A Little Princess

Last summer I wanted to re-bind a bunch of old paperbacks. I finished Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, then started on A Little Princess and a compilation of Emerson's essays. I got to the point of needing to decorate the covers, felt stumped, and got distracted with other things.

A couple nights ago, riding on momentum from finishing up another project, I finally felt inspired and started working on the Princess binding.

I was really going for the Princess theme here.

I was careful to get photos of every step in the process on this book, so now I have a montage of my paperback re-binding process.

I start by stripping off the old cover and sanding the spine down to the glue. To reinforce the spine, I sink hemp cords about 1/8" in, through the glue and just a little into the paper. Endpapers are tipped in at this point, and then it's on with the super and lining. Hand-stitched headbands complete the text block.

Meanwhile, I assemble the case by fitting new cover boards onto a piece of manila folder. This gets covered and decorated before it is finally ready to attach to the text block. Everything goes together, sits overnight under pressure, and the process is complete!

By the way, this book is available for sale here.

Making a rounded corner in leather

A couple times now I've wanted to round the corners on a book cover. When the corners are square, there are plenty of techniques to miter the fold-overs—for example, Eden Workshops goes into this in some depth. For these techniques, however, I struggled to see the geometry working out as nicely on a rounded corner.

A quick investigation on Google produced no help beyond this video tutorial. It seems promising. The basic idea is just to mold the leather over the corner without cutting it. The excess leather is gathered into ridges and pressed down as much as possible, and the pliability of damp leather allows this. However, I must not have the knack of it—there is always too much excess for my taste, creating a really bulky corner which can prevent the book from closing flush.

I wanted two things: a more or less flat profile on the fold-over, and complete coverage with leather in to about 1". To get rid of the bulk, the only solution I could see was to cut darts into the leather. Here's what I ended up doing.

And some actual photos:

I'm not sure if the solution I've come up with is an especially great one; in fact I already know of a couple ways it could be improved. For example, right at the end of the fold there's a small bit of bulging that messes with the roundness of the corner. More than that, there is an obvious fold—two, in fact—on each corner. Ideally, everything would be one smooth continuum. Still, it's a starting point, and I actually find this technique rather pretty and deliberately crafted.

I would however love to work out other ways of dealing with the excess bulk. It does seem possible to create a flat rounded corner without cutting any darts, as seen on the purple Bible here. I suspect some leather has been cut off the corner in that photo, but not very much; the rest of the bulk has been gathered and pushed out to the sides.

Structure of a commercially bound book

I've been interested in the many different ways to stitch a book's pages together. I started out by learning the structure of a book on cords, which I think is a fairly typical structure for a hand-bound book. It's far from the only one, though, with perhaps the most obvious alternative being the Coptic binding, which uses no cords. I've been compiling a gallery of spine structures in this flickr gallery, if you're curious.

Here's a structure which most artisans typically wouldn't bother to learn, since it's a mass-produced structure assembled by machine. It uses thread and is a little more sturdy than the ubiquitous glue-only perfect binding. I found it in a bonded leather Bible I was taking apart recently, and I suspect it's the structure behind most mass market hardcovers.

Why learn it? Only for re-binding purposes; in my case, the client wanted a section removed from the text block, and I had to figure out how to sew back together the two parts on either side that I had left.

As you can see, there are no cords or tapes. On the inside, at the center of each signature, lengths of thread are visible; in the book I worked on, there were four, though I've only drawn three here.

The structure has most in common with a Coptic binding insofar as the stitches are chained together by looping around each other, rather than passing around a cord or getting sewn through a leather spine.

Unlike in a Coptic binding, there are multiple leads instead of just one. Each pair of adjacent holes represents one lead of thread. The needle goes in the first hole of the pair, jumps down to the other on the inside of the book, passes out and forms a lark's head around the stitch below it, then passes in and jumps back up to the first hole. From there it passes out and into the next signature, then repeats.

This forms one chain of herringbone stitches and one chain of simple stitches for each pair of holes. On the inside, doubled lengths of thread are visible with short gaps between them. (In a Coptic binding, the threads are not doubled and there are no gaps.)

The binding I worked with seemed quite sturdy; though it was about a hundred years old, none of the stitches had broken, though the glued backing was cracked into two sections. It was also quite easy to work with once I found the pattern. I was able to cut out the undesired group of pages, then tie in new lengths of thread on the four leads to sew the one loose signature onto the rest of the text block. I then covered the spine with glue, added super, and cased it in to a leather cover.

Another Bible re-bind: full leather

It seems that, in the province of books with sentimental value which are falling apart and need an inexpensive re-bind, Bibles are king.

That's all right though. Someone who wants a not-too-fancy leather binding is someone giving me a chance to practice simple bindings in leather, and there is no greater pleasure than working with genuine bookbinding leather.