As Good as Our Tools

Equipment and Tool Makers for Hand Papermaking

For over two millennia, humans have made paper by inventing, improving, and adapting a range of tools and equipment to effectively create the best product. In the 20th century, European-style hand papermaking experienced a revival made possible by specialized studios and tools. This field of creative hand papermaking is small but robust, enabled by a key group of people: the toolmakers. These skilled makers build the equipment and tools essential to making paper by hand but receive little attention. This survey of fifteen makers across four continents gives center stage to these remarkable people, illuminating their personal paths towards these niche practices. Unfortunately, only a few are training successors while they age into retirement, even as interest in hand papermaking booms, but their stories inspire renewed commitment to learning how to make things – and, more importantly – how to make things work. Here, we listen to their voices, bring sustained attention to their vital contributions, and encourage a new generation of builders and tinkerers to advance hand papermaking. With 390 illustrations.

Published by The Legacy Press (2025).

Distributed by Oak Knoll (order for 48 USD + S&H).

Aimee Lee, a generous and inquisitive papermaker and paper historian, delves deeply into the largely undocumented world of papermaking tool makers and equipment builders in this, her second book. Fifteen makers recount their practices and consuming passions to recreate and improve papermaking tools; often for scant financial reward. Instead, these makers display a well-deserved pride in building the best tools they can, for its own sake. Lee probes where their impetus to make these tools comes from: many cite early exposure to physiological experiences as children through play and unsupervised activities. Many are autodidacts and work alone, continually challenging themselves to improve, with a borderline religious zeal. As Good as Our Tools blends makers’ biographies with their craft philosophies; becoming as intertwined as the fibers in a sheet of paper. A must read for anyone interested in papermaking, the transmission of craft, or toolmaking. —Jeffrey S. Peachey, book conservator, book historian, and toolmaker

Hanji Unfurled

One Journey into Korean Papermaking

In this first English-language book devoted to hanji, Aimee Lee shares her experience as a Korean–American artist and Fulbright fellow on her search for a traditional Korean papermaking teacher. Of the handful of American hanji researchers, she is the only one to have interacted with Koreans in their own language while simultaneously learning the craft. Hanji Unfurled follows her journey as she met papermakers, scholars, and artists from bustling cities to traditional Korean villages to Buddhist temples to island outposts. Not only did she encounter the few remaining papermakers who still practice webal tteugi, the indigenous Korean sheet-formation method, but she found teachers of a whole array of allied crafts that include jiseung (cording and twining hanji), joomchi (texturing and fusing hanji), natural dyeing, and calligraphy. She traveled from the studios of living treasures to the homes of ordinary Koreans, illuminating an often-misunderstood culture through stories from its keepers of traditional heritage.

Hanji Unfurled, the first English-language book devoted solely to hanji, honored by the Eric Hoffer Book Award in 2013

Order for 35 USD + S&H from Oak Knoll. For signed copies, please contact Aimee.

Also available at:

Center for Book Arts, NYC
Seoul Selection online

Book Reviews

Hanji Unfurled: One Journey into Korean Papermaking Reviewed by Minah Song

Hanji Unfurled: One Journey into Korean Papermaking Reviewed by Libby Pomroy

Hanji Unfurled: One Journey into Korean Papermaking Reviewed by Barbara Shapiro

Hanji Unfurled: One Journey into Korean Papermaking Reviewed by Hwisang Cho

Hanji Unfurled Book Trailer

This book is a valuable resource, a must-read not only for papermakers but for anyone interested in perpetuating honored traditions into an environmentally responsible future. Read it, and then get your hands on some hanji. — Melissa Jay Craig

Lee connects the theory to practice by outlining a chain of empirical examples from her own experience—the difficulty of finding a hanji master, the struggle of early apprenticeship days, and the slow way of learning how to make hanji. Numerous photographs and the author’s hand-drawn diagrams of tools and process provide unusual and a truly stunning number of useful details. — Minah Song

I love this book.… For a glimpse at this uniquely Korean art form – and one artist’s journey to discover its versatility – Hanji Unfurled is a gem.” “Old art learned the old way.” — Libby Pomroy

More interestingly, her journey to learn about hanji also comprised soul-searching about her identity as a second-generation Korean American.

In fact, this book is captivating because the progress that Lee made in hanji making took place simultaneously with her cultivating emotional and psychological connections not only with her teachers but also with various people she met throughout the year in Korea and beyond.

. . . this book offers a wonderful case study about how traditional handicrafts have been adapted in the modern period. —Hwisang Cho

Presented with the flow of a travel journal, this book will appeal to those scholars and craftsmen who seek a deeper understanding of fast disappearing traditional processes as well as a frank analysis of the state of the craft in Korea today. —Barbara Shapiro