Bookbinding at Home

.

When I was a teenager, we received a wonderful old weekly magazine that I read avidly.  After some years, the carefully saved issues had to be left at home when I went away to boarding school, and my mother and I decided that the best way to preserve them was to bind them into a volume.  The weekly issues were big floppy things, about 11" by 14", in the style of a newspaper, with a glossy, full-color cover, and inside pages in black-and-white.

"I'll show you how to do it," said Mom, who had acquired a variety of skills, and among them, evidently, book-binding; who knew from where?  We found a straight-backed chair, and laid the magazines, with their spines to the back of the chair.  Then we bought two sheets of heavy, tough paper which were roughly the same size as the magazine when folded double.  So now we had the 52 issues of the magazine, and one of the folded end-papers on top, and one of the folded end-papers on the bottom.

The next thing was to get binding tape.  We decided to use three binding tapes.  We glued them to the back of the chair with paste so that each one began about two inches higher than the January issue, and extended across the spine, and ended two inches below the December issue.  Once the tape was in place, all the magazines were removed, and only the bottom end-paper was left.

Now, Mom showed me how to sew the book up.  It was the sewing that would bind the magazines into a book.

[Added later:  Skip this step!  The end-papers are not sewn to the book!]  You opened up the folded end-page.  It was blue, I remember.  You pushed the needle through it, through the tape, across to the middle tape, through the end-page, across inside the end-page, out through the end-page and the other tape, back through the middle tape, across to the first tape again, and made a knot, on the outside.  The thread, therefore, made an enormous figure-of-eight in and out through the end-sheet.

You laid on top of the end-paper, the December issue, and opened it up carefully, until you had the middle of it.  You carefully pierced through the tape and the spine, up the middle, out through the magazine and the tape, across to the last tape.  [Here, you tied the magazine to the end-paper.]  Then back in through the tape and the magazine, back again to the center tape and through, and down to where you had begun the magazine. [ Tie down.]  Now put down the November issue, in through the first tape and the new magazine, up inside, out through the magazine and tape, up to the third tape, tie up to the previous magazine, back through to where you started, and tie down.  Basically, each section is sewn together using a long figure-of eight stitch, through the tapes, and tied to the adjoining sections at least at the top and the bottom, and in the middle, if desired.  The tying to the adjoining sections must be just tight enough to keep them firmly attached, but not so tight that the spine starts to pull together, forcing the pages to fan open.

As you can see, each magazine was tied to its neighbor only at the top and bottom.  Some binders tie each section to its neighbor at each tape.  Each magazine becomes what is known as a signature; leather-covered books are sewn in signatures, and traditionally signature-binding has been considered the strongest sort of binding.

The sewing continues until all the issues are sewn, as well as the front and back end-papers.  Now you can pick up the bound book; it has all the issues sewn together, as well as two extra blue pages in front, two extra blue pages at the back, and three tapes flapping in the wind, stitched into the spine of the bound volume at every point across the spine.

[The illustration shows a slight variation on the same method; the tapes have not been actually sewn in, they have merely been threaded into the sewing.  They are not helping to keep the signatures together; they will mainly secure the pages to the cover.  The tapes will be trimmed before gluing.]

The rest of the process is pretty simple.  You take the bound book, if you like, to someone who can trim it.  My mother tapped the volume with a hammer until it was slightly convex at the side that would open out, and then it was trimmed by a powerful trimmer; basically a captive knife that was screwed down to cut all the pages smoothly and evenly.  This part is actually not essential.

Now we made the cover, of three pieces of card: front, spine and back, and a piece of bookbinding cloth, a very strong kind of fabric.  The cardboard was glued to the fabric, and the fabric folded down around the cardboard.

The bound book was laid inside the opened-out cover, the three strips of tape extending out for some distance into the cover.  Now the blue end-papers were glued to the cover, completely hiding the binding tape.  Once the book was dry, the binding was complete.

Note that the pages of the book were held together by strong thread, knotted carefully to keep the signatures together.  The book and the cover, though, were held together by the glue that kept the binding tape stuck to the cardboard.  It is always thus: the cover of a book is not fastened as securely to the book itself as the pages of the book are fastened to each other, so it is not a good idea to hold only the covers of a book and shake the pages, to see whether they will come out.  They will, if you persist.

For those interested, Wikipedia gives a wonderful summary of the history of bookbinding, and one can see how the simple method described here has descended from historical techniques, especially those called Coptic methods.  (There is a section evidently written from the Islamic point of view, which has been flagged as not being neutral.  I'm not sure exactly what to make of that; it seems that Wikipedia Judaeo-Christian contributions.  Oh well.)

Arch