If you want to know how long a leather cover will last, do not look at the front. Look at the edge — the thin cut face around the outside, where the leather was separated from the rest of the hide.
It is the part your fingers find every time you pick the cover up, and the part almost nobody photographs.
What a cut edge is
Straight off the knife, an edge is raw. The fibres are open, slightly fuzzy, and lighter than the surface. Left that way it does what open fibres do: it collects dirt, drinks water faster than the rest of the cover, and starts to fray where it rubs against a bag.
The cover does not fall apart. It just looks tired at the edges long before the leather is anywhere near finished.
What we do instead
The edges are shaped, finished and polished by hand. The same small movements are repeated around the cover until the edge feels smooth to the touch.
The result is an edge that is closed rather than open: smooth to the thumb, darker than the raw cut, and sealed against the things that would otherwise get in.
Why it is worth the time
Because everything else about a vegetable-tanned cover improves with use, and the edge is the one part that can get worse.
The surface darkens and takes on a shine. Scratches settle in and blend. The colour moves toward something you could not have chosen from a photograph. Meanwhile an unfinished edge is quietly going the other way, and after two years it is the thing that makes the object look old rather than aged.
There is a difference between the two, and it lives entirely at the edge.
An honest note about the work
The work is quiet and repetitive. Polishing is a favourite step: the edge becomes smoother with each pass, and you can feel the difference under your thumb.
Another good part comes afterwards: when the parcels are handed to the courier and gone. And later, when someone writes to say the cover turned out well. That is the part that makes the edge worth another twenty minutes.
Every cover is finished this way, and they are here.