Bookbinding A Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science and Center for the Book Copyright © 1995 Douglas W. Jones; This work may be transmitted or stored in electronic form on any computer attached to the Internet or World Wide Web so long as this notice is included in the copy. Individuals may make single copies for their own use. All other rights are reserved.
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Abstract Introduction 1. Preparation of Sections for Photocopying 2. Photocopying 3. Colating and Folding the Sections 4. Making a Cover 5. Punching Holes 6. Sewing the Sections to the Cover 7. Trimming the Pages 8. Making a Dust Jacket 9. Alternatives Other Bookbinding Resources Rated as Information Value of the Week by the Austria Information Switchboard, July 12, 1997. Selected as Best of the Web by C&T Publishing, November 1999. Rated as a Select Instructional Site by Wannalearn.com, June 2000. Included in the Link Larder by the Swedish Schoolnet, Dec. 2000. Indexed by Backwash, January, 2003.
If books had been invented after the computer, they would have been considered a big breakthrough. Books have several hundred simultaneous paper-thin, flexible displays. They boot instantly. They run on very low power at a very low cost. Prof. Joseph M. Jacobson, MIT Media Lab, quoted in the N. Y. Times, Apr 8, 1988, page B2.
Abstract Bookbinding, the art of sewing pages into a cover to make a book, can serve many purposes. This tutorial introduction is aimed primarily at those who wish to preserve the content of old pulp paperbacks by photocopying them onto archival paper and then binding the results using an archival binding technique, the long-stitch. Most of this tutirial is equally applicable to binding materials from other sources. This text was written after consultation with staff of the University of Iowa Book Conservation Laboratory, and an early draft of this text was reviewed by a preservation librarian for the Reserach Libraries Group. Book-Lab, of Austin, Texas, offers services comparable to those described here on a commercial basis. Another source for such services is Information Conservation Inc.
Introduction This tutorial on bookbinding is oriented towards the preservation of the contents of decaying pulp paperbacks; the first step in this process involves photocopying the decaying book, but most of this applies equally well to making up limited editions based on photocopies of manuscript pages or typewritten material Assuming you are starting with a decaying paperback, you should ask if you really want to destroy the original! It is very difficult to photocopy an old paperback without destroying what is left of the binding, so it is worth asking if the book can be preserved by other means, for example, by neutralizing the acid in the paper. If the paper in the book's pages breaks when creased and then reverse creased, the paper is beyond saving. For example, if dog eared corners of pages tend to fall off when they are unfolded or reverse folded, the paper is too brittle to save by any means other than plastic or tissue paper lamination. In the case of the worst of pulp paperbacks, it may only take a decade or two for the paper to reach this state of decay. Assuming that you have decided to sacrifice the book to be photocopied, you can produce a limited edition of the book on archival paper. With a proper binding and modest care in storage, this should last for centuries. I don't recommend undertaking this project more than once for any particular book! It is hard work! Read this whole report before trying it yourself. If anyone else has already done the job, you may be
able to cut your effort in half if they saved an unbound photocopy that you can copy and bind.
Last Modified:Thursday, 01-Aug-2002 17:32:11 CDT.
1. Preparation of Sections for Photocopying Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
Once you have concluded that a paperback is beond repair, the first step in preserving its contents is to complete its destruction. Slice off the glued spine of the paperback so that the pages come apart as separate sheets. You can cut the sheets from the spine with an X-acto knife, or you can find a shop with a paper shear that will cut the spine loose. Here in Iowa City, one of the larger copy shops has a shear; they charge $2 a cut, which isn't a bad price considering the total cost of the project. Keep the pages in order after you cut them free, and keep all the pages, including blank leaves in the front and back of the book! In making up the sections to be bound, you will generally find that you need these blank pages in order to make the sections come out even. The next step in the process is to tape the loose pages into pairs for copying. This not only saves paper -- you can easily copy two pages of a typical paperback on each side of a standard sized 8.5" by 11" sheet of paper, but it is also necessary for a durable sewn binding. Take a look at a high quality hardback book to see how it is constructed. You will find that the pages are organized into groups, called sections or signatures, where each section is folded down the middle and then sewn to the binding. Each section typically consists of from 4 to 16 sheets of paper; the number of sheets of paper in a section is almost always a power of two because the pages of a section were originally printed on a single large sheet of paper that was folded and re-folded prior to binding and trimming. (The most common exceptions to the power-of-two rule result from the manual addition of extra pages to some sections of some books.) If you follow the instructions given here, you will very likely reconstruct the sections from which your paperback was originally made. I have found that "Scotch Brand Post-It Tape" works very well for joining the pages of a paperback into pairs for photocopying. It took three rolls to make up DEC's "Introduction to Programming, a 608 page pulp paperback, counting all the pages, not just the numbered ones. In taping together the pages into pairs, note that you need to leave space between the pages for folding and binding. The margins on some paperbacks are small to nonexistant, so merely butting the pages together won't always leave sufficient space. You can assure yourself uniformly spaced pairs of pages by making an alignment jig, or should I say, drawing such a jig, on a sheet of 8.5" by 11" paper (the same size paper you will be making your photocopies on).
Note that two pages of a typical paperback, when placed side by side, are slightly smaller than a sheet of typing paper. You will need a margin in the middle of each copied sheet to sew the binding and similar margins around the edges are appropriate, particularly if you intend to trim the book after it is bound. Set two sample pages on your jig and adjust them until the margins look good, as in Figure 1.1, and then mark their outlines on the jig and use these marks to align every pair of pages prior to taping them together.
Figure 1.1: A page alignment jig.
The gap between the outlines of the two pages must be narrower than the white tape you use to pair up the pages, enough narrower that a strip of tape can get a firm grip on each page without covering any print. Note that many pulp paperbacks were cheaply made, and this frequently means that the text was poorly centered on some of the printed pages. As a result, you may have to shift pages one way or the other in some cases in order to center the text on each page. It may help to tape up your pages on a light box so you can easily see where the text on both sides of each sheet falls relative to the margins you've drawn. If the text is well aligned, the work will go more quickly if you glue strips of cardstock to the alignment jig along the bottom and outside edges and then use these to align the pages. As an aside, if you're taping up 8.5" by 11" pages, perhaps typescript or laser printer output, you can make these up into 11" by 17" sheets and then use between a 64 and a 77 percent reduction to put these on 8.5" by 11" paper. The reduction to use depends, in large part, on the margins available on the originals. If the originals had wide margins, the smaller reduction can be used (with care in centering), while if the originals had narrow margins, a greater reduction will be needed, along with
some space between the original pages to give a margin for folding and sewing. Now you are ready to set to work. Take the stack of original pages, in order, right side up, and turn over the top 8 sheets, placing them beside the stack as if they were still bound to a common spine. Then pick off the top sheet of the left stack and put it on the left square of your jig and put the top sheet of the right stack on the right square of your jig, and tape them together, being careful not to shift their alignment. If you use something like Post-It tape, it will stick to your jig in the gap between the two pages being taped, but it can easily be peeled loose. Pause to doctor any dirt specks, pencil marks or other marks that might spoil your photocopy. I use bits of Post-It tape to cover these, and I erase pencil marks if the paper will tolerate erasure. Where the original text was obliterated by ink, I type replacement material on Post-It tape and stick it in. Once this is done, I flip the pair of taped together pages, tape them together on the flip side, and doctor that side, if needed, before setting the pair of pages aside. Do not turn over pages except when turning blocks of 8 or when flipping pairs of pages, an operation done once with each pair! This greatly simplifies keeping the book in order through this process! Keep making pairs of pages, where each pair consumes the top page from each of two piles of unpaired pages, until you have exhausted the smaller pile. At this point, you will have a pile of 8 pairs of pages. this is the prototype of one section of your reprint of the book. Having carefully set aside your finished section, turn another block of 8 pages and repeat the process, reconstructing the next section. In copying DEC's 1973 Introduction to Programming, I found (from occasional ink smears and other printing defects) that the 8 sheet sections I reconstructed were replicas of the original sections that had been folded and bound in the original paperback. The book was made of 19 such sections, which comes to 152 double sheets of paper. In the original printing, each section was printed on one sheet of newsprint that was then folded 4 times and cut to size before being glued into a paperback binding. Once all the pages are taped up, you're ready to have them copied. Ask the copy shop to use acid free paper, at the very least. You may want to ask for archival paper or lightweight acid free bond, but be aware that some paper sold as bond or as archival paper is unnecessarily thick for folding and sewing into a book. Some copy shops may have access to paper with a known grain direction. If possible, ask for cross-grained paper so that it will fold more easily. (Long grain paper folds more easily along the long dimension of the page, cross-grained paper folds more easily along the short dimension.)
2. Photocopying the Sections Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
When talking with a photocopy shop about copying what is obviously a book, they'll demand permission to make a copy. I got permission the obvious way, by calling the publisher. It took two weeks and a few phone calls, mostly to toll-free 800 numbers, where one person referred me to another, who referred me to another. Once it was clear to the right person that my interest was in what they considered to be an obsolete product, they asked me to fax them a letter requesting permission to make the copy, and some time later, they faxed me a reply granting surprisingly broad permission to reprint their material, conditional only on my including a note that the copies were made by permission, and on my inclusion of an appropriate copyright notice. The Library of Congress guidelines for Preservation Photocopying require an added note, on a page added to the copy itself that identifies the copy as such and includes, if necessary, the copyright statement applying to the copy. The note should identify the nature of any change to the original that was made in copying, including a note on the degradation of the content, if any. For example, if the original contained photographs or colored inks that do not copy well, this should be noted! Since you most likely have over 100 sheets of paper that need copying, check a variety of photocopying houses, looking for a good price. Your taped pairs of pages are too fragile to be put through an automatic sheet feeder, and because they are slightly undersize, they will need to be hand centered on the glass of the copying machine. In this day of $0.05 per page do-it-yourself photocopies, most photocopying houses will charge you extra for hand placement of originals. When I copied DEC's Introduction to Programming, the handling charge was $0.05 per page, but some places charge up to $0.25. You've done a bit of work to make up page pairs, and you'll want the copies to last, so get them photocopied on archival paper; 25% cotton bond typically costs a penny or two extra per sheet, and for a bit more, you can get strange things like slightly greenish acid free hemp paper. To be technical, specify that the paper used satisfy ANSI/ISO standard Z39.48, Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives, or ASTM standard D3458 Standard Specification for Copies from Office Copy Machines for Permanent Records. Paper satisfying these standards should be marked as such on the wrapper for each ream. For DEC's 1973 Introduction to Programming, the total cost of bond paper, copying and special handling came to $0.20 a two-sided sheet for the first copy and $0.11 a sheet for all subsequent
