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 — and making such boxes — since the 1980s, when he himself 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 to 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 of Riley’s.

“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 also 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.” (“You’re not supposed to, but I love competitions,” he said during a later video interview from his home studio. It was one of several discussions we had in recent months.)

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 also 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.

The Apprentices

Riley had his first taste of bookbinding at Douai School, a Catholic boarding school run by the Benedictine order west of London, where he worked with one of the monks to repair hymn books. “There I discovered an ardor for the idea of making things by hand,” he said.

On summer breaks from his pursuit of an English degree at Leeds University, he took a job at a bookbinding shop in his hometown, Chester, and found one of the lifelong mentors he mentions in interviews: its proprietor, Paul Delrue. Riley said that Delrue was the person who pushed him to train at the London College of Printing.

During talks about the history of bookbinding, Riley sometimes holds up a book that was bound in the craft’s Victorian heyday: “I say, ‘How many seven-year apprenticeships went into making this book?’ The paper maker, the ink maker, the type designer, the punch cutter, the type caster, the compositor, the printer, the engraver for the illustrations, right? And then the bookbinder and the goldbeater and the leather tanner.”

Later, he noted, “I would count like 17 different artisans, all serving a seven-year apprenticeship just to create a booklet on your shelf.”

New York minute

“There are five skills that a bookbinder needs to have that have nothing to do with each other,” Riley said. “When you sew a book, that’s sewing, then you’ve got to, let’s say, decorate the edges. So you’ve got to learn about how to handle gold leaf, which is the most difficult thing in the world. Then you’ve got to learn how to use a knife to thin down leather, which is completely separate. Then you’ve got to learn how to design the cover. So that’s where the art comes in.

“Then you’ve got to do the gold tooling, which has nothing to do with putting gold on the edges of the pages. It’s completely different. And then, of course, there’s the whole process of putting the actual naked covers on, which is an engineering job.”

At the end of his course at the London College of Printing in the late 1980s, he had acquired enough of the skills to win a 1,000-pound prize from stationer W.H. Smith and the British Library, money that he used to get to New York. “A friend said you could live off the smell of an oil rag in New York, eat food at art openings,” he recalled.

He landed a job with Paul Vogel, who is now widely considered the dean of the American bookbinding community, and began making presentation copies of new releases for New York publishers.

“Dominic brought all these skills to us,” Vogel said from his studio in East Hampton, New York. “We had this studio up on a roof in a glass box on West 24th Street, with views of the Empire State Building. It was a good time.”

The Dominic Tool

From there, Riley moved west, spending about a decade working as a binder and teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, then returning to England, setting up shop with Burke first in the Lake District and now in Cheshire.

Burke often teaches at the same institutions as Riley. With a Master of Arts in the history of the book from the University of London, he has an expertise in the styles and techniques of bookmaking popular in Europe from the seventh through the 17th centuries.

And Riley tends to pick up where Burke leaves off, specializing in bindings from the late 17th century to modern day. “The earliest book I teach is the latest that Michael teaches,” Riley said.

In discussion, they use a lot of the trade’s many specialized terms, speaking of “blocks” (the book’s total pages) and “boards” (the front and back covers); of how paper has a “rattle” (the sound it makes when you flip through the pages) and what that means; and of the need to “feather” leather (cutting it so the places where it joins with other materials are not visible).

During our interviews, Riley expressed a fondness for two tools particular to bookbinding: the bone folder (a small, flat paddle, usually made from a cow’s leg bone, which helps an artisan make regular folds in the paper, leather or suede used for binding); and the lithography stone, which is used to sharpen knives before cutting leather (the stones are traditionally sourced from an old Bavarian limestone quarry).

And Burke once showed me a tool that Riley had developed, a piece of wood with a sharp, brass tip protruding from it, one that others in the bookbinding community call the Dominic Tool.

“You hold it like a pencil,” Burke said, noting that it was good for the curves ubiquitous in Riley’s work.

Resurrecting “Frankenstein”

The men recently have been working on a two-book commission from an American collector: rebinding a first edition and a first American edition of Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein,” initially published in London in 1818. “We do not know the value of the book,” Riley said. “But we may assume it is quite high. It is in a very poor state and we have been entrusted by the owner to bring it back to life — ironic choice of words given the subject.”

For the job, Burke has been putting his additional training as a paper conservator to use in washing, repairing and flattening the pages, with Riley soon to set to work on the covers and bindings. They also are printing new versions of several missing pages from the first edition, transferring images of the original pages onto handmade paper similar, but not identical, to the original stock.

Riley has gone it alone on some commissions. Neale Albert, an avid collector who is a corporate lawyer in New York, gave him one of his first big commissions in 2003, asking for a cover for a copy of the whimsical Edward Lear poem, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.” Riley covered it in blue, orange, yellow and black leathers, stamped with gold crescents, circles and stars.

Another commission came in 2009 from Jamie Jennings, an oil company executive in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She saw one of his bindings on a children’s alphabet book at Maggs Bros., an antiquarian bookseller in London, and asked him to rebind her edition of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” The result had the chief characters hidden in motifs on the cover design, which included an oil refinery as the Emerald City. “I have it on display in my office,” she said.