A librarian, a bookbinder, and a conservationist walk into a bar…
…and the bartender says "Jess, you're one person."
How I ended up doing all three in Bozeman, MT.
Meet the Maker
Hi, I’m Jess
Librarian by day, bookbinder the rest of the time
I'm a self-taught bookbinder in Bozeman, Montana, and I'm also a full-time librarian — JesterCat runs on evenings, weekends, and a great deal of stubbornness. Self-taught with an MLIS, which turns out to be most of what the job requires.
I do all of it myself — the rebinds, the mending, the teaching, the emails, the packing tape. When you write to this website, I'm the one who writes back.
01 · The unlikely route
I found this niche in the least dignified way possible
I work in a library. The mendery team was down the hall, and I spent a genuinely unprofessional amount of time watching them work instead of doing my own job. Then I fell into a TikTok rabbit hole about bookbinding at two in the morning, and that was that. I consumed all the media I could from professionals who did it the traditional way with hand tools, and people who use machines to make it more accessible. I fall somewhere in the middle.
A decade in libraries is a long time watching people be quietly attached to objects. Somebody hands over a book at the desk and tells you, unprompted, who gave it to them. That's the part I never got over.
Libraries taught me the thing I care most about: you help whoever walks in, and you never make them feel stupid for asking. That's the whole operating principle here — and it's why I never left.
02 · The work
Dissertations, recipe books, and paperbacks loved to death
People bring me dissertations to bind, childhood favorites that have come apart, family bibles, recipe books in a grandmother's handwriting, and novels they've read until the covers fell off. Traditional techniques, materials picked to suit the actual book — practical and affordable for something you'll carry around, archival when it genuinely needs to outlive you.
I also teach. In-person classes at venues around town, and kits for people who'd rather learn at their own kitchen table. Nobody walks in knowing how — that's the entire point of a class.
03 · An open book
Good binding shouldn't need a trust fund
Not every book needs to survive five hundred years. The ones that do should have the option, and I can do that work — but most books just need to stop falling apart, and there's no shame in that being the answer.
So I'll tell you what I'd do and what it costs, including when the honest answer is that it isn't worth the money. No pretension, no pressure, and no quote you have to email me three times to get.
04 · Where the look comes from
Everything here smells faintly of 1890
The look of this place isn't an accident. Oxblood and gold, Victorian titling, marbled endpapers — that's the era of the field journal and the ledger, when a book was something you carried into the country and wrote in with cold hands. It's also the era Montana was built in. Those two things being the same period is the whole reason JesterCat looks the way it does.
My Montana Heritage Collection is where that lands hardest — field logbooks in bison leather, waterproof, built to be used in weather. Each one is laid out for a particular obsession: birding, duck hunting, climbing, tarot. Not a blank book with a theme printed on it, but the pages a person actually needs, in the order they need them. They're named for Montana places and for the people who shaped those pursuits here.
I learned to hunt from my dad. These days it's mostly ducks, and most of my time goes to the processing at home rather than the field — which is its own kind of not wasting anything. I care about wetlands the way other people care about sports teams. Years ago my dad and I built one wood duck box, through the California Waterfowl Association, and put it up by a pond near the house. A family of wood ducks used it for years. One box, one afternoon, and it outlasted both. Conservation and bookbinding turn out to be the same instinct: you make one careful thing and it keeps working long after you've stopped thinking about it.
05 · Off the clock
Where the name came from
"Jester" was my nickname in high school. Add two cats, too many books, and a mascot named Piero — short for Pierogi — and you get JesterCat Binding Co.
The real cats are named after Polish food: Kashka, for oatmeal, and Makowiec, a poppy seed roll, who goes by Mako. Neither of them helps. Both of them supervise and play with the thread at the worst times possible.
Otherwise I'm cooking — I'm an unrepentant foodie and I overcommit in the kitchen most weekends — or reading, or dragging my husband to trivia when the calendar allows. I'm also a devoted antiquer, which is either a hobby or occupational research depending on how generously you look at it. And I speak Mandarin, which has nothing to do with bookbinding but comes up more than you'd think.
Made by hand. Made to be yours.
Send me a photo of your book, come make one yourself, or just book a call and talk it through.