I've been diving into a bit of book binding youtube lately. It looks like it could be quite a relaxing little craft hobby. Now I've got a baby I've been thinking a bit about activities we can do together when she is older, and I think we could have a lot of fun doing some arts and crafts (painting, drawing, collage, etc.) Being able to make notebooks and such together could be fun too. I'm picturing making books that we then can fill out with things, like little 'diaries' that start out with pasted pictures and scrawls and progress to writing practice and clipped-out art from stuff we find.
Here's some nice channels I've found so far.
Four Keys Book Arts (https://www.youtube.com/@FourKeysBookArts) (some amazing videos here on medieval binding too).
Bitter Melon Bindary (https://www.youtube.com/@bittermelonbindery) (nice introductory videos)
Ido Agassi (https://www.youtube.com/@idoAgassi)
Book Care Studio (https://www.youtube.com/@BookCareStudio)
DAS Book Binding (https://www.youtube.com/@DASBookbinding)
Finally, I think the reddit page on book binding (https://www.reddit.com/r/bookbinding/) is quite inspiring!
I'm at the stage now of accumulating some basic tools, with a few remaining things on their way in the post. I'm not sure how much time I'll have for this hobby at the moment (maybe just a few hours a month to start with!) but I'll post my creations here.
Is there anybody else here who has some experience binding? Maybe you have some resources you'd like to share? Or pictures of your creations?
Coincidentally, I did a short book binding workshop a few weeks ago at the Coventry Book Fair, which was very enjoyable and involved no specialist tools or equipment.
We made little notebooks out of:
- Pretty paper for the covers (apparently wallpaper cutoffs make for good covers but any relatively thick paper, not card, will do)
- Plain or lined paper as you like for the pages
- String to bind them
The only equipment we needed was a hole punch and pritt stick glue, but the pages and covers etc were already cut to size so I imagine a guillotine or similar would also be very useful for cutting multiple pages accurately
I know some conservators etc who may have more detailed advice on this: I've never done book binding myself, I have made paper but never whole books :)
Quote from: Spritelady on August 16, 2026, 12:45:01 PMCoincidentally, I did a short book binding workshop a few weeks ago at the Coventry Book Fair, which was very enjoyable and involved no specialist tools or equipment.
We made little notebooks out of:
- Pretty paper for the covers (apparently wallpaper cutoffs make for good covers but any relatively thick paper, not card, will do)
- Plain or lined paper as you like for the pages
- String to bind them
The only equipment we needed was a hole punch and pritt stick glue, but the pages and covers etc were already cut to size so I imagine a guillotine or similar would also be very useful for cutting multiple pages accurately
That sounds like fun! Yes it seems pretty accessible as hobbies go really. I'm going to keep an eye out in thrift stores for materials I can salvage, like old books and things (extracting heavy card from ancient coffee table books and such).
Quote from: Jubal on August 16, 2026, 03:02:32 PMI know some conservators etc who may have more detailed advice on this: I've never done book binding myself, I have made paper but never whole books :)
Oh would like to have a crack at making paper. I did once visit a Japanese paper producer in the hills near Kyoto while doing some translating for a Hong Kong magazine that was visiting different makers. The texture on that stuff is phenomenal. I got a sheet that I was able to transform into a crude lamp shade.
I hadn't realised before I did it how much the real problem is not "making paper" but "making paper that ink won't just soak over in a huge blob making it impossible to write on". There's a lot of manual labour that goes into polishing and working on the surface of paper to get between blotting paper and writing paper, and we have notes in medieval documents to the broad effect of "I apologise to the reader that this is hard to read, please blame whoever's job it was to polish the paper who has given me DEFECTIVE PAPER AGAIN."
I got some binding supplies in the post a few days ago, so this weekend I found a bit of time between baby care to do an initial couple of projects. First, I made a book binding cradle using some hardboard I grabbed at a craft store. I followed this tutorial (https://youtu.be/i9CMYHRnbeQ?si=UYXgXJlaPjGpM1Pc) by Four Keys Book Arts.
(https://i.postimg.cc/15ZdddSh/cradle.jpg)
Then I proceeded on to making a pocket notebook following this tutorial (https://youtu.be/ZNtQzdW2UH0?si=NrRj0UeXBgpeoHZs) on the same channel.