copies. That means that my first photocopy of the entire book cost $30.40, while subsequent copies cost $16.72. It is worth noting that a well made xerographic photocopies seems to stand up very well to the test of time if they are properly made and properly stored. Toner is subject to chemical degradation, most notably if it is stored in the presence of vinyl or stored under pressure in a hot environment. Vinyl binders, dust jackets and similar threats are very common, and over time, the chemical interaction between the vinyl and the xerographic toner softens the toner and causes it to stick. This effect begins with photocopies in physical contact with a vinyl surface, but over time, it can extends through many pages. Xerographic toner is a thermoplastic that is melted into the paper after the image is deposited. Insufficient melting, caused either by a poorly adjusted fuser in the photocopyer or an excessively thick toner layer will result in a copy that sits on the surface of the paper and tends to wear off with use. To avoid such problems, use a well-maintained copier and set the copy darkness control to the lightest setting that gives an good looking copy. The National Archives suggests a testing procedure for archival photocopies, the peel test, using 3M #230 drafting tape pressed firmly to a photocopy and then slowly peeled off. Details of this test are given in Archival Copies of Thermofax, Verifax and Other Unstable Records by Norvell Jones, National Archives Technical Information Paper Number 5 (1990). In short, if any toner pulls off on the drafting tape when it is peeled off from a photocopy, the copy does not meed archival standards. You have just destroyed a copy of a book that is out of print, so why not make a few extra copies; it brings down the per-copy price, and if you make one extra copy on good paper, and keep it unbound, you can get more copies at a moment's notice. Unlike your paste-ups, the extra copy will be on good paper, so it can be put through an automatic sheet feeder, avoiding special handling charges on future copies. To minimize the problems you have with your photocopying house, provide them with the jig you used to paste up your pages and say you want them centered exactly as shown by the outlines on that jig. Then give them the jig and say they're free to cut out the center of the page and stick it to the glass of their photocopying machine with Post-It tape to help them center the copy. If they screw up the centering, you can and should get hard nosed about it; it's your money! Finally, tell them to keep the sections together! Make it clear that you don't want your pages shuffled. Collating costs a bit extra, so I decided to do it myself, but I asked them to cleanly separate each signature from the next in the stack of copies I got, and to keep the sheets in order. They did.
3. Collating and Folding the Sections Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
When you get your copies back from the photocopy shop, you'll have a box of paper, and you want to have a box of books. The steps you need to go through before binding the books are collating the pages of each section, folding the sections, and collating the sections. Collating the pages of a section is easiest if you pay the photocopying shop to do it for you, since they have collating photocopying machines. Lacking this, lay out the 8 piles of paper representing the 8 sheets that make up the first section of your book and pick the top page off each pile to make one section. Stack the pages so that the top page in the stack has consecutive page numbers on its left and right side (yes, there's only one side of one page in each section that has this property), and make sure that if you read up through the pages on the left side of the pile, you get consecutive page numbers. This should guarantee that you also get consecutive page numbers when you read down through the pages on the right other side of the pile. The first few times you do this, you may have to shuffle things a bit before you get it right, but once you get it right, you can fly, making up sections about as quickly as you can gather pages off of the piles. Once you finish collating the first section of each copy you've had made of your book, set it aside and collate the second section of each copy. Keep the collated sections for each copy together, stacked in order, so that you will end up with each book in a separate pile. If you don't want a hardback book, stop here! Cut each section in half where you would otherwise fold it, then either punch the holes needed to hang the page in a downsized 3 ring binder or have it punched and spiral bound. A sewn binding is more durable, but it involves more work. The final step prior to binding each copy of the book is to fold the sections that will make up each book. I do this freehand, rolling the 8-page bunch that makes up one section until the edges are even, then holding the edges together with one hand while I crease it with the other. Rose MacDonald, a long-time bookbinder, has suggested using a folding board as an alternative to freehand folding. Folding boards are boards about 2 feet (60 cm) square with 3 or 4 headless nails in a straight row down the left side of the board, 4 to 5 inches (10 to 12 cm) apart, with an additional single nail at the top, about 3 inches (7 cm) in from the left side. The nails should stand about 1/2
inch (1 cm) above the face of the board. To use this, with the board on a work table, place the unfolded section of the book up against the nails and roll the right side over to the nails, making sure all pages touch the top nail; then use your left hand to clamp the pages firmly in place and set the crease with your right hand. For left-handed use, make the board left-handed by putting the row of nails on the right side of the board and fold each section to the right, clamping with your right hand while setting the crease with your left hand. When you get all the sections of one copy of the book folded, they won't stack very well because the creases aren't properly set. To set the creases, force the books into a neat stack and clamp them that way overnight. Lacking a bookpress, stack an unabridged dictionary or a few volumes of the encyclopedea on top of the pile of folded sections. The truth is, you'll want a clamp later when you trim the edge of your book (see section 7) so you might as well make it now. Two planks about 4 inches wide, four threaded rods about a foot long, eight washers and eight wingnuts will suffice to make a clamp that can be used to set the creases in the spine and hold the book while trimming later on.
