Not everyone will want to make the trip out to Provins to visit APG Réliure, a bookbinding store in a famous medieval town selling myriad bookbinding supplies, hand-marbled papers, and their specialty, “blocs papiers” — preprinted and blank text blocks.

The text block selection was truly excellent, with a range of notebooks, printed texts chosen by competition, recipe books, and livres d’or — blank books with gilded edges (see directly below).

I didn’t buy much, since I’m heading back to the US soon, but I was happy to leave with one of the hand-marbled sheets, for €25 — a fair price for such beautiful work.

I’ve been to Provins before — it’s a medieval town about 85 minutes from Paris via the P train line from the Gare de l’Est. It’s home to a famous holiday medieval festival that I went to with a friend and remains one of my favorite things I’ve done in the entire nation of France. It was very cold, but there was plenty of vin chaud, and it was extremely foggy and atmospheric.

I would recommend a trip to Provins whether or not you’re the kind of person who’d spent about $30 for one of those slender books below, each dedicated to a specific, different bookbinding form.

For bookbinders, though? It’s amazing. I would have taken everything home if I could have afforded/carried it.

Also, I’m now totally into leathering tooling and gold.

Love! Five stars!