Fine Contemporary Bookmaking
The texture, colour and smell of our handmade books bring the senses back into the experience of reading. These books are created entirely by hand in our own workshop, by a process we have pioneered. Every book in this series is screen-printed or letter-pressed on special handmade paper.

Our intention is to use the rich resources that India offers in the service of fine contemporary bookmaking. The workshop is run on fair trade practices by our Production Manager, C. Arumugam, offering employment to a dozen skilled craftspeople from local villages. All the members of the workshop live and work together, sharing household as well as printing tasks. Apart from their work as printers, these craftspeople are also active in street theatre groups and performances. Their motto is ‘Nothing is Impossible’. This is extremely useful, particularly in view of the demands made on them by the designers at Tara. The workshop has produced almost 100,000 handmade books so far. As far as we know, no one else in the world produces books by hand in these numbers.

All our books use paper specially manufactured at the Aurobindo Handmade Paper Unit in Pondicherry, South India. The paper is usually made from a mixture of cotton cloth wastes and tree bark, rice husks, or grass.

Each page of every book is screen-printed individually by hand, which means that each sheet is an original print. On the average, this works out to a total of 250,000 pulls for a full print run. The books are also hand bound (a process involving punching holes with a mallet and nail and stitching the forms together). Some books involve additional tipping-in (hand sticking) of pictures, or embellishments like ribbons, beads, special boxes or cases.

The greatest challenge is to maintain accuracy and a high production quality despite the number of times the book needs to be handled at various stages: printing each of the colours, drying, stacking, folding, stitching, and gluing the cover, endsheet and slip case…

Tara partners with some of the finest publishing houses and museums worldwide, including a specially commissioned handmade line for the J. Paul Getty Museum. Our handmade books have won several international awards including Outstanding Book of the Year at the Independent Publishers awards, and first prize at the American Association of Museum Publications awards.

Our handmade editions elevate the book to the status of a cultural object, and in the process, make artists’ books accessible and affordable to the book lover. To view our selection of handmade books available for purchase, please visit our bookshop…

The Process – Step by Step

1. The printer places a blank sheet of handmade paper under the screen. He then uses a ‘squeezer’ to pull the ink over the screen to create a printed page. He has to pull at an exact angle of 45 degrees to create a clear print

2. The ink registers onto the paper, and the finished page is removed from under the screen.

3. The freshly printed page is dried out on wooden palettes

4. When all the pages of the book are dried and ready, they are composed (arranged sequentially) in preparation for stitching and binding

5. The composed pages are threaded through, and then hand stitched

6. The binder makes the hardcover by wrapping the printed cover over cardboard sheets

7. When both the cover and the inside of the book are ready, the binder pastes in the end sheets to make the finished product

8. The last step is to crease, fold and glue the outer slip-case of the book by hand

9. Production manager C. Arumugam does quality checks on every single book for printing, binding, paper flaws, etc.

10. The production team with the finished book