Father-son duo at the Hilltop’s Beck & Orr still binding books by hand
Walking into Beck & Orr Book Binding is almost like stepping into a time machine.
Vintage wrought-iron machines take up residence along the perimeter. Photographs from the shop’s early days and newspaper clippings line the walls, a chronicle of the Columbus company’s 134-year history.
The workbenches are piled high with annals waiting to be bound. Bookcases overflow with old jobs that were never picked up or paid for.
When you ask Skip Bowman, 63, what the oldest item in the shop is, he shoots a cheeky glance over to his dad, 86-year-old Ron.
“What are you looking at me for?” Ron quips back.
It’s not just the shop, though, that recalls images of a less-digital age –– it’s the craft of bookbinding itself.
The father-son duo have owned and operated Beck & Orr, located on West Broad Street on the Hilltop, since the 1950s. Although the business got its start Downtown, the shop has been a fixture of the Westgate area for nearly 40 years
‘Just like we did in 1888’
Today, Beck & Orr specializes mostly in thesis binding for graduate students, foil stamping and embossing, and restoring antique books.
Given the labor-intensive nature of bookbinding, Beck & Orr has never tried to compete with large-scale binderies, even in its heyday. Sure, the shop has machines, Ron said, but nothing is automated.
The binding process at Beck & Orr depends on the need of the book, but every project is rooted in tradition.
“We’re doing it just like we did in 1888,” Skip said.
Most of the machinery is operated by hand. Skip sets all the typeface for embossing the finished products by hand. Every process, from stitching spines to creating the cardboard covers to foil stamping, is done — you guessed it — by hand.
The bookbinding process
Bookbinding is about a nine-step process, Skip explained.
To begin, the pages are stitched together and glued. Once dried, the pages are compressed in a backing machine, which creates a little edge for the pages to sit in the cover.
A board for the front and back cover has to be cut, then fitted with cloth or leather. Next, the material is glued in place and goes through a ringer machine to flatten it. Letter press stamps and foil are used to emboss the cover and spine. Finally, the pages are glued to the spine and pressed to secure them to the cover.
Rebinding old books is a little more involved because it involves cutting off the old cover, removing glue residue and stitching the pages back together before gluing a new binding on the book.
Sometimes they’re able to salvage the original cover and incorporate it with a new spine. Most clients want the antique covers even if they’re pretty beat up, Ron said, especially with family Bibles and old genealogies.
Ron said Beck & Orr does between 250 and 400 books a month, depending on the job, and Skip said it’s rare that they don’t have work to do.
A long wooden table at the front of the shop displays some of their oldest work. Among them are giant family Bibles — their ornate leather spines cracking with age, some older than the shop itself — waiting to be repaired. Ron said the oldest book they’ve ever restored was a Bible from 1437.
Bible restoration can cost someone upwards of $500, but Ron said most people are willing to pay whatever it takes when it comes to restoring their family Bibles.
“You can’t find these kinds of Bibles today,” he said, running his hands over the cover of an aging German Bible from the 1700s.
The shop’s bread and butter these days is binding annals of magazines, board meetings, church bulletins and medical journals for companies nationwide. One recent Tuesday afternoon, Ron stitched together stacks of Highlights for Children, while Skip embossed finished bound copies of Consumer Reports.
But Beck & Orr has done some high-profile work as well. They’ve rebound books for the White House and foil stamped some certificates for the Vatican. In 1975, they bound 10,000 copies of former Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes’ book, “You Win With People!”
Beck & Orr’s beginnings
The business first opened in 1888, near the corner of State Street and Third Street, where the Ohio Theatre sits today. Beck & Orr moved to Oak Street and Fifth Street in 1922 –– the shop where the Bowmans later would be introduced to bookbinding.
Ron started an apprenticeship at a printing shop in town after he graduated from Columbus West High School in 1954. He didn’t know anything about bookbinding, he said, but it seemed interesting enough, and it was a union job. He ran the cutting and folding machines for a few years and would often run pages over to Beck & Orr.
Then in 1959, when Ron was at summer camp with the Ohio National Guard, his wife, Loretta, called him. It was the guys from Beck & Orr, she said. Their printer had died, and they wanted him to come work there.
Ron joined the crew and even bought half the company when one of the owners died in 1962.
“It sounded like a no-brainer,” Ron said.
Beck & Orr employed about 15 union workers at the time. Skip spent a lot of time around that shop as a kid. (Mostly because he was grounded, he said.)
Growing up around bookbinding left a major impression on him, Skip said. He took vocational classes about printing at Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center in high school and worked as a pressman at Ohio State University for 20 years before joining his dad in the business.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do my whole life,” Skip said.
Things were going well for Beck & Orr until the late 1970s. Ron’s business partner took a dream job at the Ohio Supreme Court’s printing shop. They also lost a big contract. Printing companies started closing up and moving out of state, shrinking Beck & Orr’s clientele.
Ron laid off his staff, keeping only his nephew, and moved the shop to the South Side. Then, in 1983, a freak accident threatened to shut Beck & Orr down for good when lightning struck the shop.
The building was basically destroyed, as well as many of the books inside. Ron wanted to take the insurance money and retire, but Loretta changed his mind. He still had more work to do.
The longtime Hilltop residents started looking for a new shop to call home when a specialty furniture store on West Broad Street announced it was closing. The Bowmans, and Beck & Orr, have been on the Hilltop ever since.
Plenty of things have changed about the industry –– there are fewer book printers thanks to direct-to-print services, and they don’t offer book folding anymore –– but Ron and Skip stay busy. Skip officially joined the family business in the ’90s after his cousin died.
The Bowmans see their work not simply as a craft, but as a way to preserve history. And there’s nothing they’d rather do, they said.
“The only place I plan on going after this is if the Lord has me,” Skip said with a laugh.
At its core, Beck & Orr is about family.
There’s a bulletin board by the embossing machine at the front of the shop. Although the board itself has been full for years, memories spill over onto the walls, held up by thumbtacks and duct tape. Decades of family photos, ticket stubs, business cards and “In Loving Memory” booklets don the wall.
This is their life, Skip said — the shop, the craft and everything they’ve done together since Beck & Orr first opened its doors.
Ron says it’s just something to keep him busy these days. But Skip knows his dad better than that.
“This stuff,” Skip said, “is his whole life.”
This story is part of the Dispatch’s Mobile Newsroom initiative. Visit our reporters at the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Hilltop branch library and read their work at dispatch.com/mobilenewsroom, where you also can sign up for The Mobile Newsroom newsletter.
Sheridan Hendrix is a higher education reporter at the Columbus Dispatch. You can reach her at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter at @sheridan120. Sign up for her Mobile Newsroom newsletter here.
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