#bookbinding class

[zhalfirin]

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - R. L. Stevenson

(EDIT: have a look at the clamshell box I made for this book here)

A few weeks back I had the chance to take a leather book binding class held by the wonderful Greek bookbinder Dimitris Koutsipetsidis at his bindery in Athens. He helped us patiently to improve our skills and even took us leather shopping in the end.

It was a really great week and I've had the pleasure to spend it with fellow Renegades while making tools and binding books together and doing some occasional sightseeing on the side.

My book was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A book that I greatly enjoy every read and for which I had a lot of different plans before finally settling on this design only the night before case decoration was up in class (many thanks to my fellow Renegades at this point for having opinions on my ideas, I greatly appreciated all your input <3)

The whole trip left me with lots of good memories and plenty of bookbinding things to work on (gold tooling and leather paring included. Although I might end up cheating more often than not with the paring >.<)

Photos were taken by @runawaymarbles, one of the other bookbinders on the trip.

[bookisland]

Workshops New and Old, Taken and Taught

My workshops for the summer session at SFCB are live today! Visit my Workshops page for specific offerings. I am dialing it down a bit this summer to open space for Dominic Riley and Michael Burke, who were unfortunately prevented from visiting for their usual summer regime during covid shutdowns and later. One workshop I am really excited about is an expanded Decorated Edge. It had always felt…

[gender-trash]

(i am seriously late in posting about this due to The Problems BUT whatever! its here now!!)

somewhere around late november 2022, i asked my dad "hey are there any out of print technical books you'd like a reprint of for christmas?"

he linked me to a dubious black-and-white pdf of Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy. now, i wound up checking out a copy through link+, and the original edition is a really nicely put together book! the chapters are themed around various types of measurements (length, angle, etc), and they all have these cute little diagrams which the endpapers reuse in a lil repeating pattern... the image captions are done in this really lovely dark red that did not scan for SHIT... tons and tons of diagrams and illustrations and images (both color and b&w)... just, all around, a fucking nice book!! (see also @morrak's post about it here.)

and that made me feel kind of bad about the crappiness of the pdf, which is where the Problems began. i used my phone to take pictures of all the photos and color diagrams in the original and went about replacing them in the pdf, using what turned out to be the world's worst pdf editing software (i also got through replacing all the image captions in chapter 1 of 5 before my dad convinced me to give up). i did NOT finish the pdf editing before christmas 2022 (i was going somewhat off the deep end, because both my housemates were away visiting family and i had zero external structure in my life so it was just me and my cat and this stupid FUCKING pdf wrecking my sleep schedule together); i poked away at it for most of the rest of my time off and then got so goddamn sick of it i put the project away for months. "it'll be a birthday gift instead", i said optimistically (my dad's birthday is in april! it should have been enough time!)

gentle readers, i did not finish the pdf editing by april. mostly because it was such a miserable slog that i put it off until the last possible moment and then tried to make up for it with another death march.

hating both myself and the project again, i decided i was Not going to let myself typeset Anything Else before it was done, and then took a break to bind my immortal (using the renegade publishing typeset! i didn't do any typesetting!!). SURELY, i said, i can finish this in time for christmas 2023.

i'm sure you know where this is going.

in my defense i DID finish the pdf editing by christmas, despite first doing every other possible procrastination project (including a second edition of the little second century warlord book), because by this point my dad had managed to convince me to lower my standards. on the evening of the 22nd i kicked off the print job and said to myself "this will finish printing overnight and then tomorrow i can work on sewing the textblock!"

late on the 23rd, after lots of babysitting and using at least one cartridge of every color ink in my printer, the print job was finally done. (my sweet and lovely cat wants SO BADLY to hunt and stalk the printer while it is printing -- more specifically, the printed pages, i think because they tend to make noise and move and then STOP moving. for this reason, the printer is kept in the craft room, because the cat can be shut out of the craft room and thus prevented from chewing on the pages when i have an all-day book printing job going. unfortunately the craft room was also being pressed into service as a guest room at the time so 80% of the floor space was consumed by an air mattress which i had to repeatedly trip over in order to reach the printer and replace the ink cartridges.)

then i went to my parents' house on the 24th and 25th and apologized to my dad (again) for not having the book finished. but this worked out well because we finished putting together my awesome new book clamp:

(the feet still aren't done being painted so they're just dry-fit on for now but you can still clamp books in it and that's what matters!!)

i came home, sewed the textblock (french link stitch over four linen tapes, with sewn endbands made of variegated embroidery floss over linen cord, and kozo paper glued over the spine)

... and promptly realized i SHOULD HAVE PUT IN MORE OF A GUTTER because some of the text was getting reeeeeeal close to the spine. "it's fine!" i said. "i just have to make sure it lays flat!! what better time than to try out K118 binding, a technique i have literally never done before and which people on the bookbinding discord notoriously have a hard time pulling off first try! i even have tyvek tape for it!"

