Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 7, 1994                   TAG: 9406080007
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By DREW FETHERSTON NEWSDAY
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

BINDER KNOWS A BOOK CAN BE JUDGED BY ITS COVER

Inside the bindery, it's only a bit less so: Two alphabets predominate, Hebrew and Roman, and two languages, Yiddish and English - although there's a smattering of medical Latin on some of the pages as well.

Shulem Halpert, Henry's proprietor, speaks English with the pronounced accent and imperfect grammar that marks those for whom it is a second language. It therefore comes as something of a surprise to learn that he is American-born. ``I come from America,'' he says. ``My father came from Hungary. English is for me a second language. I learn it in school; also, I catch it from the streets.''

His first language, and the one most used for communication in the shop, is Yiddish. Halpert is a Satmar Hasid, a member of a sect so strict and inward-looking that it exists in enclaves. The nearest is in Williamsburg, where Halpert was born and grew up. Another enclave is Kiryas Joel, a Satmar community in Monroe, N.Y., where Halpert moved 19 years ago, and where he still lives with his wife and those of his 16 children who are as yet unmarried. He is 45 years old, looks quite a bit younger, and already has eight grandchildren.

Henry Bookbinders is precisely what the name says, a place that binds books. It does not print them, publish them, sell or distribute them. Customers must supply the text; Halpert supplies the outside.

Some of the outsides are probably at least as satisfying and instructive as the material they shelter. Halpert does very nice work with some very nice leathers. These exceed the chromatic variety of the street outside: They are blue, green, cream, red, yellow, maroon, white and brown of many shades.

Pretty much everything is done at least in part by hand. For instance, Halpert stitches the books together with the aid of a big, foot-operated sewing machine. He takes a stack of loose pages about a quarter-inch high, sets them in place and steps on a treadle. A bank of threaded needles descends to sew the pages together. The sewn batches are folded and fastened into covers held down in presses until the glue dries.

Leather is hand work, and the tools Halpert produces for a demonstration speak eloquently of how long Henry Bookbinders has been going about its business: Halpert hones an old kitchen knife (whose blunt, broken blade had been all but worn away in past sharpenings) on a whetstone that was once the size of a pound of butter. Now it is down to the equivalent of perhaps nine ounces.

Halpert sets a scrap of leather on a granite slab whose once-sharp edge has been dulled by long wear. He takes a board, the cardboard that stiffens the cover of a hardbound book, and traces one corner onto the back of the leather. He cuts a generous triangle around this corner and bevels the edges with the razor-sharp knife. When he has the leather slimmed down to his satisfaction, he fits it to the corner and, using a flat, round-cornered rectangle of plastic called a bone, bends the leather over the board and glues it down in a neat bedsheet corner, with Elmer's glue.

This is a leather corner; Halpert will also bind - or rebind - books entirely, or partially, in leather. He will also put hubs, those horizontal raised bands, on the spine.

It is the labor, not the material, that makes leather binding expensive, Halpert says. He always has a selection of leather on hand for customers, but occasionally someone will come in with his or her own piece of leather. ``Someone brought me an old leather briefcase once,'' Halpert says. ``It had belonged to his great-grandfather. He wanted to make a book from it, to save something.''

Halpert offers a choice of endpapers to liven the insides of the covers, and also will decorate the page edges. This he does with a sponge and inks of various colors, dipping and dabbing to give the blank edges an interesting design. You also can have the edges gilded but Halpert sends this work out to a specialist in Soho.

Most of the books that leave Henry Bookbinders are less elegantly clad in what the trade calls library binding - buckram, or imitation leather, or fabric, in the unadorned style familiar from library shelves. Halpert uses a stamping press to print the titles on the spines of these books in plain gold block letters.

In the past, Halpert says, Henry Bookbinders was quite well-known in the city as a binder of city documents. The company did a great deal of work that wound up in the libraries of city hospitals. ``A lot of journals, medical books, magazines,'' Halpert says.