Thank you, HEDI KYLE, with permisson, taken from the newsletter from Elbel Libro

In June 2016, Hedi Kyle, who had been invited by Marja Wilgenkamp to teach a workshop in Blokker, Netherlands, gave a presentation of her work in a Meet & Greet session, organised by us in Amsterdam. Unsurprisingly a lot of people came, from the Netherlands but also from Germany and Belgium.

Among the visitors was Anne Goy, who is the secret in The Secret Belgian Binding…

Photo taken from Anne Goy’s website Annegoy.be

The Secret Belgian Binding was made popular in the USA by Hedi Kyle, but she didn’t invent it.

She in fact learned it from a student while teaching a workshop in Ascona in the nineties.

That student wasn’t the inventor of the structure either and when Hedi asked her where she learned it from, she could only say that she thought it originated from Belgium.

So Hedi Kyle went back to the United States where the structure became famous as the ‘Secret Belgian Binding’.

It was only years later that Hedi discovered who actually invented the structure: it was Anne Goy, bookbinder extraordinaire of Swiss origin but living in Belgium.

So the binding was indeed Belgian by nationality but no longer secret, and it was officially renamed ‘Criss-Cross Binding’.

A new paragraph in the story of the Criss-Cross Binding was written at our Meet & Greet when Hedi Kyle and Anne Goy finally met in real life for the first time.

Apart from this, the meet and greet was an intense moment for a lot of Hedi’s fans who got to meet her for the first time.

It was an fantastic evening and I still haven’t recovered from the inspiration shock.

Thanks for the organisation.

Coby A.

Thank you, Hedi!