Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1966). Bound by Richard Beardsmoore, 2025.
Bookbinder's Statement
Speak, Memory is a memoir of the first forty years of Nabokov’s life but with an emphasis on his childhood and adolescence in Russia and Europe, as the eldest of five children in an aristocratic family living in Saint Petersburg.
The starting point for my design was this quote: “Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration.” He went on to spend seven years as de facto curator of lepidoptery at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
The bindings seeks to address the question of how a binding can function as a gateway to the text and shape the reader’s expectations. So from a distance the binding looks like a butterfly and one might expect it to be a guide to "butterflies of the world". On closer inspection, however, the "eyes" on the wings of the butterfly are small images relevant to Nabokov’s text and life: his own map of the family estates, a map of Tsarist Russia, a Russian steam locomotive of around 1900, a chess problem, St Basil’s cathedral, the hammer and sickle of the Bolshevik revolution, a butterfly on a spreading board, and a dachshund.
On opening the binding the endpapers reveal some of the family photographs: the Nabokov house in St Petersburg, Baroness Maria von Korff (paternal grandmother), Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov (grandfather), Vladimir (aged 7) and his father, his father and mother, a portrait of his mother by Leon Bakst, Vadimir in Cambridge, and his father as a young boy. These are all set against a background of rippling water.
Technical Details
A Bradel binding with archival linen and leather joints. Bound in blue and black Harmatan goatskin. Top edge painted with blue acrylic paint and sprinkled with gold leaf, the other edges left untrimmed. Double-core, hand-sewn silk endbands. Endpapers and doublures ink-jet printed on Zerkall paper. Red leather inlays with images made using acrylic medium transfer. Tooled in 23.5 carat gold leaf and palladium leaf.
