OKAY, LADS. Got a long post today, because I've been Experimenting. So there's nothing that brings me more delight than uncovering and trying new niche binding styles. I'm a little limited in that i only want styles that can contain a nice big novel, which excludes a lot of art book styles, which means that i get really excited when i find something truly different, like the k118. And for a few years. I've been ruminating on ben elbel's pixel bindings.
And for me, following a tutorial or taking a class... does not spark as much joy as rummaging around on my own and making my own mistakes. This fell by the wayside for a while, probably because I wasn't that experienced when i found out about it, slash I didn't have a story in mind with the right aesthetic. But it never left my mind. And when I found out about the genealogy of this style, with forerunners like alain taral combining bookbinding and woodworking (and marquetry! be still my beating heart) and the articulated binding style developed for italian phonebooks in the seventies, I was reinvigorated.
Oh, and the issue of wanting a book thematically compatible with pixel binding? That's gotta be C Language Cultivation, babey!
So, pixel binding. The broad concept is that it's a semi-flexible cover style created with squares of board material (pixels) hinged together with the covering material. I understood the principles. I bought 3mm tile spacers years ago for this exact project. It was still an ADVENTURE in iterative experiments. These are all C Language Cultivation, and from right to left, i shall call them v1, v2, and v3. And in the end, they were *also* an experiment in different materials. But for all of them, i went in with cover board squares, spaced, and with my turn-ins finished with doublures before casing in.
V1! I knew I was probably going to run into some unforseen game-breaking issue with this one, so I didnt sweat it too hard. I got my thinnest board (0.5mm), faux suede bookcloth, and i even misprinted my book (note the untrimmed fore edge) and just went for it anyways. I lined with more bookcloth. It's not a great book, the boards are awfully thin for the size of the book, my shoulders are HILARIOUSLY large, and my doublures want to come up at the corners, but it works! And the covers are NICE and flexible.
V2! I felt confident, and it was time to break out the real leather. But my DREAM was to bind this in those old school royal blue compiler colors, and i didn't want to risk my good hide just yet, so i grabbed some hand-me-down goat. I did manage to goof things up by cutting my hide too large, needing to trim down some turn-ins after the pixels were in place, and then not being able to pare them. It's lined with paper rather than bookcloth, and despite trying to be careful, i DID punch through it once while trying to work it into the hinges. I also used my BEEFY board, 2.5mm, and the cover feels sooooo nice and luxe, but it is.... very, very stiff. Comparably.
(i am also struggling like HELL to get my squares right. this is a style that really prefers notebooks over actual story contents that need precise trimming and margins, but im stubborn.)
Okay!!! At this stage I was big confident and big impatient, and for v3, it was time for the good leather. I went for the same dimensions as the v2 case and tried to trim my text block less (mixed success). I measured my cover dimensions including the tile spacers and cut my hide to size and pared it carefully. And I went with in-between 1mm board and lined with paper, but was more careful with it. It was nearly, nearly brilliant. This was also a hand-me-down hide, and halfway through assembling the cover I realized... it was probably sheep. And sheep wants to screw you over and delaminate when it gets wet. The book is not bad at all, but it's undeniable that the hinges on v2 are MUCH more elegant and crisp than for v3.
But despite that, it's a very exciting success! Look at that FLEX! I'm almost definitely going to do a v4 (sob) when i get some blue goat hide (soon!), and this was a really cool set of iterations. There's all kinds of interesting quirks, like how i realized it was best for turn-ins and doublures to avoid having edges land too close to a hinge. Or one of the things that came down from alain taral's techniques is that for the best opening action the endpapers flyleaves are a single U-shaped sheet, laminated to the first and last pages of the text block, and then the book isn't cased in at the cover boards, but along the spine. I was so skeptical at first, but i gave all of my books the dangle test, and they performed admirably!!
If I hadn't accidentally used sheep instead of goat, I think I would be completely happy. But as it is, this is still a successful increment, and I'm one hundred confident I'll realize my vision next time!! I'm sure there are more secrets and hacks that I'm missing out on by not taking one of ben elbel's classes, but experimenting and failing myself makes me happier than ANYTHING.
I will say that for someone casually looking for this flexible cover effect... the horizontal hinges are much more for aesthetic than function. The cover is fixed at the spine as it is, so there's simply a limit to how much the cover can move outside that plane. If you're interested in the cover flex more than pixels specifically, I think the italians had it right, and vertical strips of board are the way to go. I'll be trying that out soon as well, but I don't have specific plans just yet. This was a really cool exploration and I'm so, so happy I finally committed to it!