Bookbinding explained.

[derekl_1963]

Last night at the ballgame, the_thread_lady  was asking me how the binding I posted the other day 'worked', that is how you read it. She didn't seem quite understand my verbal explanation, so here is a simplified explanation on how books evolved in the West and how this binding 'works'.

Now, as we all know, scrolls were the original 'books'. But scrolls are a royal PITA for a wide variety of reasons, difficult to store, and difficult to actually use. This lead to the first revolution in bookbinding - the accordion book.








Now rather than having to unroll a whole danged scroll the reader can simply flip to the desired page. Even more importantly, once parchment and vellum replaced papyrus, you could write on both sides of the page. This makes for a huge savings in materials cost. These accordions are kind of flimsy though and storage is still a problem because they have to be stored flat which takes up a huge amount of space. So the next step is to add a cover.





The covers are only attached to the front and the back panels of the 'accordion', but the book can now be stored vertically and by making the cover just a wee bit larger than the accordion the edges are protected from damage.

But this format is still a bit inconvenient to read, and like scrolls you still have the problem of how to label the books so you figure out which is which. Until now, labels have ribbons or tags attached to the scroll or accordion and hanging off of the edge of the shelf. As you can imagine its a pain to flip through them all and the hanging tags or ribbon are quite easily damaged or lost. This is solved by the next step in the evolution of the book - adding a spine.





Here we see the spine of a book being attached - which makes for a nice compact package, easy to label and unlikely to spring open like a slinky and damage the pages.


But, as you can see below, with my book open for reading, this wastes a portion of the paper since (as the_thread_lady  correctly noted) you can't use the back side of the paper.






Historically at this point vellum and parchment books had their fore edges (the open edges) slit open and the resulting folded pages attached to the spine - thus arriving more-or-less at something much like the modern hardback book. (Papyrus books, already almost vanished from the scene, didn't get slit as you couldn't use the back side of the page anyhow.) I say more-or-less the same because the details continued to change right down until the 19th century and the arrival of machine cased books, but that is beyond the scope of this little writeup.

Modern book binders and artists don't have to worry about saving on materials, or maximizing convenience however. We can use structures, simple and complex, both for amusement and to exploit their feel as part of the experience of handling the book.