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

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

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

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).

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

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

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.

[Jubal]

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."