(https://i.postimg.cc/YSjDgK68/first-notebook-1.jpg)
First step was to cut some old A4 printing paper in half, so I could fold it into a 'signature', keeping it 'long grain' when eventually folded.
(https://i.postimg.cc/25Jc7cT1/first-notebook-2.jpg)
Then I could use my new cradle and awl to punch some holes. An add number is good. You can see here I have a little guide, but it's not really necessary.
(https://i.postimg.cc/SsMZT6tW/first-notebook-3.jpg)
Sewing using a binders needle! I used unwaxed cotton perle. My good (and more expensive) linen flax I'm saving for proper books that I want to last. It's a pretty simple process for a single signature. Only takes a minute or two.
(https://i.postimg.cc/T1vtZKZC/first-notebook-4.jpg)
Finishing off with a few knots.
(https://i.postimg.cc/Bbfmdjdd/first-notebook-5.jpg)
All finished! Not shown here is the trimming I did with a knife to straighten the edges, using a steel ruler as a guide.
(https://i.postimg.cc/kGPTk207/first-notebook-6.jpg)
(https://i.postimg.cc/fy78Zwsy/first-notebook-8.jpg)
Here's how the spine looks.
(https://i.postimg.cc/mZ7X7S9Z/first-notebook-7.jpg)
I'll make a few of these I think. Some for myself for short term note taking, and some to give away as gifts. Fun initial foray into the world of binding.
I desperately want to learn how to Book bind but I'm naturally terrible at anything remotely arty. This looks amazing!
Thank you! Then go for it! I am not at all arty by natural inclination. Just following the tutorials and learning as I go.
I managed to do more binding today. ^-^
I wanted to tackle the next tutorial in the series by Four Keys Book Arts, which is for making a multi-signature book without needing glue.
You can bind these with card stock too, but as it happened, I had the perfect leather cover already. I previously received a journal from my publisher Mythwright, modelled on a guest book type object in Innkeep.
I ended up half filling it with gamedev to-do lists and other related scribbles. Then much of that shifted online to spreadsheets and txt file build notes.
(https://i.postimg.cc/wvMv2h8G/Journal-Rebind-1.jpg)
Now I think it would be perfect for a grail journal / zibaldoni type book for narrative design, to help me get creative. So why not rebind it? It already had the same exposed spine structure as what i needed (although the binding originally used was a bit different, meaning the thread was too short for me to recycle for this method.)
(https://i.postimg.cc/N0JTQGgg/Journal-Rebind-2.jpg)
First step was to deconstruct the old journal.
(https://i.postimg.cc/nhVCM8SC/Journal-Rebind-4.jpg)
Then I prepared some fresh signatures. The sketch pad paper i used for this was a little thicker than the paper originally in the journal, so I reduced the number of sheets in each signature from 10 to 9 to compensate.
(https://i.postimg.cc/02PNHRvR/Journal-Rebind-5.jpg)
The thread I was using would also be quite thick. I'd stitch it with a bigger needle to match. Still it felt more suitable than my small thread for this bulky journal.
(https://i.postimg.cc/rscqbWvz/Journal-Rebind-6.jpg)
I also waxed the thread using a regular tea candle. Bees wax would be nice in future. First time doing this, but it definitely felt like it helped.
(https://i.postimg.cc/cHGWgw1m/Journal-Rebind-7.jpg)With my cradle I pierced all the signatures. Four holes instead of five this time. The placement also needed to match the existing holes in the leather cover.
(https://i.postimg.cc/QM1G3Cg0/Journal-Rebind-8.jpg)
Then it was time to stitch them together. The process was more involved this time. I couple of mistakes were made where I realised id forgotten to do a loop / link at the top or bottom properly. This required a bit of back tracking each time.
(https://i.postimg.cc/CxbmMq2r/Journal-Rebind-11.jpg)
The view from the bottom. The top and bottom holes are each used twice, with the thread doing a kind of figure 8.
(https://i.postimg.cc/rmfhX2HC/Journal-Rebind-10.jpg)
The spine.
(https://i.postimg.cc/VLCF4tzt/Journal-Rebind-13.jpg)The 'deckled' side edge. I quite like how this turned out. The original signatures had been cut straight but this rougher look fits the binding better i think.
