There’s an Intertype machine in a window on Crawford Street. Most people walk past it without a second look, which is fair enough – it’s not labelled, and the building doesn’t announce itself. Behind it, David Stedman runs Dutybound, a one-person bookbindery operating out of the same room where he served his apprenticeship at John McIndoe decades ago. We went in to see what’s left of a trade that most people assume has already disappeared.
The Building Remembers
Fifty-Seven Crawford Street
Crawford Street isn’t one of Dunedin’s showpiece addresses. It runs quietly off the lower end of town, the kind of street you’d drive past on the way to somewhere else. But if you slow down near number 57 and look through the front window, there’s an Intertype machine sitting there – one of the last on the South Island – and behind it, a working bookbindery that has been doing more or less the same thing in the same space for over a century.
This is where John McIndoe’s printing operation ran its bindery, and where David Stedman first walked in as an apprentice bookbinder, decades before the place became his. The building dates to the early 1900s, and inside it smells the way you’d hope: paper, adhesive, the faint mineral tang of old metal. Stedman came back to this room after years away, set up Dutybound, and picked up more or less where the building left off. It’s not a heritage museum. The equipment works. The bench is used. Orders come in and go out through the same door they always did.
Machines That Outlasted the Industry
The oldest machinery in the bindery dates to the 1880s. The newest is from the 1960s. Nothing in between, nothing after. Stedman maintains it all himself – there’s nobody to call for parts, and most of the manufacturers stopped existing decades ago.
His most prized piece is a Swiss-built book-sewing machine that he describes, with the understatement of someone who has used it for thirty years, as “a piece of brilliance.” It’s essential for small production runs, the kind of work that would be uneconomical on modern equipment even if modern equipment existed for it.
This isn’t nostalgia. Stedman avoids upgrading because automation would take his hands out of the process, and the process is the point. If the binding were automated, you’d end up with something you could buy anywhere, cheaply, and there’d be no reason for Dutybound to exist. The old machines keep the work in his fingers, and that’s where it belongs.
What McIndoe Left Behind
John McIndoe set up as a printer and bookbinder in Dunedin in 1900 and soon moved to Vogel Street, building a firm that would run through three generations of his family. Under his grandson, the company became one of the country’s notable book publishers. The Crawford Street bindery was part of that operation – the room where pages became objects.
When Dunedin was designated a UNESCO City of Literature in 2014, it was partly on the strength of this kind of history. The city’s literary identity didn’t appear from nowhere. It grew out of a physical infrastructure of printing presses, binderies, bookshops, and publishers that once made Dunedin a centre of NZ publishing. Most of that infrastructure is gone now. The Otakou Press still runs nineteenth-century hand presses, and a scattering of small presses keep poetry and hand-printed work alive, but the industrial-scale operations have vanished. Dutybound sits in the gap between heritage and present tense – the same building, the same craft, a different century.
Thirty-Two Years of Paper and Thread
An Accidental Vocation
David Stedman’s family was already in the printing trade. His father and brother both worked in the industry. Stedman went to McIndoe not because he felt a calling to bookbinding but because he needed a job, wanted a car, and had a reasonable appetite for beer. That’s the origin story. No epiphany, no childhood memory of handling a beautiful leather-bound volume. He took the apprenticeship because it was there.
What happened after was less accidental. He spent the next fourteen years at Dunedin Public Library’s bindery unit, repairing and maintaining the collection. He was good at the work, and the work was steady, but the administrative side of the job ground him down over time. He’s described it as being “hollowed out” – the craft kept shrinking while the paperwork kept growing. So he left, set up on his own, and started Dutybound from nothing on Crawford Street. The beginning was slow. It kept building.
What the Hands Know
Bookbinding is not the kind of craft you learn on a weekend course. The measuring, cutting, folding, sewing, pressing, and blocking that go into a single bound volume are skills that take years to develop and decades to refine. Stedman has more than thirty years of it in his hands, and he’ll tell you there are still things that surprise him.
