About

Gillian Boal is a rare book and archival conservator with 35 years of experience, who teaches book arts, bookbinding, and conservation.

Currently working part time at the Graduate Theological Union’s Flora Lamson Hewlett Library and the Robbins Collection Library at U.C. Berkeley, Gillian preserves collections dating back to the 10th century. She has also helped preserve the Sutro Library’s Collection at San Francisco State University.

She served as Head of Conservation at the U.C. Berkeley Library. Earlier in her career, Gillian prepared books for binding at Cockerell & Son in Cambridge, England. She taught Book Arts at Mills College, Oakland.

As Collection Care Manager of the Wellcome Library in London, she acted as courier overseeing the Wellcome Collection’s material for many installs and de-installs of exhibitions in India, Germany, Belgium, Japan, England and USA.

My guiding philosophy echoes the craftsman David Pye’s words:

“Workmanship is the application of technique to making, by the exercise of care, judgement and dexterity. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making.

In speaking of good material we are paying an unconscious tribute to the enormous strength of conditions of workmanship still shaping the world even now, and still remain largely unwritten. We talk as though good material were found instead of being made. It is good only because workmanship has made it so.” 

—David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship