Courtesy Nealin Parker

Alexander Bick GS, founder of the independent publishing house Crumpled Press, prepares a book cover for binding.

With the growth of digitized information on the Internet, and companies like Google bringing stacks of books virtually into people’s homes and offices at the click of a mouse, some pundits are prophesying the end of “real” books.

But Alexander Bick, a graduate student in Princeton’s history department, isn’t convinced that we’ve seen the end of books that you can hold, mark up, and pass on to someone else. With two friends, Bick founded an independent publishing house, Crumpled Press, whose editors and volunteers, including Princeton graduate students, make each book and pamphlet by hand. In doing so, they are honoring the idea of books as aesthetic objects, not just transmitters of information.

In May, Crumpled Press was in the middle of binding its latest book, Codex in Crisis, by Princeton history professor Anthony Grafton, about digitization of information and the future of bricks-and-mortar libraries. (For more on Grafton and his book, see the Q&A below.)

On the living-room floor in Bick’s Princeton apartment lay folded laser-printed copies of the pages of Grafton’s book — flattened by gym weights. On a table was a box of book covers made from hand-molded French paper, alongside another box of prints — depicting the burning of the library in Alexandria — that would be taped carefully into the manuscripts. Each book would be folded, cut, and sewn by hand, using an awl to poke holes in the pages and needles and thread to bind the books.

The editors seek to create a community of readers, writers, and bookmakers by hosting book-binding “parties”: Ten to 15 people gather in Bick’s apartment for stretches lasting eight to 10 hours, including wine and cheese breaks. All the editing and labor is done voluntarily. “It’s a labor of love,” Bick says.

Founded in 2005, Crumpled Press aims to promote the “tactile” reading experience that can’t be duplicated by reading information on a computer screen. “We are experimenting with how the reading experience can be transformed,” Bick says.

With eight pamphlets and books published to date, the press publishes first-time authors and writings that might have been tossed aside — hence the name Crumpled Press — because they were not commercially viable for a mass-market publisher. This month Crumpled Press hopes to finish ’Tis of Thee: Reflections on the Fourth of July by Christopher Moses, a Princeton graduate student in history, based on a lecture he delivered last year to public school students in New Hampshire. The press prints between 100 and 1,000 copies per book, charging from $5 for its first pamphlet of poetry to $30 for Grafton’s book.

Among those who helped produce Codex in Crisis were Laura Giles, curator of prints and drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum; Steve Ferguson, curator of rare books at Firestone Library; and Robert Milevski, preservation librarian. “What we have tried to do,” Bick says, “is bring people together around books to discuss their content, to discuss books as a particular medium, and to discover a kind of [scholarly] collaboration ... in the production and circulation of books.”