4. Making a Book Cover Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
You have a decent book now, on archival paper, and you need a cover that will be reasonably durable. A full hard-backed case binding is a big project, so I'll recommend something less, a longstitched soft-board binding. This was recommended to me by the book conservation lab at the University of Iowa, and I'm very satisfied by the results I've achieved using it. I should note that if you have professional bookbinders in the area (and most large cities have them), you should be able to geet your book bound for somewhere on the order of $20. Professionals have machines and supplies to do a case binding on fairly short order. The cover for a long-stitched binding is made of cardboard -- specifically acid free two ply museum board. Good art-supply stores carry this. One sheet will make about eight book covers for books printed on standard sized typing paper. In determining the size of the cover, you have to allow for not only the thickness of the paper, but the thickness of the thread used to sew the binding, so now is the time to get the thread. Traditionally, unbleached linen thread is the preferred material, but unbleached long-staple cotton will do almost as well. The key is that it is a natural fiber comparable in expected lifetime to the paper and the cover material, and that it have very long fibers, giving it great strength. The thread should be heavy, heavy enough that you might be as likely to call it fine cordage as you are to call it heavy thread! Thread diameters of close to a millimeter (when uncompressed and not under tension) are quite reasonable. The thread should compress to about 1/2 millimeter when successive turns are wrapped tightly around a pencil. If you have 19 sections, as in DEC's 1973 Introduction to Programming, you'll need to add the thickness of 19 threads to the thickness of your book. To find this, wrap 19 turns of thread tightly around a pencil and measure the length of the wrapping, then add this to the thickness of the clamped spine of the stack of sections that will make up your book. The museum board has the interesting property that it flexes fairly easily in one direction but it is fairly stiff in the other. You want your cover to flex easily from side to side, since that's the way you tend to bend the covers of a book when you hold it open to read. You want the book to be stiff from top to bottom, since bending in that direction should never happen. Taking this into account, cut a
rectangle of museum board with the dimensions shown in Figure 4.1:
Figure 4.1: Basic dimensions of the cover.
Starting with a rectangle the size of one unfolded sheet of the photocopied book, add the following dimensions to the width: P -- the thickness of the stacked sections that will make up the book's body, compressed and measured away from the creased edges. T -- the thickness of the thread. Do not cut the cover oversize. The cover used with this style of binding is intended to cover the pages of the book in the way a conventional paperback cover does, with the edges of the cardboard exactly even with the edges of the bound pages. I did all my cutting with a carpenter's square to guide a large X-acto knife. It took two or three scores with the knife to cut all the way through, and I used an old cardboard sheet as backing so I wouldn't cut into the top of the table I was working on. A paper cutting guillotine also works well to cut out the cover, particularly the type of guillotine that clamps the material being cut so that the blade does not pull the cardboard sideways as it cuts. Having cut out a rectangular piece of cardboard, you need to score the creases where the cover will hinge to wrap around the pages. I measured twice to avoid error, then set my straight-edge along the planned hinge lines and used a blunt tool to score the crease. Traditional bookbinders would use a
bone tool for this. I used the rounded and polished end of a metal ruler I found in my toolbox. Be careful not to cut or tear the fibers of the board when you score it; your goal is to compress the fibers in order to guide the crease. Figure 4.2 shows the cover with scored creases.
Figure 4.2: The cover, slit and creased.
Before you bend the cover, you need to cut a series of equally spaced square-ended slits in the cover, as shown in Figure 4.2. Typically, these should be about an inch apart, (anywhere from 2 to 3 cm will do) and the slits at the top and bottom should be a bit closer to the top and bottom edges of the book (about 1/2 inch or 1.5 cm is nice). Each slit should be about 1 mm wide, but the precise width is less important than the uniformity. I cut 8 slits for this purpose, but 7 would be just as good. The ends of the slits should be about 1/2 the thickness of one section of your book from the creases that you just scored in the cover. There are several ways to cut these slits. For my first effort, I used an X-acto knife, but I've found that cutting cardboard with a hammer and chisel is very fast and accurate. Use a broad-bladed wood chisel that's almost the length of the slit you want, and make sure it's very sharp. Place the chisel so the flat side faces the side of the slot you are keeping, and the beveled face faces the waste material you will discard. Always work against a disposable backing that won't damage the chisel; I use some heavy strathmore board for this. Practice a bit on scraps of your cover material before you attack the real thing. Another way to make these slots was suggested to me by Neil Tyler. He has done this with an inexpensive utility knife, the kind with a cast metal handle that is in two halves held together by a
screw. Normally, you put only one blade in such a knife, but if you put two blades in, side by side, with a spacer between them, you can cut slots that are about as wide as the thickness of the spacer plus the thickness of one blade. There is one warning about this method! Be extremely careful! Wounds made by closely spaced parallel blades are nasty, difficult to bandage and slow to heal when compared with the commonplace cuts that most users of sharp tools have experienced on occasion.
5. Punching Holes for Sewing the Sections Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
Paper is hard stuff, and pushing a sewing needle through 8 layers is no fun; it is far easier to prepunch each section for sewing! To do this, make a jig out of a scrap of cardboard with a very straight edge. First, cut a shallow wide notch in the cardboard. The depth of the notch should be about the thickness of the 8 sheets of paper that make up your sections. The width of the notch should be the height of the spine of the book. Then, put the jig parallel to the length of the part of the cover that will be the spine, so the notch just brackets the cover, and carefully mark where each slot in the spine passes your jig. Finish the jig by making a V shaped notch at each mark. These notches show where the holes go in the crease of each section. It's a rare day that you can get the slots in your spine perfectly symmetrical, so mark one end of your jig as the top, so that you can punch all of your sections the same way. Always make the up direction point towards the top of the page, and your book will come out with even edges. Figure 5.1 illustrates the finished punching jig, resting against the spine of the cover:
Figure 5.1: The punching jig against the spine of the cover.