so it turns out that tyvek tape isn't actually tyvek with glue on it, it's tape FOR attaching pieces of tyvek TO EACH OTHER, which maybe i could have guessed if i'd done even the slightest amount of research or planning. at this point i think it was the 27th and i was still angling to get this thing done by new year's, so no time to order Actual Tyvek.

fortunately, i had ALSO received An Package in the mail with yarn for a totally unrelated knitting project... shipped in a tyvek envelope.

i peeled all the shipping labels and stickers off my tyvek envelope, cut that shit up, and glued it on there.

and THEN it was time for gluing on covers, which i thought was going to be easy because i had actually thought ahead and ordered materials (specifically acid-free museum board), except when i cracked open the box of museum board i decided i Didn't Like It because the surface was too soft and easily dented, so i glued onto it the too-thin board material i'd previously been using (so that the cardboard goes on the outside of the book). this worked super well (the cardboard stuff has a tendency to curl up from the glue moisture, but the museum board doesn't!) and i'll probably use it on other stuff in the future.

i thought the blue bookcloth i used was kind of boring but i showed my dad the available cloth options and he really liked it, so... what do you know? i cut the piece i used on the back cover very slightly too short but it wound up being covered by the leather, so you can barely tell.

and the leather... a scrap just baaaaarely big enough from my bag of leather scraps from discount fabrics... and this the first time i'd ever attempted to put leather on a book... AND YET the only complaint i have is that i didn't manage to put an even amount on the front and back. it's reasonably square and straight!! amazing!!

i am super super happy with how this project came out (especially given the number of problems i encountered) and oh my god check out how much the spine bends

AND, AS A NEW YEAR'S PRESENT, I FINALLY MANAGED TO GIVE IT TO MY DAD

[assignedclownatcheckout]

Wanted to share some photos of my first bind! @roguedruid 's fic Hero Class Civil Warfare is absolutely God Tier™ and it was the first bnha fic I ever read.

As this was my first bind I've got a few notes: first, I used the complete wrong paper weight so this book is deceptively chonky (not to say it isn't long, but still); second it was first bind so I didn't do anything too ambitious with the cover.

Anyways, I'm really pleased with it and I'm happy to share it! @roguedruid I hope I did your amazing work justice!

I wanted to take some better photos before posting this, but uhhh, I was procrastinating 😅

[thedemonscrawler]

OH YEAH (no I'm not procrastinating) but I think something that would be cool to do with Permission Slip once it's finished is to bind it. Which like, everyone and their sibling suggests binding fanfics, and that's cos it's a cool idea.

The thing is that PS is stupid long, and while I could bind it as one really hefty volume, i think it'd be a lot neater to make a fake paperback series. Like this kind of thing:

Each book would contain multiple chapters, so I think i'd divide it up like

1-4 5-8 9-10 11-13 14-15 16-17 18-20 21-22 Still workshopping the divisions here to get roughly the same length per book. Idk, future project idea

[writer-at-the-table]

More books!

[ineffablefool]

How the hell is all this acrylic paint that I bought for a class I signed up for in 2004 (not a typo) still wet?

[jill-question-mark]

Re: printer paper being nice for bookbinding...

So you specifically said not to do this but...

1)using plain printer paper is totally fine for books if that's what you have access to. It's what I started with and some people just stick with it.

2)most of us who get really serious into it get custom cut paper to be short grain as it should be. We get 11x17 paper cut into 8.5x11 so the grain is correct. Most Renegade Bindery people in the US get it from Church paper, and they've added a listing to their website for it. And it's nice paper. (Hammermill cream typically.)

Nooo don't encourage me! Danger, danger! As punishment you get to see the results of me going to poke around in my old college work.

Here's a little book I probably made after somehow acquiring a colour inkjet printer. The colours have held up well after 25 years!

The interior consists of anatomical clip art. Why? I dunno. If I pretend to be an art historian of myself, I could say I was making a prescient statement about computers taking over everything including our bodies, but honestly I was probably just having a laugh with the extensive clip art collection that had come with my.. WordPerfect? or Corel Draw? software.

Two little books with non-adhesive bindings and rather nice Japanese paper.

The covers stay on via paper tabs.

Here's a set of two books with covers made from hand-dyed/patterned fabric from my textiles classes. The covers are again attached with paper tabs that I made into a decorative element.

More handmade paper. It's unsized and feels like quality paper towels. Looks like dried flower petals aren't an acid-free material and the colour didn't hold up :P

cool little triple-fold guy.

Hand-marbled paper... I was really into purple and teal in combination.... It was like 1997

Bonus: me snarking on "AI" technology, before the turn of the century. Plus ça change? Unfortunately, the computer didn't do a bad enough job to be funny.

