mei's adventures in bookbinding

total beginner trying to figure out this bookbinding lark

[mei-bound]

04 - Bumbling along

My plan is to first bind the seven Austen novels, and then move on to fanbinding when I've found my feet a little. Seven books to try things out, get a bit of a groove going.

Also good to have low-level stakes projects where it does not matter if you fuck up. You can just live with the newly learned lesson and move on. Or redo.

So I want to bind each of the seven books in a different colour, because why not. I envisioned something of a rainbow of Austen novels on my shelf. Good to have goals.

Sadly I don't live in a part of the world where multi-coloured book cloth is easy to come by, and I was still trying to abide by the resolution to use my own resources first, if possible. So I started to learn how to make my own book cloth, as the logical solution to obtaining my Austen rainbow. I've been following this tutorial, using cloth and flour paste:

Make Your Own Bookcloth

Here is a simple technique for making professional quality, archival bookcloth from almost any fabric. Backing your fabric using this techni

It's been a little hit and miss, but I attribute that to my absolute amateur status. But even if some of the fabrics ended up curling, I have enough to use for my bindings, and I think they turned out quite pretty. I absolutely love the fact that I can take pretty much any of fabric out of my ever-growing hoarder's stash and use it for books!

My plan was to have green fabric for Northanger Abbey, and I had a nice little piece that would fit the vibe and the silky look of its predecessors PnP and Persuasion (mark I). Or so I thought! But the little bastard fought me every step of the way.

Not only did the glue come through in the front, the edges started fraying and coming apart, and then the PVA made truly hideous splotches on the inside when I tried to glue the fraying into submission. Also, I had again cut the boards too wide, as with my first try at the Pride and Prejudice cover. I had to admit defeat, and start afresh.

Here are some other progress pics:

Sense and Sensibility, signatures getting sewn up. I had run out of white thread and had to use green. XD I don't even mind how it looks. Maybe I'll use colored thread on purpose for other projects.

My stash of darlings, sewn and glued and freshly cut, now waiting to be cased in! On the left, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Lady Susan, and Persuasion mark II for my friend, on the right Northanger Abbey, and my first stab at fanbindings. Mansfield Park is still being typeset, it's taking me awhile. Another chonk in the making.

Onward and upward!

[mei-bound]

First finished binds, wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Of course looking at them I can't help but see all the mistakes I made; spines collapsed, book blocks were trimmed crookedly, endpapers shifted, the print-out, the thickness of the boards, et cetera. That means I learned an awful lot, though! The next text blocks will be better. And like one of the wise book people said, first there was no book, and now there is book, legible and not falling apart. So, Success!

The Austens are going to be my Fuck Around and Find Out binds, so I threw everything at them and tried to make something stick. So many firsts! First time making my own book cloth, following this tutorial. First time trying made endpapers, as per DAS. First time testing how that edge decoration shtick works, hell. I looooooove the beautiful edge decorations on commercial binds, I wanna get there! But my book plough work still needs practice, and I got self-conscious about sanding the edges on my balcony, so the result is rather predictably poor.

Pleasant surprise was the bradel binding! Took me long enough to understand what a bradel binding is (connecting the spine board and the front and back boards with a piece of paper before you cover the whole thing with cloth or paper), but once I got it, I loved it. It sounded so complicated when I read up on it, but it actually made the whole casing in process more predictable and less anxiety-inducing.

I screwed up the first cover for Pride and Prejudice, left the front and back cover too long. They stuck out almost a centimeter beyond the text block, it felt so wrong! So I made a second one.

The cover decoration was just the title cut with my Silhouette on some heat transfer vinyl.

Next up, either the next few Austens (I am ogling Emma, because I love her; ultimately I want to bind all seven novels and have them sitting next to each other on my shelf like little jewels!), or a fan-bind for a friend. Geronimo!

[mei-bound]

003 Ploughing ahead

Yes, I am going to use terrible puns whenever I can. :D

So! The book plough! I had never heard of the tool before, the concept of having to cut off the edges of all pages to make them neat and pretty never even crossed my mind.

But mei, you say sternly. Didn't you promise you were going to make your first books with just the stuff you have lying around at home, and NOT invest in any extra special bookbinding tools just yet?

Yeeeeees. Yes, I did. But seeing what cool stuff all the expert binders on the discord were doing with their smooth book edges (edge gilding! edge foiling! EDGE PAINTING!!!), I started looking at my box cutter with untempered disdain.

Enter the 3D-printed Book Plough!

The concept appealed to me on several levels:

According to the interwebs, in order to get the really nice clean book edges, you need either a guillotine or a plough. Guillotines are big and expensive and I am poor and don't have the space for extra furniture that gets used 30 minutes in an average year and gathers dust for the rest.

Real book ploughs are also big and hefty expensive specialty tools, but the 3D one is open source, small and easily stowed away, and the materials (blade and glue) set me back about 40 Euros.

I don't own a 3D printer, but my local library does, and I've always wanted to try 3D printing something there. You can book printing time slots for up to 4 hours (the waiting list is between 3 and 5 weeks), and it doesn't cost you anything but your own time. (and while you have to wait by the printer for your project to finish, you are surrounded by books begging to be read! win-win!)