(https://i.postimg.cc/fLRKvgbR/Journal-Rebind-12.jpg)
Ready for use. Looking forward to scribbling innkeep narrative stuff in here!
This is so cool! :o
Thank you for sharing your projects and also for sharing the resources/links. It has been my dream for a very long time to learn the basics of bookbinding, too, so the info will be helpful. Maybe I'll manage to do some of it this year as I had originally planned, but right now there are so many other things going on! Sigh.
I'll follow your progress on here though for inspiration :)
You're welcome! I think at this point I will settle in to making a lot more simple notebooks to give as gifts and things.
Before I can advance to 'real' books ill need some bricks and laminated board to act as a makeshift press. And time.. maybe in a few months.
Recently I tried my hand at French link stitching. This is quite a flexible, basic kind of stitching where you kind of link together your signatures as you go. It can be used for making "book blocks" (where the stitched together signatures then receive glue and spine support before being given a hard cover) or for simple exposed spine notebooks. I'm making an exposed spine notebook here, as it's very simple. I just wanted a general purpose book where I write down words and mini bio info on famous people, aphorisms, thoughts, that kind of thing.
(https://i.postimg.cc/63gCTZ9n/french-1.jpg)
I started off with just some signatures from standard folded A4 printer paper, and some black card. I did go pretty ambitious and make 9 signatures.
(https://i.postimg.cc/brnknvJW/french-2.jpg)
This was my first time to also practice the "kettle stitch", one of the basic book binding stitches. I did it incorrectly (which I realised later), but still it turned out OK. It serves also to help (flexibly) bind together the signatures (with my previous multi-signature journal in leather, the case itself was where you kind of had large kettle-stitch type loops. Here it's simply done around the internal links between the signatures itself.
(https://i.postimg.cc/h4Q962rZ/french-3.jpg)
Here we can see the French links. Given the black card cover, the white pages, and the exposed spine, a nice thick red thread would have looked good here, but I don't have any! Next time. If you look carefully you can see I made a mistake with the orientation of the French link early on, messing up the uniformity. But it's hard to notice if you're not looking. All part of the learning process.
(https://i.postimg.cc/8P8hSLXs/french-4.jpg)
One of the benefits to this style of exposed spine + French links is that you can open it flat easily.
(https://i.postimg.cc/JzMZyMWX/french-5.jpg)
To give the black cover a little point of interest I pasted on this picture of an ancient Chess piece carved in the shape of a Viking Berserker (I recycled it from an old children's book on Vikings that I got at a thrift store.) Aint he cute?
I think it turned out quite well! Looks very nice.
I also like the unexpectedly friend-shaped Viking Berserker :)
Thank you! I've proceeded to make a miniature cased book as a practice run too. I just need to find time to upload the pictures of the process.
Another update in my adventures in book binding. Until this point, all my work had been glue-free. Just card, paper and thread. But I was itching to push on into hard covers and glue.
I also had some small offcuts from my re-binding of my innkeep journal, so I thought I'd make some mini books to learn the basics of hard cases! Mistakes were made. Many mistakes! But it was very instructive.
(https://i.postimg.cc/xdvjCJy7/first-mini-book-1.jpg)
After making a lot of small signatures, I started binding them with the same kind of French link binding that I used for my previous notebook. Only with 1 central place for these links instead of 2, because of how small the book is.
(https://i.postimg.cc/SsmSzSgq/first-mini-book-2.jpg)
Here's the finished thing! And mistake number 1: My signatures were using quite thick paper (from a sketch pad). Given the size of the book as well, this made "the swell" around the spine pretty big. Less paper per signature would have been a good idea (and a bit of time pressing them before stitching.)
(https://i.postimg.cc/26TzQstv/first-mini-book-3.jpg)
I then applied some glue to create a "text block". And here was mistake number 2: Really, I should have set up some kind of press, even if just out of basic supplies, to hold the signatures closer together. I also should have applied 1 coat, waited a while, then done a second coat. This can let the glue form a much better connection (something I've figured out since then).
(https://i.postimg.cc/2y6C2HpJ/first-mini-book-4.jpg)
Still, our cute little text block was holding together. I used some old ribbon as the "mull" (extra spine support that you glue on), and that seemed to work fine. Something a bit more gauzy would be better but I didn't have anything like that.
