Today I put the finishing touches on my commissioned re-binding of a paperback CCD Bible. I am extremely pleased with the results and I hope my client will be as well!
The plan was to use red Italian (Cialux) book cloth to cover the cover boards. While I love the look of this fabric, I was at first not entirely sure how I'd put a title on it—I don't have the tools or skills to gild it or screen print it, and the laser printer I used on the paper-covered Plato books would probably not work so well on cloth. However, I remembered back to Brian's Tome and decided the best thing to do would be an embossed look.
I was able to achieve this by cutting the letters out of a sheet of cardstock and pasting it over the front coverboard. The effect is subtle, but combined with the very bold lettering (traced directly from the original cover), it shows up well and has quite an impact. Unfortunately my camera is no good at capturing it—you need to hold it in your hands to really enjoy the effect.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I felt that this book would be incomplete without headbands. By an odd little bit of irony, I'm too lazy to get hold of machine-made headbands, so I defaulted to the more work-intensive task of handmade headbands.
These are stitched directly onto the text block, with the tie-downs passing between pages and through the kraft paper backing rather than through signatures. I used top-sewing upholstery thread over a core of whipping twine, and followed this excellent tutorial.
The book has a very nice profile when lying open. I think this may be the cleanest execution of covering and endpaper paste-down that I've managed so far.
Finally, my client had asked for me to incorporate the inside of the original front cover, if possible, because it had the family name written in it. So here is a shot of the old cover snuggled onto the inside of the new front cover—though I blurred the name for privacy.
It looks awesome! And I'm still a huge fan of embossing myself.
ReplyDelete