Traditional bookbinding is a storied and noble craft, but until recently, not a portable one. While book arts have surged in popularity and artists are pushing limits (books as jewelry, sculpture and even edible books at Asheville’s BookWorks studio), there’s no substitute for good, old-fashioned hand binding. To make one of those perfect books usually takes more than skill: it takes heavy, expensive equipment that many book binders don’t have space for in their homes. A nipping press—used to apply uniform pressure to book pages so that they don’t buckle—can cost up to $1,000 and weigh more than 20 pounds. Dea Sasso thought there had to be a better way.

Sasso first came to the mountains in the 1980s to do a leatherwork internship with local harnessmaker Julian Jackson of Jackson’s Western Wear. Now a book artist and restorer, she teaches book binding, calligraphy, papermaking and printmaking at schools across the country, including John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, where she’s the resident book artist. Traveling from school to school, she found there was no easy way to get her tools around, and while her students would learn the techniques on the school’s equipment or her own, they couldn’t recreate the process with what they had at home.

Working with Mennonite woodworker Alvin Fox of Pennsylvania, Sasso created the Bindery In A Box: a sewing frame, plough, nipping press, lying press and backing press that all fit neatly together in a handsome wooden box. It’s an ingenious little contraption with interlocking parts that clamp onto the box or do double duty. With the box, book binders don’t need any other tools to make books: they can make all sorts of editions or one-of-a-kind books. Sasso says she has shipped binderies as far away as Australia and Korea, and some of her clients have started their own bookbinding businesses with it. — Joanne O’Sullivan