Bookbinding - Wikipedia. A traditional bookbinder at work. Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from an ordered stack of paper sheets that are folded together into sections or sometimes left as a stack of individual sheets. The stack is then bound together along one edge by either sewing with thread through the folds or by a layer of flexible adhesive.
For protection, the bound stack is either wrapped in a flexible cover or attached to stiff boards. Finally, an attractive cover is adhered to the boards and a label with identifying information is attached to the covers along with additional decoration. Book artists or specialists in book decoration can greatly expand the previous explanation to include book like objects of visual art with high value and artistic merit of exceptional quality in addition to the book's content of text and illustrations. Bookbinding is a specialized trade that relies on basic operations of measuring, cutting, and gluing.
A finished book depends on a minimum of about two dozen operations to complete but sometimes more than double that according to the specific style and materials. All operations have a specific order and each one relies on accurate completion of the previous step with little room for back tracking.
An extremely durable binding can be achieved by using the best hand techniques and finest materials when compared to a common publisher's binding that falls apart after normal use. Bookbinding combines skills from other trades such as paper and fabric crafts, leather work, model making, and graphic arts. It requires knowledge about numerous varieties of book structures along with all the internal and external details of assembly.
A working knowledge of the materials involved is required. A book craftsman needs a minimum set of hand tools but with experience will find an extensive collection of secondary hand tools and even items of heavy equipment that are valuable for greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Bookbinding is an artistic craft of great antiquity, and at the same time, a highly mechanized industry. The division between craft and industry is not so wide as might at first be imagined. It is interesting to observe that the main problems faced by the mass- production bookbinder are the same as those that confronted the medieval craftsman or the modern hand binder.
The first problem is still how to hold together the pages of a book; secondly is how to cover and protect the gathering of pages once they are held together; and thirdly, how to label and decorate the protective cover. Few crafts can give as much satisfaction at all stages as bookbinding. First, there was Stationery binding (known as vellum binding in the trade) which deals with making new books to be written into and intended for handwritten entries such as accounting ledgers, business journals, blank books, and guest log books, along with other general office stationery such as note books, manifold books, day books, diaries, portfolios, etc. Second was Letterpress binding which deals with making new books intended to be read from and includes fine binding, library binding, edition binding, and publisher's bindings. A result of the new bindings is a third division dealing with the repair, restoration, and conservation of old used bindings.
How to bind your own Hardback Book by KaptinScarlet in books-and-journals. Download 15 Steps Share. Collection Intro Intro: How to bind your own Hardback Book. The craft of bookbinding probably originated in India, where religious sutras were copied on to palm leaves (cut into two, lengthwise) with a metal stylus. The leaf was then dried and rubbed with ink, which would form a stain. Curnow Bookbinding & Leatherwork, Dixon, California. Custom handcrafted leathergoods and journals. He became more interested in bookbinding while he was pursuing his library science degree at Indiana University, and worked for a time in a conservation lab at the school's Lilly Library.
With the digital age, personal computers have replaced the pen and paper based accounting that used to drive most of the work in the stationery binding industry. Today, modern bookbinding is divided between hand binding by individual craftsmen working in a one- room studio shop and commercial bindings mass- produced by high speed machines in a production line factory. There is a broad grey area between the two divisions. The size and complexity of a bindery shop varies with job types, for example, from one of a kind custom jobs, to repair/restoration work, to library rebinding, to preservation binding, to small edition binding, to extra binding, and finally to large run publisher's binding. There are cases where the printing and binding jobs are combined in one shop.
A step up to the next level of mechanization is determined by economics of scale until you reach production runs of ten thousand copies or more in a factory employing a dozen or more workers. Origins of the book. The leaf was then dried and rubbed with ink, which would form a stain in the wound.
The finished leaves were given numbers, and two long twines were threaded through each end through wooden boards, making a palm- leaf book. When the book was closed, the excess twine would be wrapped around the boards to protect the manuscript leaves. Buddhist monks took the idea through Afghanistan to China in the first century BC. Similar techniques can also be found in ancient Egypt where priestly texts were compiled on scrolls and books of papyrus.