The purpose of the V shaped notches is to guide the tip of an awl as you punch holes in your sections. Slide your jig into the center of a folded section until the notched edge rests in the crease, then hold
the back of the section against a scrap of wood and use a good sharp awl to punch a row of holes, one per notch in the jig. Keep the section folded fairly tightly, and the awl will find the center of the crease in the section and the center of the notch fairly naturally.
6. Sewing the Sections to the Cover Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
Now, you're ready to sew your sections into your book cover! The long stitch I used is a fairly modern modification of an ancient style of bookbinding; the basic rules are simple: Sections of the book are sewn into the cover one at a time, in sequence, from the front of the book to the back, using a single length of thread to sew the entire book. In sewing each section, the thread runs once down the length of that section, alternately inside the fold of the section and outside the spine of the cover. The thread is always sewn inside the fold of the section at each end of the book; except at the ends, the threads of successive sections alternate, so that the sewing pattern on the back of a finished book (with 4 sections in this example) should look something like is shown in Figure 6.1:
Figure 6.1: The sewn spine, from the back.
B -- The beginning of the thread. E -- The end of the thread. The book is sewn with a single thread, between the indicated points. Note that it takes a bit of cleverness to sew the ends of the sections, since the natural alternation of over and under brings the thread out somewhat randomly in one or the other orientation. The thread should always pass over the end of each section and around the end of the spine. This helps prevent the pages from tearing out, because tears almost always begin at the end of the crease. Before you start sewing, you need to measure out enough thread to sew the entire book. For a book with 19 or 20 sections, wrap the thread 10 times around the handfull of sections when they're clenched tightly in the cover. Then wrap one or two turns for good luck. It's better to have a bit of
extra thread than to have to knot the thread in midbook! Before you start sewing, it helps (but is not strictly necessary) to wax the thread with beeswax. To do this, clamp the thread against a block of beeswax with your thumb and pull it through with your other hand. The thread will tend to cut a slot in the wax, so keep changing the angle of pull to even out the wear on the wax. Do this two or three times with the full length of thread before you start sewing. A note of caution: You do your final quality control check when you commit yourself to sewing in a section! Once the wrong section is sewn in or the right one is sewn in with a missing or inverted page, it's no fun to undo. Check what section you are sewing, and make sure it is all there and rightside up! As you gain experience, you'll find that you spend less time checking, but it's better to do too much checking than too little. Also, with each section, check that all the pre-punched holes line up with the slits in the cover. If they don't you've probably got the section upside down. If they still don't line up, you've done a bad job punching the holes, and you'll have to repunch a few. Figure 6.2 shows, in some detail, is a cross section of the knotting at the end of a thread:
Figure 6.2: Cross-section through the first or last section of the book.
T -- The thread P -- The pages being sewn in C -- The cover K -- The knotted end of the thread Try to keep the knot and the loose end on the inside of the book. A tight square knot will do well here. Start by making the knot at one end of the first section, and finish sewing the first section to the spine. At the end, you'll face a problem -- how to finish one section and start the next. Here, in some detail, is the sewing pattern used to change from one section to the next. If the thread emerges from the end of a section in the crease of that section, go outside the cover and down into the first prepunched hole in the next section, then out the crease, over the spine, and through the same hole as you begin sewing the length of the next section. If the thread emerges from the end of a section outside the spine, go around the end and down the
crease, re-using the last hole in the same section before going outside, around the end of the next section, and up the crease. In both cases, the above sewing pattern will produce the result shown in Figure 6.3:
Figure 6.3: Detail, looping from one section to the next.
Here, dashed lines are used to show threads that are tucked into the crease of a section, while double horizontal and diagonal lines show the threads visible from the outside of the spine. Whenever you use the same hole twice, always be sure not to sew the thread through itself. Pull the thread that goes through the hole off to one side, then thread the needle through to the other side of the same hole. If you do accidentally sew through the thread, it will make it difficult to tighten the thread when you're done sewing. As you reach the end of the book, it will get hard to squeeze the last few sections in. You'll have to press hard to move the already bound pages down the spine to make room for the last sections, and as you work on the very last one, you'll have to squeeze the book again each time you try to get the needle through. If you measured the spine width correctly, you'll just barely manage to fit the last section in -- that's the test of a perfect fit. If you run out of thread before you reach the end of the book, follow the instructions below for tightening the thread before you tie on a new length of thread, then tie the knot (a square knot) as close as you can to the last hole the thread passes through, Keep the knot on the inside of a crease! Do not back yourself into the situation where you have a knot that you need to pull through a hole in the sewing when you try to tighten the thread later. Before you tie the final knot in the book, tighten the thread, working along the spine from the inital knot towards the end, pulling out any slack until the thread is uniformly tight throughout the sewing. I use a sharp awl (the same one I used to punch the holes in the sections) to do this, since it is easy to insert the tip under a tight loop of thread and pull the slack forward to that loop, tightening the previous loop. You don't need to pull too hard, but you don't want to leave any slack in the binding.
Finally, when the sewing is uniformly tight, tie the final knot, and you have a book! If the pages aren't in the right order at this point, though you'll have trouble fixing the order without cutting the thread and re-sewing! The spine of the finished book is shown in Figure 6.4. Note that the end sewing and the threads holding the center sections of the book match almost perfectly with the pattern illustrated in Figure 6.1. The pattern of the threads holding the very first and last sections is somewhat obscured by the tighter packing of these lines of sewing.
