derekl_1963

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.

Another book done - inspired by the Fourth of July I wanted to do something in the colors of the US flag. I think the finished book is not unattractive, but somehow it isn't quite what I was trying to do.

More on the design and construction (and the problems) can be found at my bookbinding blog.

When one has to trim paper that requires a 'seam allowance' it is a damn good idea to remember to include that seam allowance in your measurements and calculations.

At least on the second attempt at cutting.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Avoiding the studio for the moment

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.

After much hemming and hawing, finally a simple book emerges from the workshop. There are a few flaws that a little practice will fix, but it feels good to finally get one finished after half a dozen attempts. (The folds of the inner leaves are just a touch tricky.)