Gerald Ward is a bookbinder, librarian, and maker with more than two decades of experience in preservation, design, and historical media. He currently serves as Assistant Director and Media & Digital Services Librarian at High Point University, where he leads creative and educational programming in book arts, digital storytelling, and media production. As the founder of Bibliopathologist, Gerald specializes in custom bindings, archival enclosures, and the restoration of rare and collectible books—each crafted with intention, precision, and a reverence for the stories they guard across time.

Gerald is a Professional Member of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and serves as Chair of the Special Collections Section of the North Carolina Library Association (NCLA). He is also an Associate Editor of North Carolina Libraries and an active member of the American Library Association, the North Carolina Preservation Consortium, the Guild of Bookworkers, and the Society of North Carolina Archivists. His professional life reflects a commitment to stewardship, craft, and the advancement of the book arts and preservation fields.

A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Gerald brings the same discipline, precision, and commitment to excellence to his craft that he brought to his service. Bibliopathologist is proudly veteran-owned and operated.

Throughout his career, Gerald has performed conservation work on volumes of international significance. His past treatments include an Algonquian Bible (the first Bible printed in the New World, 1663), Shakespeare’s Second, Third, and Fourth Folios, Johannes Fust’s 1466 printing of Cicero, two first editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s presentation copy to Robert Browning of Poems Before Congress. He has also conserved the autograph manuscript of Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, along with many other rare and remarkable texts.

With experience spanning archival conservation, large-scale digitization, and hands-on public instruction, Gerald blends deep technical expertise with a design-forward, historically informed approach. His workshops - ranging from zine-making to historical bookbinding - have reached audiences at universities, libraries, and museums across the Southeast and Midwest. He believes in the enduring power of physical media to connect us to history, to one another, and to our own sense of meaning.