#but i've checked my other two bookbinding notes posts so often that it'd be silly not to also write this down somewhere i can find it can

[liapher]

a couple bookbinding notes on two projects i did last week :)

the first one is a4-sized and perfect-bound. the contents were already typeset, but the interesting things to learn here were:

the book is typeset in the style of edward tufte's books, which works really well for this kind of non-fiction. in short, the text is in a column that takes up the left two thirds of the content area, and figures and additional notes are placed in the right third. i read several of tufte's books earlier this year, and this worked really well in print (despite it looking somewhat unusual in that the verso and recto don't mirror one another), but now i realized how useful that layout is for pdfs that are also meant to be read digitally---you can have a professional- and good-looking layout with margin notes without the text column and/or margin column appearing to jump to and fro as you scroll through the file.

i still had to compile this. did you know you can externalize tikz commands so those graphics are only recompiled whenever something's changed. this speeds up things so much. this really isn't a bookbinding note, just a note to myself in case i stay in academia.

since the book was a4-sized and i don't have access to any printers that can deal with a3 paper at the moment, i had to do a perfect binding, which turned out to be pretty fun. i followed the very helpful video by sage reynolds, except that i neither had some spare greyboard nor a book press so i had to use some bulldog clips and weights (books) instead, but that worked too. (i think the greyboard would've made it a tad easier to line everything up and keep the spine straight while gluing it though)

sawing the holes was the most fun part i think. i just used my regular book sewing thread instead of some thicker cord for filling in the holes, and that seems to have worked nicely. the perfect binding ended up sturdier than i expected, but i'll see how well it does when i actually read the book :)

the case itself was pretty straightforward, like a simpler version of this one but as a quarter binding instead of a full binding. (i forgot to keep in mind the thickness of the bookboard used at the front and back when deciding on the width of the spine, so now the spine looks a tad too thin imo.)

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the other book is a small (12 cm × 16 cm) journal for taking short notes on bookbinding projects, like so:

the idea was to use up some old paper with a company logo letterhead, so i needed a relatively small format where the folios would still fit on the non-company-logo part. lesson learned here: don't trim paper when you're tired, it will go wrong. 🙃 oh well :))

the binding itself isn't too remarkable---french link stitches for the text block, and a quarter-bound case. i used thicker endpapers for this book (unknown gsm but substantially heavier than typical copy paper) and i think this worked really well for this book: