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
