A FORMER Cuddington resident has won the three top prizes in a prestigious national bookbinding competition.

Dominic Riley, 43, who lived in Cuddington Lane, attended St. Nicholas school in Northwich, and studied with master bookbinder Paul Delrue in Chester and the London College of Printing.

He spent 10 years in San Francisco restoring rare books, and now lives in the Lake District, where he and fellow bookbinder Michael Burke have established a bookbinding course at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal. Each year they return to the USA to teach.

The Bookbinding Competition is organised by Designer Bookbinders, a society which is devoted to promoting contemporary bookbinding, and is held this year at the newly refurbished Rylands Library in Manchester.

It is sponsored by the Folio Society, which provides the book that each entrant must bind.

This year's Set Book' was The Somme, a collection of writings from soldiers at the Front. Binders can also enter two Open Choice' books.

Dominic won first prize in both categories, and was also awarded the silver medal for the best overall book in the show, which went to his Somme.

He said: "My approach was to keep the colours muted and the design sparse but evocative: the trenches filled with helmets, the bands of barbed wire, tooled in pewter leaf which is more restrained than the traditional gold, and hints at the colour of gun-metal."

Dominic's other binding is by contrast a very colourful book, Some Birds and Beasts and Their Feasts printed by the Incline Press in Oldham.

He said: "I needed to work on something light after The Somme."

Shapes of coloured leather create abstract images of strange birds, set off by bright dots of gold all around the design.

"I was delighted to win both first prizes and the medal", says Dominic." He has now bound over thirty Design Bindings, each of which takes a few months to create. He has sold many of these bindings to private collectors, and the British Library acquired a prize-winning binding of his made for the competition in 2004.

The exhibition of the Bookbinding Competition is on show at the John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, Manchester, until January 12, 2008.