Morgan's Bookbinding Projects

I got into bookbinding over the panini, so here are all my little book experiments - from the basic beginnings, to my current projects.

[morganali-books]

Sometimes the best book for sketching is the one you cobbled together out of scrap paper and old manilla folders on a lark.

I made this one at work on my downtime. Aside from the needle and thread I keep in my desk drawer for mending emergencies, this one is all rubbish from the office :)

The paper signatures are all damaged paper, or misprints I didn't want to waste. The manilla folders I typically reuse, but they start looking messy after you've crossed out the title a few times.

As the manilla card is pretty thin, I actually made them into little cardboard pockets, and slipped them over the first and last pages of the scrap paper textblock. I then reinforced the outer spine with a wide strip of yellow paper, and the inside covers I anchored in by trimming and gluing the second and second last pages of the textblock to the manilla covers.

It's kind of a weird hybrid between a casebound book and a perfect bound book (your typical paperback novel style book construction).

And because of the junkiness of the whole thing, it's pretty great for messing about in :) very low pressure book to use.

[morganali-books]

And last, but not least (at least for now!), are my work and home diaries for 2023-2024. Same template as for previous years, with some tweaks to add or change things to make them work better. Calendar format has not changed. I did forget it is a leap year next year, so my February pages are ever so slightly wonky.

You may notice that there is kind of a theme for both. 👀💦

For my work diary (the one with the shield), I wanted to evoke something of the House Fortemps armour - green faux leather bookcloth for the spine, the slightly metallic scrapbooking paper for the chainmail, the green and yellow marbled paper endsheets and yellow pages for the text block for that general green and gold colour scheme.

Then I decided to go a little crazy with a craft knife and sketched (more or less freehand from reference) and cut out the unicorn design from the shield. Arguably I should have stuck to just the unicorn head, but then I did the whole dang shield anyway.

The home diary is also subtly House Fortemps themed, and because I am well and truly stuck in the blorbo zone, it is also subtly Artoirel themed as well. This was a bit of an afterthought, so the coloured pages of the textblock and the endsheets have no bearing on the overall design, but I went in for similar colours as the work diary (yellow, green and the sort of greyish brown of the cover), went simpler with the unicorn motif, and picked a scrapbooking paper design for the cover that incorporated the music staff in it (because, you know, orchestrions).

Also please enjoy the picture of me working on these during one of the many Prae runs I did during the last Moogletome event 😂

[morganali-books]

Here are the diaries I made for work and home in 2022-2023 (Pink with green spine is home diary, red with blue is for work).

Not much different from the original template, though some minor tweaks were made. I believe I added in the Mail Pending page for this iteration of the diary, and lost the WoW tracker page as I had long since stopped playing at that point (although, had newly started FFXIV so, you know 👀).

Trimmed the page edges for both of these with a chisel, so they look nice and smooth. Covers are just scrapbooking paper with a bookcloth spine. The blue for the work diary is bookcloth I got from the NSW bookbinding shop, and the green is DIY bookcloth made from green linen and iron on fusible webbing - it works pretty well as a DIY bookcloth, but isn't quite as sturdy as cloth made with book glue. You can't do any tooling on it either as the surface isn't primed for it.

[morganali-books]

Of course, while I was hitting up Project Gutenberg for Bookbinding books, I had to see if there was a version of one of my favourite classical books - Jane Eyre.

As before, I formatted it in Word for print. For this one, I learned how to trim the pages with a chisel - it's a lot of work, but the resulting page edges are very satisfying.

I stitched in headbands to the top and bottom of the textblock, and the cover is made from the DIY bookcloth using book glue, and a faux leather style bookcloth for the spine, corners and name plate.

Though I did attempt to learn how to do gold foiling, I could not get a satisfactory result, and used a metallic gold pen for the text and gold edges.

I tried to seal the gold on the faux leather bookcloth with an artist's spray fixative, and learned the fixative spray *will* make the bookcloth look a little cloudy. So the more you know.

[morganali-books]

Naturally, after tackling "The Workwoman's Guide," I went and hit up Project Gutenberg to see if I could find a copy of "Bookbinding, and the Care of Books" by Douglas Cockerell, which was printed in 1901 and considered a pretty good reference for bookbinding.

I reformatted the whole thing in Word (which is surprisingly good for automatically splitting up a whole document for bookfold signatures).

For the cover I used a homemade bookcloth I made using a green linen, and a book glue I made using tapioca starch of all things. I had previously tried making book glue using fabric starch, but overcooked it and it was a little too thick to use. Starch is starch though, and the tapioca starch worked just as well.

The end sheets are a proper marbled paper I ordered through binding supply place down in NSW who's name escapes me at the present. There's not many binding supply places here though, so they're not hard to find 😅

[morganali-books]

Somewhere along the line, I had the startling realisation that I could print and bind digitally archived old books that are nigh impossible to find print copies of.

I've had a copy of "The Workwoman's Guide" sitting on my computer for some time - it's a great resource if your looking at patterns for clothing in the 1830s specifically - a lot of more modern books that cover historical costuming don't tend to cover this period overmuch. Being written in that period as well though, finding a physical copy is very unlikely for me.

Now, Adobe Reader does have a pamphlet folding option in its print settings, but it does not have the knowhow to figure out multiple signatures all by itself. As long as you're willing to do a little maths however, it's actually pretty simple to convert a .pdf document into bookfold signatures.

The fancy leaf paper came back for the endsheets on this one, and I lined them up so that the fold of the endsheet was right down the middle of the mirrored pattern, which I think looks so nice :)

I still need to decorate the cover, but still not 100% what I want to do with it. It's a good solid book though, you can give someone a good whack with it.

