A tour of the craft in fifteen stations — from a 16th century workshop to a 19th century bindery floor.
You are a bookbinder in the 16th century. A wealthy customer has just handed you a stack of printed pages they bought from a printer and want bound into a book. Binding keeps the pages in order, protects the information, and increases the value of the book. What is the first step?
First you fold the parent sheets (large sheets of paper on which multiple pages are printed). Your parent sheet is set up as an octavo; when unfolded it has eight pages on each side. When correctly folded, those pages will be in order from page 1 to page 16. This folded parent sheet is called a signature. You may use a bone folder to make nice, crisp folds.
Folded signatures are assembled into a text block. Before sewing, all signatures are flattened using a beating hammer to compress the paper and folds.
Use your sewing frame to sew the signatures together, forming the text block. To create a raised-cord binding, which provides extra support for the spine, you'll wrap the thread around the linen cords, or supports, on the frame. These supports will be used later to connect the text block to the boards, or covers.
You need to round the spine with hammers to accommodate the swell of the threads and prevent the spine from becoming concave over time. Animal glue and parchment spine linings are applied to ensure the rounded spine holds its shape.
Folds on the edges of the text block prevent each page from being read, and the rough (deckled) edges trap dust. You carefully trim the pages on all three sides, cutting one or two pages at a time by passing the plow back and forth on top of the press.
In giving directions on how the book should be bound, your client may ask for an edge treatment to protect the book from dust, moisture and bugs. Common treatments include beeswax, pigment, or gold leaf applied to the exposed edges. Gold leaf, the most protective and luxurious edge treatment, requires a coat of glaire, a layer of pigment, and finally gold leaf.
Next, lace on the boards using the excess linen cord from the spine. Then cover the boards with hide or fabric, and decorate the front and back covers and spine of the book to suit your customer's tastes. This is called finishing, and it is delicate, painstaking work.
In the 1800s, as the Industrial Revolution progressed, bookbinding moved from small workshops to factories. The process of creating a book split into two tracks: assembling the text block, and forming the case. This new workflow meant that books could be bound more uniformly.
Until the 1880s, books were sewn on sewing frames, but publishers used a faster, less secure method called recessed cord sewing. The invention of the first commercially viable book-sewing machine, the Smyth #3, was a breakthrough for publishers. Machine-sewn bindings were not only faster, but stronger than recessed cord bindings. In 1903, the National Sewing Machine improved this process and became the industry standard. To this day, a machine-sewn book is called “Smyth Sewn.”
Instead of the repetitive, time-consuming use of the plow to trim the pages, publishers used a guillotine, introduced in the 1850s, which trimmed hundreds of pages at once. This Palmer and Rey, circa mid-1880s, could trim as many as twelve books at a time.
Introduced in the 1850s, the Rounder Backer made it possible to form a convex spine and create a hinge point for the cover with a single pull of a lever, replacing rounding and backing with hammer blows.
Book board, a heavy paper-composite board used for covers, was previously trimmed by hand. The Board Shear, introduced in 1836, cut quicker and more reliably.
Until the introduction of case-making machines in the 1890s, assembling the case was done by hand: cutting the book cloth, gluing up, positioning the boards and spine piece, and turning down the edges.
When publishers moved to covering in cloth, they discovered that embossing cloth required more pressure than tooling leather. Arming Presses — also called embossing or blocking presses — were introduced in the 1830s. They could emboss and gild an entire cover with one press of a heated die. The speed and uniformity of this process rendered hand-finishing obsolete for cloth-bound books.
The case and text block were glued together. The finished books were then stacked in a standing book press to ensure the text block and cover are flat and all of the adhesive is dry. This standing press could accommodate up to 1000 books.
