Welcome to The Book and Paper Gathering’s festive rewind! It’s like Spotify Wrapped or Goodreads’ Year in Books, with slightly less pizzazz but considerably more acid-free paper. Let’s look back at our site over the past year (and even further back!)

We’ve come a long way since our first article in 2010. In the last thirteen years, we’ve published 214 pieces (a grand total of 191,489 words…whew). Our aim has always been to share conservation knowledge and experiences with a worldwide audience, and in the past year alone, we’ve welcomed 17,565 visitors from 138 countries. Hello everyone!

We accept all types of articles, whether you just want to share a small tip, or a more detailed dive into a longer treatment. Want to be wowed with a quick read? Try our shortest article of 2023, Talitha Wachtelborn’s ‘My Favourite Tool: Diamond-tipped engraving tool‘. Got time to really get into a longer piece? How about Jen Lindsay’s ‘Two Case Studies in Restraint‘? The latter also takes our grand prize for the most viewed article from this year – well done!

…For those interested, our most popular article of all time is Arthur Green’s ‘Some Forwarding Techniques for Springback Bindings‘. Despite being published over a decade ago in 2013, it still continues to receive views every month. Good techniques never age!

So what’s next for The Book and Paper Gathering in 2024?

More fabulous articles, of course! We’ve already got some brilliant pieces in the pipeline to start the year off with a bang. As always, we’re also looking for new contributions. So if you’ve always fancied writing something but never got around to it, take a look at our submission guidelines and drop us an email. We get lonely if people don’t write to us 😢

You can also keep up to date through our various channels – we’ve recently joined Instagram, so please go ahead and follow us on there! We also post regular updates on our long-running Facebook page. If social media’s not your thing, you can subscribe directly to the site to receive updates through email or WordPress.

More than anything, we’d like to say a massive thank you to all of you who continue to read and share our articles. This site would not be where it is without your support, and we’re very grateful for it.

Happy conserving!

Images by Stefania Signorello, with editing by Katherine Potapova.