I received graduate degrees in painting and sculpture from San Jose State College in California, studying and working closely with Sam Richardson. I began my study of hand bookbinding with Barbara Hiller in San Francisco in 1972. My classes with Ms. Hiller continued until 1975 when I moved to Paris to study binding and tooling full-time with Pierre Aufschneider and Roger Arnoult, icons of French bookmaking in the mid-twentieth century.

I returned to the Bay Area in 1977 and opened a studio where I accepted commissioned binding work and taught bookbinding privately. I then also began my career as a design bookbinder, making design bindings that were collected by private and institutional collectors, mostly in the U.S. In 1984 I moved my studio to Western Massachusetts, where I joined the growing community of bookmakers working around the Northampton area. In that fertile environment I enthusiastically pursued my ideas of design as they related to my binding work, experimenting with materials and techniques rarely associated with bookmaking while continuing to honor the traditional form.

I accepted a position as book conservator in 1996 at the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts, and then in 1998 became professor of book arts in the Book Arts Program at the University of Alabama. Both of these positions vastly broadened my experience as well as my view of bookmaking and its place in modern culture. During my employment in Andover and Alabama, I continued my exploration of bookbinding as a format for intensive design work and invention.

In 2000 I moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where I resumed my career as a full-time book artist. While living in Cleveland in 2002, I made and published my first edition (60) of artist’s books entitled Brooklyn Bridge: A Love Song. I have since made several further editions of artists' books.

In 2010 I began my tenure as Instructor of fine binding and Director of the Fine Binding Program at the American Academy of Bookbinding in Telluride, Colorado. I hold those positions still.

In 2019 I was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Guild of Bookworkers.

I now live with my wife, book artist Suzanne Moore, in Tacoma, Washington, where I make design bindings and artist’s books that are collected worldwide.