So I printed out the thingies in two separate sessions; each plate took about 3 hours. In the middle of the first plate, the filament ran out, and I resumed it with a different color; later I used that other color to print the second plate, which resulted in a really cute dual-color design for my very own plough!

So I had finished printing out my copies of Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion. These two were going to be my "Fuck Around and Find Out" books. I had cut the printed A4 pages into A5, folded them to A6, sorted them into signatures, made some sew-on endpapers, sewed all the sections together, and glued the spines.

Note to self: even with itty bitty A6 books, two sewn-on tapes are better than one.

I don't have a proper finishing press, and my cobbled-together version of two boards and clamps were less than ideal for getting all the signatures to stay in line, but I imagine that'll improve with practice.

Pride and Prejudice had to bite the bullet for being the first to be trimmed with the plough, and boy, did I suck at it! The "finishing press" fell apart if you so much as looked at it, too, which didn't make stuff any easier. I grudgingly drilled some holes for screws and wingnuts into the boards, and also tried several different techniques for moving the plough.

At first I hated the cutting, but by the end of Persuasion, I think I started to get the hang of it. It starts getting almost meditative.

[mei-bound]

002 the plot thickens

So I own several mostly empty notebooks. They are pretty, I buy them or get them as gifts, write something or other in the first couple of pages and then never use them again.

That's why I decided that my first book was not going to be another mostly empty notebook, destined to just gather dust in my slatternly home. But I have an old friend who shares my love for Jane Austen, and the novel Persuasion in particular, so my plan is to bind the book and gift it to her. Persuasion is an open source text available on Project Gutenberg, and it's relatively short for an Austen novel, only about 84k words. Perfect first text to muck about with.

For a lot of classic texts, there are typesets already available, so in theory you just have to download the PDF someone else has typeset for print (for example from one of the generous Renegade Bindery discord resources), print it out, and bind away.

I decided to make my own Persuasion typeset for several reasons: 1. I wanted my first book to be a Quarto in A6 size, because that meant I could use readily-available long-grain A4 copy paper to print. A typeset for such a small book needs a different (larger) font size and different margin widths than PDFs optimized for A4 or A5 sizes 2. I wanted to find out how typesetting is done, and if I ever made it far enough to start doing my own fan-binds, that's a skill I'd have to learn anyway 3. By making my own typeset, I could sneak in a dedication to my friend at the beginning of the book, and faff about with handwritten Jane-Austen font for Captain Wentworth's letter to Anne :D

I took my time and followed one of the typesetting guides available from the Renegade Bindery discord to the letter. And amidst all the new knowledge, I found out something I hadn't quite expected: typesetting is FUN!!! I love doing it, easily one of my favorite parts of bookbinding so far!

From the discord server, I also got an A6 typeset for Pride and Prejudice, which I also printed, to have at least one print file made by someone who already knew what they were doing. :D

[mei-bound]

001 now what?

Time to get started! But where to begin?? For the first couple of months or so, I just researched and crawled the web for tutorials, archives, how-to's. One of the first things you come across is the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, and thank goodness for that.

Because they have their own discord server, the Renegade Bindery discord, and that one will just blow you away with the sheer number of peeps on there, chatting about every possible facet of the bookbinding process. I'm a lurker at heart, and great masses of people make me nervous, but even for the silent reading types such as myself, the discord is an invaluable treasure trove of information. People there give answers to questions you didn't even know you had! My most favorite thing ever is the channel in which people show off their completed books. I'm a visual learner, and the beautiful pictures people upload, showcasing their books and showing off their techniques and little fails alike, are absolutely mesmerizing. You look at those pictures with awe and delight and catch yourself thinking, I wanna be able to do that! and that! and that! and that!

Soon you realize that before you even attempt to make your first book, there are so many questions to sort out first! Will you do an empty notebook to test out the most basic techniques, or attempt to bind a typeset? Hardcover or softcover? Which format should you bind in, A4? A5? A5 horizontal? A6? Paper grain direction? What the hell is a quarto/ bradel binding/book plough? Where do you get equipment from? Boards, paper, a printer, box-cutter, end-paper, PVA glue, awl, beeswax, thread and needle seem to be the bare minimum!

Trying not to descend into panic, you decide to make your first book with as many of the materials you have lying around at home already as possible, so you don't end up buying lots of expensive paraphernalia and then find out after 1 and a half attempts that bookbinding is not for you, after all.

It really cheered me up when I remembered that I already had an awl! Though whatever for, or who brought it into this household, I have no earthly idea. But awl-wise, I am covered. Phew!

[mei-bound]

000 so you wanna bind a book, huh?

I doooooooo!

A few years ago someone did fan-bindings for a fandom I was involved in, and the books they made looked so cool and fun. I hadn't even been aware you could do that, on your own, at home! Just take your favorite stories and make them appear in the solid world! Fascinating stuff. Back then, I had hoped to commission a fan-binder to make physical copies of a story I had co-written with a friend of mine, but it never came to pass, and then the idea slipped my mind again.

But it's been kicked back into the front of my mind recently, with the wish to bind hard-copies of my favorite fics still as present as before. So now I'm taking the plunge and doing it.

I'm going to waffle about my process in this side-blog, and since I am starting from absolute ZERO, perhaps someday someone else will read this and want to dip their toes into fan-binding, too.

Geronimo!