Figure 6.4: The sewn result!
The book shown in Figure 6.4 has seen several years of use, and the impact of this wear is quite visible. Repeated flexing of the fold where the book front meets the spine has torn some of the surface fibers. Should this crease ever begin to tear, it would be a simple matter to thread linen tape through the sewing and glue it to the front and back covers in order to reinforce the spine and hinges. The photo shows no wear on the threads, and the torn fibers along the crease are very clean; this is because the book has been protected by a dust jacket since it was bound.
7. Trimming the Pages of your Book Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
You now have a book, but you'll notice that the pages don't come out even along the edge of the book opposite the spine. The innermost pages of each section stick out farther than the others, giving that side of the book a jagged edge that can make the book difficult to use. People who do "art bookbinding" seem to like this irregularity, but for a book you intend to be used, it's worth trimming the pages to make an even face. The easy way to do this is to take the book to a place that can shear off the edges. The same shear that works for trimming off the spine of a paperback will also serve to trim the pages of the new book, so if you can have the book trimmed for only a few dollars, do so. Tell the people who are trimming the book to square up the edge before they trim it, and then take off about 1/8 inch or 3 mm. If you've got appropriate margins around your photocopies, this shouldn't cut into the images of the original pages. Do not try to have the top and bottom trimmed! These edges of the book should be fairly flat already because you started with good square sheets of paper and punched them carefully in a jig. If they're a bit irregular, carefully banging the top and bottom of the book against a table top should square them up. In any case, the irregularities on the top and bottom are your fault, and you cannot fix them by trimming! The thread that sews your sections to the cover reaches all the way to the top and bottom edges of your book, and trimming the edges will cut the thread! You can make a tool to trim your own book out of a wood chisel (1/2 inch or 15 mm minimum width) and a few blocks of hardwood. You'll need to hold your book in a clamp while you trim it. I made a minimal clamp out of two planks about 3/4 inch or 2 cm thick and a few inches longer than the book. These can be held against the book using C-clamps, or holes can be drilled through the ends of the planks so that long bolts (threaded rods) and wingnuts can be used to hold the book tightly in place. I used the same clamp I made for setting the creases in my sections (see section 3). Clamp the book (including the covers) loosely between your planks, then square up the irregular edge of the book by pressing it edge down on a tabletop. Use shims about 1/8 inch thick (2 or 3 mm) to hold the two planks back from the irregular edge (I used thin LEGO bricks from my son's collection). The edges of the planks will define the plane along which you will trim the book, so it is important to
square things up carefully. Once you have the book squared up, with the squared edge protruding the right distance from the clamps, tighten the clamps down hard, being careful not to disturb the squareness of the assembly. Now, you're ready to plow off the rough edges with your chisel, except that you need a jig to help hold the flat of the chisel exactly in the plane of the faces of your plank clamps. Figure 7.1 shows my jig just after I've begun work on a book.
Figure 4.2: The plowing jig against the spine of the book.
H -- The chisel handle C -- The two clamp jaws J -- The hardwood jig holding the chisel I attached the chisel to my plowing jig with a pair of countersunk wood screws that grasped the narrowest part of the shank of the chisel between the handle and flat part of the blade. Most of the flat part of the blade is countersunk into the body of the jig in a slot I cut with the same chisel. The final adjustment of the blade height is critical. I do this by trial and error, adding scraps of paper behind the chisel blade or shank, as needed, to bring the flat of the blade exactly into the plane of the bottom of the jig. In retrospect, I should have made one jaw of the clamp about twice as thick as the other, because by the time I've plowed off half the pages, the far end of the jig holding the chisel falls off the jaw of the clamp and it's a bit harder to keep the cutting edge of the chisel exactly on the plane I'm trying to follow. The problem isn't serious enough to make me go back and make a new clamp, though. It is crucial that your chisel be very sharp, and there must be no bevel at all on the flat side of the blade! Careless sharpening will frequently put a slight bevel on the flat side, and this will make your plowing ride up as you work across the book instead of allowing you to hold to the plane established by the jaws of your book clamp. To plow off the edge of the book, stroke the sharp edge of the blade gently against the edge of the book, holding the flat face of the chisel (and the flat face of the jig) tightly against the jaws of the clamp. Each stroke should cut through a few pages along the full length of the book. Since the cover
is in the clamp too, it might take a few strokes to make the first cut through the cover. As your plowing continues, a pile of confetti will accumulate around you, and you will learn the best angle to hold the plowing jig and the right pressure to apply in making the cut. It is far better to apply too little pressure than too much. Trying to cut through too much paper in one stroke will stretch the paper, resulting in a rippled texture. Even more pressure will begin to tear the paper instead of slicing cleanly through it. I usually plow my way through about 3/4 of the book from one side, then change sides and plow in through the cover from the other side. This means that I finish the in mid-book, using extremely gentle strokes towards the end in order to trim of the last few hanging bits of confetti. If the plowing rode up out of the desired plane while cutting from the first side, the final cuts made from the second side end up trimming off hair thin shreds in the area already trimmed from the first side, largely correcting the error.
