Bound to his craft
- Christian is not only a bookbinder, but an inventor
- His handmade menus featured in restaurants worldwide
- He listens to cultural radio shows while working
Christian Fuchs’ father, the bookbinder Johann Fuchs, built his son a small worktable when he was a boy. On Saturday mornings, father and son would tinker on projects together, side by side. The first booklet Christian bound was a collection of his own drawings, a gift for Mother’s Day. At 21, his father asked him to join his company, and ten years later, he handed him the keys to the business. Christian expanded the company's range from ringbinding to digital services, and made a breakthrough invention in restaurant menu covers. Though the company has grown to 24 employees and six divisions, Christian Fuchs still personally takes menu design orders, while his father still works in the framing department.
Interview
- You love books, but also machines...
- When I was around six years old, I took my grandmother’s radio apart and repaired it. I still love machines – we now have quite a collection of vintage printing machines which I collect, restore and display. I like to figure out how things work.
- Do you still listen to your grandmother's radio?
- I do. We have five radios in the workshop. In the evenings, when my employees have left, I leave all the radios running in the different departments, as I walk through all of them. Bookbinding is very meditative, it goes well with jazz.
- What have you invented?
- I have a few registered patents to my name. One is the ClemmUp®, which is a system I developed over ten years ago, which lets you clip menus inside the leather menu cover. One of the world’s most famous chefs approved it. It became an immediate hit and allowed us to become market leaders.
- What's the biggest challenge of your work?
- Gold embossing the product once you have completed it. After having spent so many hours working on the leather binding, the moment when you add the embossing is full of suspense – it can make or break (if it smears!) all the work you did before in just an instant.
Christian Fuchs is a master artisan: he began his career in 1989 and he started teaching in 1991
Where
Christian Fuchs