Qualified bookbinders in this country are genuinely rare. It requires what Stedman calls “quite a high skill level,” and there’s no shortcut – you can read about grain direction and kettle stitching, but your fingers need to learn the tension of a thread through a signature, the feel of a properly set spine, the exact pressure on a blocking press that leaves a clean impression without crushing the cover material. This is physical knowledge, built incrementally, and it can’t be downloaded. When Stedman says he prefers old machines because they keep his hands in the work, he’s describing a craft where the hands are the instrument.
What Comes Off the Bench
The Quiet Commissions
Much of what Dutybound produces never gets seen by the public. The bread-and-butter work is institutional – tribute folders for Hope and Sons Funeral Directors, preservation boxes for archives, book repairs for clients who need a damaged binding made functional again. This is the quiet, sustaining core of the business: repeat customers with regular needs, work that requires precision but doesn’t seek attention.
The repairs alone cover a wide range. Some are straightforward – a loose spine, a torn cover. Others are closer to conservation work, where the goal is to stabilise something fragile without altering it. Stedman treats each job on its own terms. A funeral tribute folder requires a different kind of care than a rebind of a battered novel, and both are different from building a preservation box to protect something that can’t be touched at all.
The Personal Work
Walk into Dutybound during its Monday-to-Friday hours and you can browse what’s on the shelves: handmade journals with buckram covers, photo albums with archival pages, notebooks in various sizes. These are the products that bring people through the door who might never have commissioned a bespoke binding.
But the bespoke work is where the craft gets personal. Wedding guest books with screen-printed covers. Retirement tributes with hand-blocked lettering. Bound memoirs and family histories – the kind of thing someone brings in as a stack of typed pages and takes home as a proper book. Stedman uses blocking presses to personalise these pieces, stamping names, dates, and designs into cloth and leather covers. Each one is made to order, built around what the customer brings, and finished to a standard that a machine binding simply cannot match. It’s the kind of work that people keep. Often for generations.
The Unexpected Stuff
Bookbinding, it turns out, is a more elastic skill than you’d think. Stedman has done embossing work for Company of Strangers, the Dunedin fashion label, pressing designs into their leather goods using the same blocking presses he uses for book covers. He prints on pencils as a sideline – custom runs for businesses and events, done on equipment that was built to do something else entirely.
One of his more notable projects was a collaborative edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, produced with artist Rob Lamb and the Brett McDowell Gallery. That project pushed into high-end finishing work – the kind of detail that separates a bound book from a designed object. It’s not the typical commission, but it shows where the craft can go when someone with Stedman’s skills meets someone with an idea that needs hands to make it real.
Paper in a Screen Age
The Tactile Argument
Stedman doesn’t spend much time arguing against screens. His take is pragmatic: e-readers are fine for what they do, and what they do is remind people how different a physical book feels. “People still want to feel paper,” he says. “It’s a tactile thing.” He’s not mourning the death of print. He’s observing that the two formats have separated into different experiences, and the physical one isn’t going away – it’s just becoming more deliberate.
There’s some evidence for this in the culture around him. His old school friend Richard Emerson named one of the Emerson’s Brewery beers – Bookbinder – after Stedman and fellow binder Michael O’Brien. A bookbinder inspiring a beer name in Dunedin is a peculiarly local kind of recognition, but it says something about the cultural weight the craft still carries. The trade has shrunk, but the people who remain in it aren’t marginal figures. They’re part of the city’s story.
One of the Last
The honest reality is that qualified bookbinders are disappearing. The trade doesn’t attract apprentices the way it once did, and even if it did, the training timeline is measured in years, not weeks. Stedman has found it nearly impossible to hire anyone with the necessary skills. The pool is tiny. The craft requires patience, precision, and a willingness to spend a long time getting good at something the market barely recognises as a profession anymore.
But Dutybound is still open Monday to Friday, ten until three. Orders still come in. The machines still run. Stedman started from nothing on Crawford Street and the work has grown steadily since, and that quiet trajectory says more than any lament about dying arts ever could. He’s not performing a heritage trade for the benefit of tourists. He’s making things – real, functional, beautiful things – because that’s what the room on Crawford Street has always been for.
Fifty-seven Crawford Street has been a place where books are made for over a hundred years. The machines have changed owners, the industry has contracted to almost nothing, and the work itself is no longer something most people even know exists. But the door is open five days a week, and the bench is not for show. Some things persist not because they’re preserved but because someone keeps doing them.