Another version of bookmaking can be seen through the ancient Mayan codex; only four are known to have survived the Spanish invasion of Latin America. Writers in the Hellenistic- Roman culture wrote longer texts as scrolls; these were stored in boxes or shelving with small cubbyholes, similar to a modern winerack. Court records and notes were written on wax tablets, while important documents were written on papyrus or parchment. The modern English word book comes from the Proto- Germanic *bokiz, referring to the beechwood on which early written works were recorded. Roman works were often longer, running to hundreds of pages.
The Greeks used to comically call their books tome, meaning . The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a massive 2. Torah scrolls, editions of the Jewish holy book, were. The first method is to wrap the scroll around a single core, similar to a modern roll of paper towels. While simple to construct, a single core scroll has a major disadvantage: in order to read text at the end of the scroll, the entire scroll must be unwound. This is partially overcome in the second method, which is to wrap the scroll around two cores, as in a Torah. With a double scroll, the text can be accessed from both beginning and end, and the portions of the scroll not being read can remain wound.
Do-it-yourselfer demonstrates how to make a glue bound paper back book. Includes a look at a home made bookbinding jig. Bookbinding design and restoration of books as well as preservation and presentation of important documents.
This still leaves the scroll a sequential- access medium: to reach a given page, one generally has to unroll and re- roll many other pages. Early book formats. Diptychs and later polyptych formats were often hinged together along one edge, analogous to the spine of modern books, as well as a folding concertina format. Such a set of simple wooden boards sewn together was called by the Romans a codex (pl.
Two ancient polyptychs, a pentaptych and octoptych, excavated at Herculaneum employed a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on thongs or cords. This term was used by both the pagan poet Martial and Christianapostle. Paul the Apostle.
Notched-Spine Glue Binding Tutorial. John made his own binding jig to speed up the work. Bookbinding, the art of sewing pages into a cover to make a book, can serve many purposes. This tutorial introduction is aimed primarily at those who wish to preserve the content of old pulp paperbacks by.
Martial used the term with reference to gifts of literature exchanged by Romans during the festival of Saturnalia. Consisting of primarily Gnostic texts in Coptic, the books were mostly written on papyrus, and while many are single- quire, a few are multi- quire. Codices were a significant improvement over papyrus or vellum scrolls in that they were easier to handle.
Make your own books and journals!
However, despite allowing writing on both sides of the leaves, they were still foliated. The idea spread quickly through the early churches, and the word Bible comes from the town where the Byzantine monks established their first scriptorium, Byblos, in modern Lebanon. The idea of numbering each side of the page. This book format became the preferred way of preserving manuscript or printed material.
History of bookbinding. Since early books were exclusively handwritten on handmade materials, sizes and styles varied considerably, and there was no standard of uniformity.
Early and medieval codices were bound with flat spines, and it was not until the fifteenth century that books began to have the rounded spines associated with hardcovers today. These straps, along with metal bosses on the book's covers to keep it raised off the surface that it rests on, are collectively known as furniture. The earliest surviving European bookbinding is the St Cuthbert Gospel of about 7.
British Library, whose decoration includes raised patterns and coloured tooled designs. Very grand manuscripts for liturgical rather than library use had covers in metalwork called treasure bindings, often studded with gems and incorporating ivory relief panels or enamel elements.
Very few of these have survived intact, as they have been broken up for their precious materials, but a fair number of the ivory panels have survived, as they were hard to recycle; the divided panels from the Codex Aureus of Lorsch are among the most notable. The 8th century Vienna Coronation Gospels were given a new gold relief cover in about 1. Lindau Gospels (now Morgan Library, New York) have their original cover from around 8. Luxury medieval books for the library had leather covers decorated, often all over, with tooling (incised lines or patterns), blind stamps, and often small metal pieces of furniture. Medieval stamps showed animals and figures as well as the vegetal and geometric designs that would later dominate book cover decoration. Until the end of the period books were not usually stood up on shelves in the modern way. The most functional books were bound in plain white vellum over boards, and had a brief title hand- written on the spine.
Techniques for fixing gold leaf under the tooling and stamps were imported from the Islamic world in the 1. Although the arrival of the printed book vastly increased the number of books produced in Europe, it did not in itself change the various styles of binding used, except that vellum became much less used. Introduction of paper. The people who worked in making books were called Warraqin or paper professionals.
The Arabs made books lighter. As paper was less reactive to humidity, the heavy boards were not needed.