Book Binding

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

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 (some amazing videos here on medieval binding too).

Bitter Melon Bindary (nice introductory videos)

Ido Agassi

Book Care Studio
DAS Book Binding


Finally, I think the reddit page on book binding 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?

[Spritelady]

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

[Jubal]

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