HEART TO SPINE
Retired cardiologist now tends to pages and covers as artisanal bookbinder in Corrales
Corrales bookbinder Jerome Goss looks at a book and makes comparisons with the human body.
There’s the back of the book, or the spine; the hinges that run on both sides of the spine that he likens to joints; the front and back boards, or covers, which he thinks of as the skin; and the inside pages, representing the myriad internal organs and vessels.
It’s understandable that Goss, 81, a retired cardiologist, sees those comparisons.
Although he has always loved books and his Corrales home has an impressive library, “it never occurred to me that I might become a bookbinder,” he said; that is, not until he started thinking about what to do after he retired from medicine.
In 2002, he took some private lessons with a local bookbinder and found that it really interested him. Wanting to learn more about the repair and restoration of old leather-bound books, Goss enrolled in a yearlong bookbinding program in 2004 at the Glasgow Metropolitan College, a trade school in Scotland that teaches this highly specialized craft of antiquity. Of 12,000 students attending the trade college at the time, Goss said, only 12 were signed into the bookbinding program.
Early love for books
Goss was born in Dodge City, Kan., and grew up in heavily agrarian western Kansas. His father ran a restaurant and his mother was a school teacher who cultivated in him a love of books. “In the summer, no matter what else I was doing, she had me at the library in the summer reading programs,” he recalled.
Initially, he entertained the notion of becoming a geological or petroleum engineer. That changed when, as a high school athlete, Goss got hurt in a track and field accident in which he severely injured his leg and an artery in his abdomen. “I wound up spending two months in the hospital, and saw what the doctors and nurses did, and that got me interested in medicine,” he said.
After graduating from the University of Kansas, he attended medical school at Northwestern University in Chicago. He graduated in 1961, and trained at hospitals in Chicago, Cleveland and Denver. He did a stint in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War era, practicing cardiology at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
Goss found his way to Albuquerque in 1968 to help start a cardiac catheterization program at the University of New Mexico medical school, but a lack of funds and other issues delayed the launch of the program. Presbyterian Hospital, however, was looking to start a similar program, so Goss put his talents to use there. It was at Presbyterian that he met Lorraine, a registered nurse whom he married in 1986. Goss ran the program until 1995 and remained with the hospital until his retirement in 2004.
Tools of the trade
The tidy home workshop of Goss’s Milagro Bookbinding & Repair contains the tools and material of the bookbinding trade: book labeling machines; board cutters; a guillotine for cutting stacks of pages; book presses to compress and hold books and pages while glue dries; drawers containing high-quality paper; cabinets with rolls of calf, goat and kangaroo leather, Goss’s three favorite skins to use as book covers; and a selection of dyes and shoe polish containing wax needed to blend and match cover colors.
“I always work on three books at a time because a lot of time involves gluing, compressing and waiting for things to dry,” he said.
And artisanal bookbinding is not just time consuming — it is also expensive. Depending on the size of a book and the complexity of work required, a repair or restoration can take from weeks to months to complete, and could cost from $100 to more than $800, he said.
“There are only two reasons to have a book repaired or restored — if there’s an emotional attachment or if it’s valuable,” Goss explained.
That’s why most of his business comes from people who want to repair or restore favorite volumes and old family Bibles, or from antiquarian book dealers who have old and valuable books that need to be stabilized before they’re sold.
Among his current projects are books on the history of Ireland and a family Bible, both from the 1800s; a collection of profiles of people from Louisiana from the early 1900s; a medical book from 1619 written in Latin; and a compendium of Greek words from the 1500s.
“When you have a book that is 400 years old, and you see the print quality and the paper quality, you know that people worked at making things beautiful and making them to last,” he said.
And likewise, “when I put my label inside a book and it says ‘Jerome Goss, bookbinder,’ I know someone is going to see that 100 years from now. They may not know who I was, but they will recognize the quality of the work.”