Colophon opened its doors in 1958 as a general secondhand bookshop, and grew a bindery bench in the back room within its first decade — first for the shop’s own repairs, then for outside commissions once word got around.
Today the two halves of the business run side by side: a catalogued stock of antiquarian and fine-press editions out front, and a working bindery that still takes on conservation, rebinding, and bespoke commissions in the same room where the presses live.
Every item in the collection is catalogued to its real physical collation, not just a title and a date — a habit inherited from the shop’s founder, who held that a bookseller who couldn’t collate a book by hand had no business selling one.