Book press

With the help of hrollaug I built a book press a couple of weeks back, and it finally saw action this week. OK, Ralph did most of the work being handy and all that, I mostly 'supervised' and tried to figure out how the tool would work in practice. Between building it and now using it, V2.0 will be considerably improved.

A book press clamps and holds books and bindings under construction and accomplishes two things: First, when you are binding, you use the absolute smallest amount of adhesive you can. The pressure ensures the adhesive forms a thin and smooth film. Second, many glues and all pastes contain water - and we've all seen how paper can wrinkle when it gets wet. Clamping the paper prevents this. (As does minimizing the amount of adhesive you use.)

All these photos were actually taken the day after the book was worked on - you really want to work as fast as possible once you start applying adhesive.

Here we see the press open ready to put the work in. The base of the press is in the foreground and the top in the background.



Here is a book cover in the press. The extra sheet of paper ('waste paper' in binding parlance) helps wick away any moisture that seeps through the cover paper.



Here is the press closed and under pressure. I'm using the brick here because I was feeling too lazy to run the wing nuts down the bolts as I'm supposed to do. V2.0 will have shorter bolts to make the press easier to use.



After all that - it turned out I'd screwed up the book by misaligning one of the cover sheets... It's no biggie in the long run as I can simply trim the sheet even with the edges of the boards and glue on another cover sheet. There's even historical precedent - I've read accounts by book conservators discovering an older (and nearly identical but flawed) cover underneath existing covers.