Book Binding At Long Last!

At last! I have reached the Promised Land! Today is most definitely the first day that I have really felt like I am making books. Now that I have gotten together many of the materials that I need, and I know which direction (sort of) that I am going in, I can start actually making books.

Today, I assembled two different books, filled with blank paper to practice before I settle on a design and work away at the text blocks to fill them. As I mentioned in my last post, I will unfortunately have to give up the ghost of lead type for my text block. Instead, I will be doing the entire book using screen printing. The initial image of the text will be designed and typed on a typewriter and then transferred to screen... but that whole hurrah will be discussed in a different blog post!

The first book is a folded "soft-cover". The cover is made with a light card, called Casan Mi-Teinte turquoise, that I folded and attached the would be text block (in this case blank pages) to. I cut and pasted one of the screen print fish that I designed for the cover onto the card before folding.

The important thing with this type of cover design is that you want the length of the paper that will become your cover to be twice the length of the final cover size so that you can for it in on itself. I wanted my cover to be 12" X 9" so the paper that I am using in this pic is 24" X 9". Make the first fold directly in the middle of the paper. Next, measure and mark 6" from the center fold on either side. Fold where these marks are "hamburger"-wise as the kids say, or in layman's terms parallel to the first fold. This is your cover.

   

 Next, you get the "text block" ready. I did this binding the text pages together, or the guts of the book shall we say, using a simple 3 hole pamphlet stitch. You can find super easy instructions for that here (this is the site I used!).

Finally, take your guts and glue them to the two inner flaps using pH neutral binding glue. (The glue is important because other things will degrade over time eating away at the paper and all your hard work). The inner sheet that I used was a scrap of mulberry paper.

After all that's together, you may also want to press the book under something heavy. Unless you happen to have a bookbinding press lying around, which we just happened to have at UBCO, you can really use anything heavy for this: a cinder block, Michelangelo's David, you know, whatever you happen to have kicking around that will allow it to lie flat between two flat surfaces that cover the entire thing with pressure. If it's not totally covered you might end up with some kinks in your beautiful cover and we can't have that now. 

As for the learning experience today, I will be doing some more screen printed fish in a lighted contrast with more translucent ink to see how they look compared to the stark grey and black I used on the last ones. Also, I have come to the conclusion that I will be doing two editions of the book... one soft-cover and one hard cover. Stay tuned for next time when I explain how I will be constructing the hardcover versions of my book!