Bookbinding for fun and family

During our latest session at Pat's bookbinding workshop, after he showed me something for the umpteenth time, he got a little exasperated and told me that all books are made essentially the same. Each book has a text block, covers, spine assembly, and miscellaneous.) So, in fixing a book you look at the hinge which you can either replace or reinforce. You can look at the text block and either straighten it or replace certain pages. And finally you look at the covers and either replace, repair, or reinforce them. It seems to obvious to me now but it wasn't last week.

I decided to take on as a project a book that Ed & Tiff's family bought recently - a collection of Disney stories. It is a delightful little book except that the inside of the book (the text) is upside down with respect to the covers (and vice versa). I had thought about taking it to Pat's to work on it but was afraid Pat would take it over.



But with my new insight I figured I could easily take on the project.

Since the cover was on upside down, the first step logically is to take the cover off. The trick is to take it off the right way so that it will be easy to replace.



Here you see the result of the first step.

The text block that is removed has a lot of junk on it that has to be scraped away. To make this easier, the pages are put into a press which in this case is simply two boards held together by four bolts and tightened with wingnuts.

The old glue and cardboard has been scraped away and a layer of new glue has been laid down to hold the hinge cloth or mesh.


Here the mesh has been trimmed and a piece of folded paper called the hollow has been glued to the mesh. This allows the paper and the spine to act independently.


Finally, everything is put back together such that the new binding is at least as strong as the original and doesn't show ugly joints. And, of course, the cover and the text should agree.