Where Old Hands
Teach New Stories

My name is Martin Wilbert Li, and I have spent the better part of two decades learning to make things with my hands — bookbinding, leatherwork, hand-stitched paper journals, and a quiet obsession with traditional joinery. None of it came quickly. Most of it still doesn't.

I grew up watching my grandmother repair clothes rather than replace them, and my grandfather sharpen a single set of chisels for forty years. That kind of care — unhurried, attentive, built on respect for materials — became the thing I was always chasing, long before I had the vocabulary to name it.

I started documenting my process not because I thought people would care, but because writing about the work helped me understand it. What I discovered is that the struggle is the interesting part: the seam that pulled wrong, the binding that needed to be undone and redone, the afternoon lost to figuring out why a join wouldn't close. Those are the moments worth keeping.

This journal is my attempt to share that honestly — the finished things and the unfinished thinking behind them. I hope you find something useful here, or at the very least, something worth sitting with.