[morganali-books]

I had a Clairefontaine diary that I hated for some forgotten reason. I'd ruined the first few pages trying to use it for a bullet journal, and it wound up in the giant pile of largely ignored and unused notebooks.

I ended up using the existing textblock - which, apart from the few pages I had ruined, was still in decent condition - and re-covering it. There was a tear in the bottom corner of the front page, but I manage to disguise it pretty well by splitting a piece of similarly patterned scrapbooking paper to make it even thinner.

It went onto the ever growing pile of finished diy books after that, but then I realised I had an enormous stack of free recipe magazines that I wanted to try and get rid of, and decided to use this one as a cookbook for recipes I've find that I like.

From beloathed journal, to often referenced cookbook - I'm glad this Clairefontaine diary didn't go to waste :)

[morganali-books]

Never being able to find the exact perfect diary, I realised I could just make my own now. These are my work and home diaries for 2021-2022 (I used to work in finance more or less, so I'm very used to working off a financial year calendar - it's my go to, now).

I formatted a whole diary template from scratch in Word, with a dot grid background, calendars, page headings, etc. My work and personal diaries have a lot of similar elements, though my work one does have a page each month for stocktake, and does not have a page includef for WoW tracking :P

My personal diary I ended up having a weird print error, and I ended up re-printing the middle of the diary on a different paper - in hindsight, not the best plan. The mismatched colour isn't a big deal, but the way it handled ink compared to the other stuff was less than desirable unfortunately. I did add a pocket to the back though, which was very handy :)

(Work diary has the pink endsheets, home diary has the purple sheets)

[morganali-books]

My first attempt at shooting for the moon, let's say.

When I was in high school, I wrote a 40 page novella about some elves. It wasn't very good, but for some reason, my parents helped my hodge-podge the damn thing into something resembling a book.

Taken by some of the 1920s fairytale books I have on my shelf with beautiful watercolour insets and the like, I thought it would be really cute to bind together my high school novella for real, and set about formatting it to fit a pagefold signature layout, and adding in extra stuff I had written in that world to pad it out a little bit more.

For the inset image I did handpaint with watercolour, and then scanned it in so as not to use the original - but I did also do a digital version based on my original sketch. I was inspired by the fairytale illustrations of Charles Robinson, and though I didn't quite capture what charms me about those illustrations, I think it's still nice. Trying to emulate watercolour digitally is very tricky, it turns out.

I think the book has some issues, but I still think it's not bad for a beginner effort :)

[morganali-books]

A fun little book comprised entirely of scraps. I made a text block out of lots of left over paper, and used up the rest of the paper shopping bag and offcuts from the fancy papers i have to decorate it. Will make a good little book for messing about in :)

[morganali-books]

Another book using some of the fancy paper I got in the Dymocks fancy paper section. This paper is quite nice, I've used for a few end papers as well on other books :)

[morganali-books]

Another casebound book, this time using a painting I did as a test for a different project. It wasn't quite wide enough to cover the book cover completely, but I think the pink edges make for a nice touch.

The painting was a test for a DIY bookbinding press I commandeered my brother and his power tools to assist me with, as below.

I did forget until half way through painting this that I owned an easel. Whoopsidoodle. My brother kindly drilled the holes and even rounded the edges of the wood I bought, leaving me to prime and paint it to my heart's content. I think it turned out quite pretty :)

It works well enough, though these days I do find it a bit more efficient to just weigh things down with a few bricks instead 😅

[morganali-books]

Getting into bookbinding:

Pro: You will stop buying just so many notebooks and diaries you aren't going to use.

Con: You will become someone who will hoard and buy beautiful fancy papers like a little bowerbird.

Dymocks has a rack of very pretty fancy papers, on a completely unrelated note.

[morganali-books]

This one was a bit of an experiment, another casebound book using an old paper shopping bag and some pages salvaged from another unusable notebook i had that had these pretty page backgrounds.

I spliced two pages from the diary together for each endsheet, and I wanted to try something interesting using the spiralbinding holes as a feature, but ended up having to trim them away 😔 alas.

[morganali-books]

Some more case binding experiments with some salvaged sketch books. I used scrapbooking paper for the covers, splicing together pages for the covers and spine.

[morganali-books]

This is a bit of an odd one, but for my second little book project, I wanted to try my hand at doing a hard case bound book. The component pieces of this one were pages from a notebook I never used that had the thinnest paper in the dang world, and for the cover I used some star wars wrapping paper. While the end result is a little wonky, I am looking at the blue endsheets in that second photo and am pretty pleased with how nicely they're lined up with the cover edge.

As will become apparent, perhaps - one of the main instigating goals of me learning this new skill, is I have so many inconveniently sized notebooks and sketchbooks that I never use that I've found I could salvage into something actually useable.

While this early attempt wasn't quite so successful, I did learn from some of the mistakes I made in its assembly.

[morganali-books]

Some time early 2021 I had the errant thought, "what if I learned how to bind books?"

Half a minute later, I was looking up tutorials on youtube and rifling through my paper and sewing supplies. For my very first and second attempts, I used youtuber SeaLemon's tutorial for coptic stitch binding, which you can see above has an open spine and doesn't need glue - a pretty good place to start. My first attempt (above) was definitely very rough, took me a minute to get the hang of tension etc.

My second attempt (below) was a bit more successful. You can see the paper signatures are sitting more nicely in that second photo.

For book two, I managed to track down some pre-waxed thread and curved needles - which aren't necessary, but definitely make life a lot easier. The waxed thread is actually quite bulky I found, so while it is pretty good for this style of binding, it's not something I've used a lot for later books.

About a month later, I took both of these books apart and recombined the signatures into one book. I decorated the covers, and actually used crochet cotton that I waxed myself for the binding stitches. It makes for a good sketch book as this style of binding lets the book sit quite flat :)