Book binding

Last summer I decided that I wanted to bind books. Immediately. Lucky for me I found a great book in the library which explained the entire process. Over about two days I made three bound books. A lot of the materials I used are either recycled or things I found in our "art cabinet", which at that point had a fairly high proportion of junk (but which has since been cleaned out and re-stocked).

I wanted to make a journal with lines, so I ended up taking apart one of those composition notebooks everyone uses in elementary school to get paper. I did a good job with the binding on this one. The cover is smooth, the bookcloth is cut well and lines up. I took a long time to decide what I would use for the endpapers, and I'm very satisfied with the result.

The only thing I should have done differently are the stitches which attach the signature of paper to the cover. Somehow they got loose enough while I was tying the knot for the signature to move by an eighth of an inch vertically.

Today in class Barry told us a horror story about a press which had printed a limited edition book on handmade paper and then sent it out to a commercial bindery. The bindery misread the order form, and so instead of sewing signatures together they bound the book like a cheap paperback. Yikes.

I started to write something in here once but I ended up tearing in out. I guess the elegance of the cover papers is intimidating. My favorite of the three books I made is the one with the most imperfections. I'll be posting about that one shortly.