SAN FRANCISCO — Dominic Riley said he was stressed out. Some of his eight students at the San Francisco Center for the Book had discovered that the fireproof boxes they were constructing were too snug, making it difficult to slide the boxes on and off books from their own libraries.

Between the classes this past summer, Riley had come up with an idea that he hoped would solve the problem: steaming the boxes over an electric kettle, so the moisture would expand them just a bit. “I’ve not done this before,” he told the students. “But it should work. It’s physics.” (Some boxes required multiple steam baths, but all of them eventually loosened up.)

It was an unusual problem for Riley, 58, who has been binding books professionally since the 1980s, when he was a student. Over the years, he and Michael Burke, his partner in life and work, have taught the ABC’s of bookbinding in Australia, Brazil and the Czech Republic and countries whose names start with many other letters of the alphabet. They also regularly travel from their home in the English county of Cheshire to teach at the San Francisco organization, which Riley helped establish in 1996.

He has worked on some valuable books over the years, including a math primer used by George Washington; an early copy of Noah Webster’s dictionary; and a rare collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s work published by William Morris, a leader of the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement in England and a hero to Riley.

“William Morris’ vision, to ‘rescue craft from the encroachment of industry,’ was laudable,” Riley wrote in a 2016 essay about rebinding the Chaucer, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “Coming late as Morris did to the world of printing, he proved himself worthy of the accolades he won from his peers as the creator of the most handsome book of his age.”

As for his own approach to the craft of binding, Riley is among those in his field who have compared it to designing a theatrical set. “The bookbinder, like the set designer, is responsible for imagining a context for one’s first encounter with the book,” he said. “Opening the box for the first time is the curtain rising.”

But his discussion of the craft moves to another emotional register when he talks about some of his mentors. During an interview, his voice caught when he described John Vivian, a renowned 20th-century binder, asking a young Riley how he liked the work: “I said ‘I’m loving it. I feel like bookbinding is in my blood.’ And he said ‘Wait till it’s in your heart.’ ”

In addition to rebinding and restoring old books, Riley has done about 100 of what the trade calls design bindings — his own creative, modern takes on volumes. They have won several of the specialized field’s top awards, including the 2013 Sir Paul Getty Bodleian Bookbinding Prize, a 10,000-pound (now about $12,500) award for the cover he created for “Pyramus and Thisbe,” an excerpt from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The book, chosen from 285 entries, was bound in chocolate brown leather. Its title was spelled in stars that Riley punched onto the cover, which featured leather inlays of stylized tree trunks and a full moon. The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford in England, a sponsor of the contest, now has the volume in its collection.