(https://i.postimg.cc/NFzBV1B7/first-mini-book-5.jpg)
I tried my hand then at making a book cover. I applied some cloth just directly to some hard board, and in this case it turned out ok. It's better to use an interfacing material that you iron on (which I got cheaply at a nearby shop since then). But it was OK. However I made mistake number 3 here, in not having large enough hinge gaps. You need pretty big ones (1cm even). Once I stuck everything together, it was clearly not able to open properly, so I had to just remove the spine entirely to get around it.
(https://i.postimg.cc/CMPhzVkn/first-mini-book-6.jpg)
Luckily, that kinda worked. And you can open the book just fine. Haha. Looks ugly, but still.
(https://i.postimg.cc/yYDVRryc/first-mini-book-7.jpg)
And there we have it. My first hard-cover book, mini though it is. I learned quite a bit from this one. And I must say even now I'm very happy with it, warts and all. There's something amazing about being able to turn a bunch of old paper, some cardboard, thread, and bit of scrap cloth into a little pretty thing like this. Out of raw materials, a bit of beauty. I find the smallness of the thing quite endearing too. It's by my computer atm and I can just kinda fidget with it quite happily. :-) Could be a good thing to stick some poems in. Or maybe tiny pictures or sketches.
Until next time!
It's October already? I'm a bit behind in posting my bookbinding experiments.
Here's one I did last month. The first proper hinged book. A little square thing..
(https://i.postimg.cc/3rnXLvH0/square-1.jpg)
I thought I'd do a red/brown kinda look.
(https://i.postimg.cc/fWBcH9h0/square-2.jpg)
Initially, I was planning on having some exposed French links, but when I waxed the red thread with white paraffin wax it kinda turned them pink, and I wasn't loving the look combined with the brown paper I was using. So I ended up going with a cover after the fact.
(https://i.postimg.cc/9XJdx7jT/square-3.jpg)
Adding some glue and pressing it.
(https://i.postimg.cc/y6vmfZz0/square-4.jpg)
Here you can really see how much glue adds to the overall structural strength of a spine. The trick is that you do it in coats. Of course, a full on proper book also has things like support bands and proper mull. Something I've been experimenting with lately, but that's another post.
(https://i.postimg.cc/8ktRy6Vh/square-5.jpg)
Making some decorative end-bands using support tape and thicker string + glue.
(https://i.postimg.cc/KcJP9Myx/square-7.jpg)
Going back to an online tutorial (https://youtu.be/jabgWTJV6DQ?si=w2Pho0m6rpc9oG42)(Bitter Melon Bindary), I made sure this time I understood the hinge spacing required. What surprised me was how loose it sits on the book prior to adding the book cloth. I wouldn't have guessed it just by eye-balling, as it looks like a huge gap. But this is actually what we need.
(https://i.postimg.cc/bY3x6tjw/square-8.jpg)
Initially we can use a bit of masking tape just to check the dimensions, make sure it's all fitting snug. Adjustments can be made here. You want a few mm overhang around the text block of course.
(https://i.postimg.cc/xjtvszSd/square-9.jpg)Glued on my over-thick jacket fabric "book cloth" (I've got some proper canvas since then but I worked with this for a bit.)
(https://i.postimg.cc/sfwYnhRx/square-10.jpg)
And voila. A cute little notebook thing.
(https://i.postimg.cc/66YrHvN8/square-12.jpg)
This was really where hinges clicked for me. And you can see how with this technique, the spine is free to lift upwards. This lets you open the book wide and flat without issue.
(https://i.postimg.cc/XNQf2C0J/square-11.jpg)
Unfortunately my blade was a bit blunt, and when hand trimming I made a mess. Something I still struggle with, even with a sharper blade, depending on how thick the text block is. A nice industrial strength guillotine would be something. But alas, no space / money for that!
(https://i.postimg.cc/qBjsm3dL/square-14.jpg)
Another glaring mistake I caught after it had dried in the press. Ooops!
(https://i.postimg.cc/sfwYnhRQ/square-13.jpg)
But overall, I was very happy with it as a learning experience in making hard cases.