The Lord of the Rings, part I: Three into one

You ever get into those pissing contests where you try to do something for the longest time or prove you have the most of something or make the biggest thing just to see if you can? Maybe it's not even that advisable, but man didn't make it to the moon by sitting at home worrying about whether it was a dumb-shit thing to do just to prove you could do it—you know what I mean?

What I'm trying to say here is that I've taken a three-volume boxed set of The Lord of the Rings and I'm going to put it all between one set of covers.

The fact that I don't have a lot of cover board in stock has nothing to do with this, nor does my fetish for combining bookbinding with chainmaille as soon as humanly possible and I have this vision of a sheet of fine maille draped over an absurdly wide leather book spine. Just, okay, just picture this monstrous concoction on your bookshelf taking up more attention span than the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. It's going to be beautiful and, somehow, I hope to God, not prone to structural collapse.

So here's what I started with.

Pretty unexciting mass-market paperback boxed set of the trilogy. I stripped off the covers and spines, then whittled out pages that I wouldn't need. The single-volume edition will only need one map section, whereas currently I have three. Really just need one copyright page too. Actually, all these title pages should get consolidated into one. Stuff like that. I printed off a few custom pages to tip in where needed and make the whole thing cohere.

Speaking of cohering, it soon became obvious that no amount of fresh glue was going to bring these three volumes into one, not without two very obvious parts in the spine. I decided the way to make everything work out was to first break the whole thing down into much smaller chunks, then bring all those together so as to avoid two big obvious breaks in favor of many little ones. Alvenh Channe led the way with this excellent tutorial on overcast sewing, a technique designed for single sheet binding.

So, after some quality time with a very sharp knife and an incredibly tiny drill bit, I got my signatures all ready for stitching. After even more time with a needle and a good amount of thread, I finished up with this wonderfully monstrous cinderblock of text:

I don't know about you but I'm pretty excited to see this thing on a bookshelf once it's all grown up.

Some stats, if you're into numbers at all: It has 1137 pages of content for 591 total sheets of paper (with title pages, tables of contents, etc.). The pages are chunked into 16-sheet groups, of which there are 37, each with 10 holes. The needle passes through each of these holes twice, so that's 740 stitches. Number of times I stabbed myself with the needle: just once!

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.

The Art of Racing in the Rain

This book was not what I expected, so I'm glad I read it before I bound it! For some reason I expected it to be about a dog who loves chasing things—you know, good old-fashioned foot-racing.

In fact, this turned out to be a charming, meaningful, and reflective book, written from a dog's perspective, with the rare power to hold my attention while talking about car races. It was reminiscent of the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and certainly a worthy evening's read.

With three themes of its content in mind—dog as armchair philosopher, car races, and rain both real and metaphorical—I set about designing its new look. Enzo the dog takes the main focus, as on the standard cover, this time as a silhouette but with remarkably similar ears. The racing theme found its way onto the endpapers in the form of flying checkers, and a pale blue cover paper sets the rainy theme. For just a touch of class, I used black leather on the spine.

Oh, and I really love adding hand-stitched headbands to books.

I was a little crunched for time on this; my brother wanted it as a birthday present for a friend.  Were I to try again with more time, I'd add some silver detail on the cover—or maybe orange?  I do love blue and orange, and it would maintain more of the original look.

I'm also not entirely happy with the typesetting of the title. Normally I would spend hours obsessing over that!  I might have tried making the dog silhouette full bleed on the left, right against the black leather shoulders, with the title set more to the right... oh well.  It's done now, and all concerned parties have communicated their satisfaction.

Two things that went quite well this time were the spine and the insides of the covers.  I finally realized that I need to crease the shoulders so that the spine is much wider than the text block.  This gives the French grooves more definition, allows the book to open without wrinkling the leather, and gives me wiggle room so that the spine doesn't end up narrower than the rest of the book (a BAD problem).  As for the insides of the covers—by which I mean the cover material which wraps around to the inside—I achieved a very clean, even, square edge on both the paper and leather portions this time around.  Weirdly uneven lumps under the endpapers are not cool!

Metacrafting: the bookbinding workspace

The difference between a craft that I try once, think is really cool, but then don't keep up with, and one that I keep coming back to and improving my skills in, is a good workspace. The space I have is small – just a corner of my bedroom – but it has a few features that allow me to really focus and enjoy sitting down to work on my books.

First and foremost, there is ONE rule about the desk, only one, but it is unbreakable. The rule is this: No computers.

Ever.

Not mine, not my friends'. Not for a minute or an hour.

Laptops, iPads, tablets, they can go everywhere else in the world, but this is my ZONE, my artistic space. It is sacred and protected from the mundane ubiquity of technology, the cluttered space-hogging of keyboards, and the idle drudgery of facebook. (It's a little funny because my real work these days is as a web page designer, so I also work at creativity on a computer; but that has its own, different, space.)

There are no other rules for the workspace, not about keeping it clean and organized, or having only one project at a time, or anything like that, because I tend to find them stifling. I enjoy the primordial soup, as it were, of a busy desk area. I leave the organization to habit and necessity; it is a small enough space that things can't get too far out of hand.

Now for the actual physical features...

1. Twin bright desk lamps: First of all, they're practical; overhead light alone is just not going to cut it. Having two of them allows me to move them around so they cancel each others' shadows. Second of all, when I sit down at my desk and lean forward to switch on these two lights, flooding my work area with all the photons I could ever want, it puts me in a mindset that I'm really working on stuff now, not fooling around half-heartedly. It's time to get in the zone.
2. Rare earth magnet: You can't see it, but there is a large, cylindrical, neodymium magnet stuck to the base of one of the lamps. It holds my sewing needles and a collection of paperclips. Again, it's practical because it keeps me from losing track of sharp things somewhere in the chaos of the desk, and fun because, well, magnet! Done sewing – snick!
3. Cutting board: The board in the center of my desk is my main work surface. It protects the wooden desk underneath from glue and knife blades, offers a convenient writing surface for calculations and quick sketches, and hold a place against the encroaching chaos of the tools and materials around it.
4. Books: Kept close at hand on a hutch are the majority of the books I may need. The bottom shelf is full of instructionals and art books. Just above it is what I consider the "display shelf", with an assortment of Folio Society editions and other pretty bindings. It's good to have them close by for those moments when I need a role model or structural reference – and they work as a heavy, flat weight in a pinch.
5. Paper, board, and cloth storage: I have paper in stacks in one of my desk drawers. I have a plastic sleeve tacked to the inside of the desk by my left knee, full of sheets ready to hand. I have huge rolls of paper leaning in a corner of the room, and a pile of boards and cheap kraft paper on the floor. None of it is more than eight feet from me at any moment.
6. Cat – or more specifically, designated cat roost. It's a foregone conclusion that she is going to supervise my work. Might as well accept it and give her a place of her own. I'm always amazed that she, for her part, accepts the cushion.

Admittedly, this isn't quite the whole story. My dad, who shares my philosophy that a good craft needs a good space and good tools, has an entire basement room of the house devoted to woodworking. A surprising number of woodworking tools are very useful for bookbinding as well, so I make trips to the basement for certain portions of the binding process.

I would love to have a larger area – a huge slab of a table with cutting, gluing, and leather-skiving stations; whole storage bins full of supplies, with cubbies and shelves for all my paper sheets; space for a sewing frame and a book press; and a miniature workshop-within-a-workshop for gold leafing. It won't be happening any time soon and certainly not while I'm living with my parents, but it's something to work toward. For now I get along quite happily with my well-lit, magnet-endowed little space. I hope this maybe gave you some ideas for your own space!