>> The following is a presentation of KBTC Profiles.

>> Books are very important for what they hold inside.

I mean, whether it be informative, whether it be an escape.

I'd always loved books.

I always was interested in taking the book and dismantling the older books that I would find to see how the structure and everything was.

Being able to work with your hands and your mind working together to create something really can help in bringing history to life.

My name is Paul McClintock.

I'm an artist and a bookbinder living here in Whidbey Island.

We're in the little studio here in the woods on the south end of the island.

That's where I create -- try to bring 18th century to life through my bookbinding.

Well, being born in Virginia, I got an early start in the 18th-century history part of it as a kid.

My family came to the colonies in 1772 in South Carolina.

And my father, being a gunsmith, he made reproduction firearms.

And my mom, being a hearth cook, we really lived in history.

And we traveled to reenactments.

And that's what really triggered my love for history, is because it was that tangible and that you could smell it.

You could feel it.

You could taste it.

And you could hear it.

The bookbinders during the Revolutionary War period were very important.

The biggest part, I think, that really they played a big part into were the pamphlets.

They were very easily produced, quickly produced.

They were not bound as the book would be bound.

So it was very quick to get them out and distributed across the colonies, and also stir up some thought.

One of the largest and most known and important one was "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine.

The process we take, we bring in our paper, fold it into signatures.

This is a signature or a section of the book.

And this allows the piercing cradle.

You would take those sections, lay it inside the piercing cradle, take the sharp object, and pierce the well.

And we take it to the sewing frame, and that's where we start sewing.

We have our hemp cord, linen thread.

We wax the thread with beeswax.

So I go on to this side of the cord and go through the hole.

Then you do stitching all the way over and back, just laying a signature on top of signature as you go.

And then you cut it from the frame and free the book from the frame, and you'll end up with a text block that looks like this.

And then you'll want to lace those cords into the boards like that.

So you'll see here the cords have been laced on.

They've been frayed and glued to the board, giving it a really, really sturdy, very strong binding.

Then we'll stretch leather over the spine.

The final step, which is really critical, is the tooling, if you do any tooling on it at all.

Once this is heated up, you'll make sure that it's the right temperature like I mentioned earlier.

And then I will place that here, and then I will roll it across the book, and you will end up with all the pattern you see here with different rolls and punches and stamps.

And that's pretty much a really quick run through the bookbinding process.

Well, we do a lot of maps.

We've done reproductions of wills and testaments and letters of the period.

It was a great opportunity, very good opportunity to be able to work with the Ken Burns team to have my stuff featured in the documentary "The American Revolution."

So throughout the documentary, the ephemera and the maps that you see on vignettes that they filmed pretty much is our work.

So yeah, that was -- that is exciting, very exciting.

I also have, do faux food, 18th-century faux food as well, for museums.

>> We're currently standing in This Is Native Land, a permanent exhibition at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, Washington.

This Is Native Land is an exhibition that tells the story of Washington state from an Indigenous perspective.

We really wanted to show the ways in which Indigenous people are reclaiming their food practices and carrying that forward for the next generation.

Paul McClintock made most of the food that you'll see on display in This Is Native Land.

Paul's work is so realistic that you just want to taste it.

He performed magic by making those things really look real and come to life so that people can understand the significance of these first foods for Native peoples.

>> Craft, craft is very, very important, I think.

I was raised in a household that we were constantly creating.

I'm more of a visual person and a sensory person, and the craft has such multiple steps and stages.

It's like a puzzle coming together, and there were so many aspects involved into that.

So that's why I really focused in that area.

Yeah.

It keeps on giving.

[ Music ] >> Funding for this edition of KBTC Profiles provided by the KBTC Association.

>> KBTC Profiles are available at kbtc.org.

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