Richard Norman

Hello, I am Richard Norman.

After leaving school I joined the Navy as a boy sailor lzft the service in my mid-twenties. I had always been a musician, I got my first guitar when I was 10 years old, with this love of music I spent 3 years working in a music shop in the West End of London, England, then I got a job playing in a dance band that played all the honeymoon hotels along the East African coast, I spent 3 years doing this, an unforgettable experience that permanently changed me, I went native for a while and lived with the Giriama tribe who are scattered along the Swahili speaking coast, I absorbed the rhythm of their native music, it's style can still be seen in my playing today.

But all good things etc, and I had to return to the UK, this was in 1983, I met my future wife who had just returned from 3 years working for Oxfam in Northern India, we hit it off big time and after a year of kicking our heels we returned to college as mature students to study bookbinding and paper conservation. We did very well, we were mature focused people, plus we were blessed with creativity. During our last year, we became friends with a Benedictine monk who was attending a bookbinding evening class, to cut a long story short we were invited to set up a book bindery in the grounds of Downside Abbey, famous for its neo-gothic abbey and public school.

We took over a derelict building and in 20 years we had converted the whole of the building and resurrected four principle crafts, a craft book bindery, a paper marbling studio, a specialist decorative box making workshop and a private press. In 1997 we were voted a National Living Treasure by Country Life magazine.

We moved to France in 2004 for a better quality of life and education for our daughter, I had wanted to hand over the workshops to someone else, but no one was prepared to take on the challenges of our workshops. So I set about passing on my knowledge through our website. It started off as a free resource of book craft related subjects and today still provides a mass of free book resources in the form of free to download book arts related .pdf manuals, but we now also supply the rarer examples of book supplies.

I still repair books, am a fervent writer, website developer, but I still have my love of improvised music, and I have been practising for 53 years so I should be damn good by now.