservators who might need to handle the book. "A patient record," Nakashima calls the summary.
Tomomi Nakashima at Kuro's workshop in Kailua, Oahu.
About thirty years ago Nakashima, then a student at the University of Utah, was applying for a job shelving books at the campus library; she found it filled but was offered a position in the preservation department instead. She knew nothing about book preservation at the time. Stepping inside her new workplace "totally opened my eyes, because there are so many broken books on the shelf." She learned how to mend pages, sew text blocks, make covers. She eventually moved into rare books, some dating back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and at times would find a flower pressed in the pages, preserved for hundreds of years. It was like stepping into a "completely different world," she says, one in which the books' materials had as much to teach as what was written in the pages. "Since then I have always worked with books. I cannot think about my life without books."
Nakashima, who was Tuia's Japanese-language teacher in college, pulled Tuia into bookbinding, and when Tuia returned home to Hawaii, Nakashima followed. But "I'm not so much into the old, moldy, hairy books," Tuia admits. "I really like clean, new material and making books." So Kuro's Workshop also teaches bookbinding to the public-stitching new journals, wrapping covers with heirloom fabrics and, in more advanced classes, binding tomes with leather. Each book, new or old, that passes through the women's hands "is just one of the books in all of the world," Nakashima says, "but no book is the same after it is used."
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