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.

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.