your lotr edge illustrations are crazy gorgeous!!! how do you get the edges smooth enough to draw on? when I've used an x acto knife it comes out wobbly and when I've used sandpaper the pages feel swollen.... beautiful work anyhow!
Totally!! So i use a beefy paper guillotine, not one of the ones with a simple up and down lever on the blade, but one of the BIG boys that gives you a better mechanical advantage
It was a bit of an investment, but the single most useful piece of equipment I've bought for bookbinding!!
And i can speak to some of the other options too!! An xacto knife is going to give you more trouble than it feels like, because the length of the blade itself is pretty short. Once you get a little ways down into your text block, it's going to be REAL easy to go wandering away from your straight edge, or just for the handle to start bumping into things and causing problems.
I know that chisels are a classical solution for trimming books like this because they gave a long, flat surface that's nice and easy to slide along, but it is also relatively dangerous if you don't take care with your setup!! I used scrap wood and G clamps to try to chisel trim a book a while back, and let's just say the stability was... not good. I stopped after chiseling my knuckle pretty good, but i did recently buy a book press for giving this another go with the right equipment. You can also use specialized ploughs to trim like this, but chisels are probably a more affordable entry point.
But! Sanding is what i currently use when a book is too large to fit in my guillotine! And I know exactly what you mean about the pages bulging out. When im sanding a book, i clamp the edges of the pages HARD between scrap board and scrap wood and go from there with an orbital sander. It isn't a complete solution, I still find little fluffs of paper dust in the pages after I take it out, but it does give me enough to go on. The clamping I photographed here is for art rather than sanding, but it's a similar idea! I want the pages to he operating as a UNIT, i don't want them to be capable of separating and moving independently. For sanding, I don't use the carriage bolts, i use heavier duty clamps, but you can kind of see how clamping forces the text block to act more like a solid piece and less like individual leafs of paper
And I'll say, these days, im using an orbital sander and am picky about how flat things get, but one of my older edge painting projects is pretty UN-flat snd still worked extremely well! My single-volume tian guan ci fu was sanded by hand, which was a terrible idea and gave me so many blisters, and in the end, I didn't yet all of the sawtooth sanded out before I said it was good enough. You can still see the shadows of the little valleys on the left here. But it was still flat enough for a full art treatment! Once you clamp the edges and stop them from swelling, sanding can definitely get you to a good art surface one way or another (though i definitely recommend an orbital sander over your bare hands lmao)