Nothing would ever be the same after Joel Trumbo had an experience with beauty that changed his life at the age of 10.
Growing up on the campus of a boarding school where his father was a teacher in residence, the library became his refuge. On that memorable day, he felt drawn to pick up a copy of “The Hobbit,” by J.R.R. Tolkien.
“It was the 50th anniversary edition, bound in gold leather with green runes (a letter of an ancient Germanic alphabet),” said Trumbo. “I still remember how it looked. It was unlike any book I had ever seen, something magical almost. It was seeing that book that made me grab it, and that opened the world to me.”
Today Trumbo is one of few remaining old-world book binders, plying his trade at his small homestead in the Shenandoah Valley alongside his wife and nine children. “I’ve always been interested in the medieval manuscript tradition,” said Trumbo, who became Catholic in 2005. “I was particularly interested in the book arts and what medieval Christianity did with the written word and how exquisite it was.”
Trumbo’s passion for the arts may seem at odds with his other life. He served 11 years in the military including five years as a U.S. Army Ranger with four deployments in Afghanistan. He not only sustained his art in the war zone but also came to appreciate the beauty of God’s world even more, and became Catholic in 2005.
“I’m a convert and I think there are a lot of different ways personalities are drawn to the truth and the faith,” he said. “It wasn’t good arguments and doctrinal stuff that drew me in. It was beauty — the beauty of tradition, of all the elements — the universal scope of Catholic Christianity and all that that encompasses through the centuries. That’s how God got his hooks in me.”
The premium version of the books Trumbo designs, binds, and prints are hand sewn in the traditional style onto leather bands, then joined to a wood cover and wrapped in goatskin. Books such as “Beowulf” and “The Book of the Gospels,” prints, and prayer cards are sold through his Etsy store.
Trumbo has plans to reintroduce other medieval classics, as well as Catholic devotions such as “Imitation of Christ” by Thomas à Kempis. He’s happy to go against the grain of modern culture that has reduced reading to scrolling on a screen. “Holding a physical book, especially one that you can make as beautiful as possible, is important because we are sensory people,” he said. “We’re physical beings, and that’s a good thing. Physical, tangible, beautiful books are sensory. That’s important because that’s how we’re made.”
When someone first sees, then picks up one of his weighty books, their response is often emotional and unexpected. “What a book can be is powerful. I would say it’s incarnational. We are embodied people, and we worship a God who was embodied as a human,” he said.
“We’re created to experience physicality and to try to bring Christ to bear on that, whether it’s healing the sick or opening the eyes of the blind, Christ is concerned with physicality, and we are called to be the same, to bring wholeness and beauty and to elevate. That’s what drew me to Catholicism — its capacity to do that.”
And that’s what Trumbo strives for, one book at a time.
Hale can be reached at [email protected]
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To visit Trumbo’s Etsy shop, go to etsy.com/shop/TamburnBindery