8. Making a Dust Jacket for your Book Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
The cardboard cover of the book you just made has threads that show on the outside, and it has no title or cover art! You can add artwork, hide the threads and protect the binding with a paper dust cover. I used 11" by 17" paper to make a dust jacket. This is double the size of the typing paper on which the book was copied, and the largest standard size paper most photocopiers will handle. If you're lucky, you'll have an original cover that you can photocopy onto the dust jacket for cover art, but by the time a book has reached the point where this kind of copying and rebinding project is worth while, this is unlikely. I did some cut-and-paste work with photocopies of parts of the body of the book to reconstruct an approximation of the typography used on the tattered original cover, then photocopied this onto a colored paper dust jacket before cutting it to shape. Figure 8.1 shows a general plan for a good archival dust jacket:
Figure 8.1: The dust jacket.
A -- First fold in the top and bottom of the spine. B -- Second fold in the left and right sides.
C -- Finally, fold in the remaining flaps. Note that care is needed in folding in the two sides of the dust jacket, crease B in Figure 8.1. If these are folded tightly over the ends of the cover with the book open, the dust jacket will be too tight to allow the book to be properly closed. Ideally, you should first close the book, then wrap the jacket (with fold A already completed) around the book, and then fold in the ends, cracking the cover open only as far as needed to tuck the large end flaps in between the cover and the pages of the book. The 11" by 17" paper I used (the largest size the photocopying shop could handle) wasn't long enough to fully jacket the insides of the cardboard book covers, so I used photocopies of the insides of the original cover as "end papers", gluing them to the dust jacket (but not to the cardboard cover) with PVA cement after the dust jacket was folded on. One of these "end papers" is visible in Figure 8.2. You'll need to clamp the book shut to keep the paper flat while the glue dries, but this raises the risk of some glue leaking out and sticking to the rest of the book. To prevent this, insert sheets of wax paper between the sheet you are gluing and whatever it shouldn't stick to.
Figure 8.2: The finished book, open to show title page and inside of dust jacket.
You should be able to remove your dust jacket by opening your book so far that the front and back cover are parallel and then sliding them out of the jacket. In normal use you would never expect to open a book that far, so a dust jacket made this way is unlikely to fall off accidentally. If you intend to use the book much, I recommend wrapping the paper dust jacket in a mylar jacket -mylar drafting film is the ideal stuff. Use "magic transparent tape" to hold the mylar dust jacket on (it's also made of mylar), taping the jacket to itself, not to the book. The only difference between making the first dust jacket and any additional layers of dust jacket you might put on your book is that, where the flaps at the top and bottom of the spine (crease A in Figure 8.1) were the first flaps you folded in on the first jacket, you can do these last on any outer jackets, tucking them into the space between the inner jacket and the spine. The result is shown in Figure 8.3.
Figure 8.3: The finished book, with a mylar jacket over the paper jacket.
A book made as suggested here, using both an inner paper dust jacket and an outer mylar jacket, looks very much like a commonplace hardbound book. The air spaces between the layers of the book jacket give it a bit of a plush feel, and the hard mylar surface protects your cover art at least as effectively as the varnish and laminated plastic common in modern commercial bookbindings. Furthermore, the added height and width of the layered dust jacket protects the exposed threads at the top and bottom of the spine from abrasion; this corrects what is perhaps the most important weakness of this particular style of binding! Do not use vinyl dust jackets! Vinyl sticks to xerographic copies, pulling the ink from the paper, and it is slightly acid, speeding the decay of the paper. The effect of vinyl is not confined to direct contact. When a stack of xerographic copies is stored in contact with a vinyl surface for a period of years, the influence of the vinyl appears to seep through the pages, causing the ink to get sticky on pages many sheets from the sheets actually in contact with the vinyl.
Polyethylene dust jackets are also compatable with xerographic copies, but they are quite soft and do not provide the same degree of mechanical protection that is offered by hard plastics such as mylar.
9. Alternative Binding Ideas Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
Once you've bound a few books, it is worth exploring alternatives. Here are some variations on the basic techniques outlined in the previous sections.
Trimming the top and bottom If you want to try trimming the top and bottom edge of your book, you will have to end the sewing back from the ends of each fold, instead of sewing over the ends of the folds. To do this, cut the cover and punch the pages in exactly the same way you would if you intended to sew over the ends, but treat the first hole in each section as if it was the end of the fold. Figure 9.1 shows the spine of a book sewn this way.
Figure 9.1: Sewing for trimmed top and bottom edges.
Once the book is sewn and the face of the book has been trimmed, you can now trim about 1/4 inch (0.5 cm) off of each end. Clamping the ends of your book will pose problems because of the swell in the binding, caused by the thickness of the thread you used in sewing the book. I find that this swell can be dealt with adequately by rounding the spine. Most traditional hand-bound books in glued bindings have a spine which is rounded when it is glued, so it stays in that shape. With the absence of glue in a long-stitch binding, the same technique of rounding the spine is applicable, but the shape will not be permanent. What I do to begin rounding a book's spine is to squeeze the spine in my hands, working the book until the center of the back of the spine pops up against my palms. Once the book has been "urged" to give in this direction, it can be clamped along the spine (or put in a bookpress) and the clamp (or press) can be carefully tightened
until the book is crushed flat and the spine bulges out. Rounding the spine puts considerable stress on the sewing and on the cover, but I have not seen this lead to broken thread, torn paper or a torn cover because the stress seems to be distributed very uniformly throughout the structure of the binding. Nonetheless, this stress gives you reason to work carefully as you squeeze your binding! Once you have your spine rounded, you'll be able to re-clamp first one end of the book and then the other so you can plow off the unevenness at the top and bottom of the book. Plowing through the folds at the end of the spine is a bit tricky, but if you're careful and your cutting edge is sharp and angled properly, it should pose no problems. If you're using a relatively small plowing clamp like the one I made, the big trick is to keep the book straight up when only one end of the book is clamped. If you're not careful, the end of the spine in the clamp will stay rounded while the other end swells up, and this will lead to a very awkward looking result. Note that, in trimming the top and bottom of your book, you will gain nice glossy edges, but you lose the protection against sections tearing out that you gained by sewing over the ends of the folds. The two lose bands of cover at each end of the book don't look very good, but they can be put to good use as places to anchor the spine of a dust jacket; instead of just folding the ends of the dust-jacket's spine in, carefully tuck the end flaps under this bit of otherwise unneeded book cover.
