"The color images of the books...have been laid out in a pleasing progression that evokes moving through an actual physical exhibition.... Cover Stories was so expertly planned and written that the images of the covers and the stories that Kamph narrates about them are inseparable. Readers can page through the book seeking a favorite cover-there are many gorgeous choices-but likely you will end up deciding that it is the combination of the author's style as a writer, as a designer, and as a talented craftsperson that will make this book a favorite on your bookshelf."
- Barbara Hebard, Guild of Book Workers Newsletter - Number 285, April 2026

Cover Stories is about life as a bookbinder. It is not a book about binding methods and techniques. It is not "how to," but rather, "why?" What inspired a particular design? How does it fit into its cultural context? Who bought it for what purposes? There are rescue stories. There are tales of extravagance. There are scenes of family life. Over 100 color photographs illustrate a 50-year continuum of bookbinding experiences that add up to a life of joy and accomplishment.

This is a book about making, unmaking, and remaking books. It is about the making, unmaking, and remaking of a woman who loves books. It is about learning, understanding, invention, and creativity. There are lessons in recombining what lies in front of us and restoring what seems most fragile. It is encouragement, not instruction.

"Illustrators pick and choose a passage suitable for a visual commentary. Binders evoke the entirety of a text and acknowledge its physical properties in this or that edition, if not in a particular copy with distinctive attributes. Clearly, Jamie relishes that part of the process, and explains here how she arrived at her binding designs by trial and error, happy accidents, literary research, and structural considerations."
- from the Foreword by John Bidwell

Jamie Kamph has been an editor, writer, and publisher with a small book-packaging company in New York City. Book collecting led her into bookbinding. After an informal apprenticeship with Hope Weil, she set up a bindery in an 18th-century barn on her New Jersey farm. Her design bindings are in many private collections and such institutions as The Pierpont Morgan Library, Princeton University Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Thomas J. Watson Library, the New York Public Library, and the Bridwell Library at the University of Texas in Austin. Other bindings have been exhibited in Guild of Book Workers' and Designer Bookbinders' exhibits. The binding of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn received first prize in the Helen Warren DeGolyer Competition in 2003. Oak Knoll Press also published her earlier books, A Collector's Guide to Bookbinding (1982) and Tricks of the Trade: Confessions of a Bookbinder (2015).