[dreadfutures]

one step closer to knowing how to bind my own books the way I want

[spooksier]

do you think you'll ever try to get pandorica published when it's done or will it just be available online? I'd love to have a physical copy :)

yes!! the absolute dream for pandorica is to find a way for it to be physically published (either independently or by a studio) so people can have copies <3

[shitpostdevil]

You have digital bookmarks of fanfiction? That's cute. Now print them out. Bind them. Make it a physical library, coward.

[merylstryfestan]

hey so i know bigolas dickolas is about to bully darkhorse into reprinting the manga, but i've actually started a personal bookbinding project to make an english copy of my own! i'm starting with Trigun Maximum vol 1, and I'm going to post updates as i go!

[gender-trash]

Hi! I have been interested in learning how to make sewn in hardcover books, but whenever I look for guides, they are people just making themselves a sketchbook with not a full on cloth bound hardcover, etc.

Additionally - when trying to find what are good beginner supplies am struggling to find what is recommended. Book boards on Amazon that had reviews saying it was too flimsy... bookbinding kits online that literally have the same waxed thread as leatherworking kits etc,, no idea where to find unwanted linen thread....

There was a gentlemen who teaches bookbinding at sca events id reached out to, but hadn't heard anything back because I'm sure his schedule has been busy.

I know this is a huge ask, but do you have any books or websites or guides you suggest for learning any of these things and for learning what to search for? If these things are listed in a tag or faq, I am sorry I didn't see them when I did a cursory search of your blog after I saw your bookbinding critique post that petermorwood reblogged

YES HELLO JOIN USSSSS!! reject the tyranny of Big Book*!!!

* in the "publishing industry" sense, not in the sense of binding a really thicc boi (which is both allowed and encouraged)

my main recommendation is to check out @renegadepublishing's resource links page (and join the discord if that's your vibe!) and in particular @armoredsuperheavy's tutorial for doing a basic case-bound hardcover, which is how i bound my first hardcover :3 or if video tutorials are more your jam, people on the discord really like DAS bookbinding's youtube channel. also! if you ever happen find yourself in san francisco, definitely take a couple hours to check out the bookbinding museum -- they have a bunch of examples of different binding techniques you can hold in your sweaty little hands and stare at until their secrets are revealed to you >:)

i won't certify that these are good supplies recommendations For Beginners but here's what i use:

lineco (acid-free) book glue you can find on amazon, but i also really like glue stick and double-sided tape formats which are less messy. i love these silicone brushes for applying glue because you literally don't have to wash them you just let the glue dry and then peel it off later. very satisfying

lineco's little packages of linen tape are so fucking overpriced :/ i got a couple rolls from burnleigh & trowbridge a while back and it's literally exactly the same stuff but way cheaper per unit length (or if you don't want a whole roll you can buy it by the yard)

you can also get unwaxed linen thread and beeswax off burnleigh & trowbridge but i ran out and switched back to cheapo prewaxed linen thread (it works equally well!). (i assume "unwanted linen thread" was a typo for "unwaxed linen thread" but if you are using linen thread you absolutely want to wax it -- otherwise it is Badly Behaved)

i bought linen cord (not needed for just A Basic Hardcover but fun if you want to experiment with medieval cord bindings) from talas (which is a specialized bookbinding website that also sells bookcloth and stuff)

this is a nice little beginner kit that comes with an awl, a bone folder, and a punching cradle that will fit half-letter books (it's annoying how you have to constantly screw and unscrew the little clamping screws but it IS functional). for bigger stuff i also have this punching cradle (i had to glue some sacrificial board strips to the bottom to actually get enough room for the awl to punch a decent sized hole, which is annoying). please send a signal flare if you find a Secret Good Punching Cradle...

i actually don't really like any of the book boards i've used so far either, which is maybe because i've been buying cheap crap off amazon (most recently this, which was far too thin; i always wind up gluing two pieces in a stack and then it always curls up even though i put it in the clamp and i Don't Like That). i plan to experiment with museum board soon and i will attempt to keep everyone updated on how that goes

also not a Beginner Supply but this is the beast i refer to as Madame la Guillotine and i love her so so much

wrt book clamping, i am VERY NEARLY DONE making a fancy-ish wood clamp with my dad, but all of my bookbinding has been done with a combination of scrap plywood, random thin hardcover books i don't like, woodworking clamps, and just leaving things under a heavy textbook while the glue dries (my go-to is CLRS)

i hope this helps you in some way!! please keep me updated on your bookbinding endeavors i wanna see what you make :O

[satisfictionbindery]

Another flipback is in the works 👏👀 but having to be disciplined and not bind it because on the final 4 day countdown of dissertation 👏😂

[applesandbannas747]

Being my student is just microdosing on adhd

[writer-at-the-table]

Books!