Holes Instead of Slits The basic long-stitch sewing pattern allows the sections of the book to slide from side to side along the slits in the spine. Once all sections are sewn into the book and the stitching is tightened, this poses only minimal problems, but while sewing the last few sections in place, the other sections tend to rise, making it progressively harder and harder to get the final sections into the cover and pressed down far enough to sew in place. One way to avoid this problem is to punch individual holes in the spine for each thread instead of using the slotted pattern suggested in part 4. The best way to punch these holes is to use a small punch of the type designed to punch leather, the kind with a hollow point that you strike with a hammer. Holes with a diameter on the order of half the thickness of a section of the book work well. Do the spine layout, with pencil, on the surface that will end up being the inside of the spine. Mark a line the width of the spine where each slot would have been cut, if you followed the instructions in part 4, and then, for a book with, say, 4 sections, divide this line into 8 evenly sized segments with cross lines. Of these cross lines, 4 will be the centerlines of book sections; these 4 mark the locations of holes, while the other lines hint at where the edges of the sections will lie. Figure 9.2 illustrates this.
Figure 9.2: Layout for punched holes for a 4-section book.
In each group of holes that replace one slot in the cover, it is important to avoid punching them in a straight line. This will weaken the cover enough that tear-through from one hole to another is quite likely, reducing your carefully punched holes to slots. Instead, stagger the holes to one side or the other of the centerline of the slot, as suggested in Figure 9.2. If you stagger the holes so that the threads do not overlap inside the book, the swell of the spine will be reduced, while if the overlap is in the creases of the sections, the swell will increase. The back of the book can look quite interesting when the threads are sewn this way, and if you use colored threads in contrasting cardboard, the result can be quite decorative. Going one step farther, you can plan the punching with patterns more elaborate than zigzags in order to make a very decorative spine that does not need a book jacket. It is important to make sure that nearly half of the length of each thread passes through the crease in the section of the book, since this is the part of the thread that actually holds the sections in place! If you stagger the holes too much, or go to wild with your elaborate patterns, you may weaken the structure of the book. The zigzag pattern of the holes in the spine of the book suggested here means that you must punch half of the book sections one way and half in another way. This, in turn, requires that you prepare two different hole punching templates. More elaborate patterns will require even more complex sets of templates, until, in the extreme, each section of the book is punched separately. Whe the time comes to sew the sections to the cover, the sewing pattern used with punched holes is exactly the same as the pattern you would use with a slotted spine. The only difference you will encounter is that, instead of sewing sections in loosely until the very end, and then squeezing in the last few sections, you will find that you have to do a moderate amount of squeezing to get each section into place. Figure 9.3 illustrates the result you might get with a 4-section book, using a mix of slots and punched holes for binding.
Figure 9.3: The sewn spine of a book using punched holes instead of slots in the back of the cover.
Appendix Other Resources Part of the Bookbinding Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science
The book Non Adhesive Binding, Volume I -- Books Without Paste or Glue by Keith A. Smith, 1991, is the definitive printed source for the long-stitch bookbinding method and many of its variants. The following material on bookbinding hass been made available by others on the world wide web:
General Resources The Catholic University of America Libraries Guide to the Book Arts and Book History This is a good general index! Conservation OnLine The Preservation Department of Stanford University Libraries offers a full-text database of book conservation information intended for conservation professionals. This includes a good online dictionary of bookbinding terminology.
Academic Programs All of the following offer lists of web-based book-arts resources in addition to their listings of course offerings and presentations of scholarly work. The University of Iowa Center for the Book An interdisciplinary program on the book arts and the history and impact of the book. The University of Alabama Book Arts Program The School of Library and Information Science at the University of Alabama offers a MFA in Book Arts. Their web site offers good information on this program and an excellent directory of other online resources. Center for Book Arts
The catalog of the center founded by Richard Minsky, including courses offered, a list of works in the book arts by various artists offered for sale, and a general description of the center.
Other Minsky Online Home Page An exhibit of the art bookbinding work of Richard Minsky, including both books and nonbook objects made using bookbinding techniques. Sheila Summers' Bookbinding Tutorial. This tutorial contains complete instructions for creating a simple hard-cover book. Summers' method is not as complex as traditional case bindings, but it is still fairly durable, making effective use of modern products such as fusible webbing. Superlative Books A dealer in handmade, small press and unusual books, with a web site that features links to a very wide variety of other book-arts web sites. The Thomson-Shore Virtual Book Factory Thomson-Shore is a commercial short-run book manufacturer that has put together a decent WWW-based tour of their facilities, illustrating typical production methods used for modern commercially produced hardback and paperback books. Information Conservation, Inc. A commercial firm wiuth 8 regional binderys around the United States as well as a division specializing in book and paper conservation services and a division specializing in document reproduction. Akkra Inc. A source of bookbinding tools