Bookbinding, like book publishing in general, is on the decline. But if you walk down the stairs at the front of the old-tenement building at 135 Henry St. on the Lower East Side, you’ll find a man plying that trade the same way he did 40 years ago — and moreover, he’s still very active.
His business is called Henry Bookbinding and everyone calls him Henry, although that’s not his real name (after much probing, he says his first name is Sholom, but he wouldn’t give his last name). Henry, age 76, is a member of the Satmar Hasidic community and lives in Monroe, Orange County, N.Y., which has a large Hasidic population. Inside the store are several pictures of
Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979), the founder of the Satmar rabbinic dynasty. Henry is originally from Williamsburg, where the Satmars first settled in the U.S. after the holocaust, and he speaks with a hint of a Yiddish accent.
Henry readily admits that the internet has taken away some of his business — for example, reports on medical research, which are largely found online nowadays — but even so, he has lots to do. The mainstays of his business, he says, come from lawyers, rabbis and doctors. These are “the people who are most important in life, but the people who we least want to see,” he jokes.
(Presumably, he was referring to rabbis officiating at a funeral, not at a simcha such as a wedding.)
He recalls how he got started in the business about 40 years ago. At that time, the store was owned by a Mr. Glantz, and Henry got a job there. How long did it take him to learn the trade. “About a week,” he says.
Seen throughout his store are religious Jewish books such as machzors (special prayer books used on holy days) and tehillim (books of psalms). However, he also binds and repairs Christian and Muslim holy books. “I’m a diplomat,” he says with a smile.
Among his other customers are newspaper and magazine publishers who give him all of their issues for a particular year, to be put into what I called a “bound volume” when I worked at Fairchild Publications in the 1980s. When I interviewed Henry, I noticed bound volumes of the Chelsea News, a weekly that is distributed in my co-op’s lobby.
Owners of old and/or rare books that are falling apart and need to be re-bound also come to him. I told him about such a book that my paternal grandfather owned — a High Holy Day machzor printed in Romania in 1844. My father, unfortunately, “fixed it up” with masking tape.
Henry took me on a brief tour of his cramped office and workshop. In some places, paint is peeling from the wall, but it’s clear that what’s important to him are his finished products. The workshop has several machines — among them are a sewing machine (which fastens the internal sections of a book together), a paper-cutting machine, and a manual cutting and trimming device with a large metal blade. Henry calls this last device a “guillotine,” which I thought was a joke until an internet search revealed that these devices actually have that name.
Throughout the work area, there are strips of material used in bookbinding, such as leather, cloth and paper, as well as glue, scissors and other items. In the back, there’s a desk, above which a myriad of pieces of paper are taped to the wall. These represent orders and jobs that are on Henry’s schedule.
Even when Henry first started working at 135 Henry St., the glory days of the Jewish Lower East Side were long gone. The Jewish Daily Forward, once the largest Yiddish-language daily newspaper in the United States, moved out of its nearby landmark Building on East Broadway in 1974. Also a stone’s throw from Henry Bookbinders was the Garden Cafeteria. where Yiddish-speaking-intellectuals debated politics and literature and shared the latest gossip. It closed in 1983. Henry was quick to point out, however, that one of the oldest yeshivot in New York, Mesivtha Tifrerh Jerusalem, is still up and running at 145 East Broadway. And while most of the businesses around the area are now Asian-American, this doesn’t bother Henry. “The Chinese people are my customers, too” he says.
It’s clear that Henry’s customers appreciate his work — everyone who’s commented about his store on Yelp gave him five stars. A sample comment, submitted by “Nadine S.” in 2022, reads, “I inherited a precious book of Robert Burns poetry that my great-grandfather brought from Scotland. The cover was damaged and the spine non-existent. In less than a week Henry re-bound it but kept a good bit of the original cover. Now the book can be read again and kept for future generations.”
As I was about to leave, I asked whether any of his children have followed him into the bookbinding trade. “No,” he says, “they’re smarter than that. They make more money!”
