#beginner bookbinding

FUCK. MY. LIFE.

So you're thinking about getting into bookbinding but you don't want to shell out many many money for book board and awls and bone folders and fuckin $40 glue

No problem. I made my first few books with shit I had laying around my house. You may not have all of these things, but hopefully you can use these as a jumping off point, and find your own material and tool subs. And if you find you like the craft enough to invest, you can get the fancy stuff, or you can keep doing what you're doing.

First, a list of everything you, generally, need to make a book, just so we have a baseline.

Needle and thread

Paper

Glue and brush

Bookboard

Book cloth

Awl

Bone folder

Knife

That's the most basic stuff you need for bookbinding. You can get fancy with things like head bands and leather and foil stamps, but to take a pile of stuff and make a book out of it, this is what you need. Now let's start replacing them.

Needle and thread and Paper

Starting off strong and by strong I mean these can't really be replaced. Sorry. But they are super easy to get. I usually just use printer paper any time I'm putting together a book, although I've definitely seen people use other materials. A friend sent me a tiktok where someone used brown paper bags? For the needle and thread, I already had sewing stuff, and there isn't a specific needle or thread to use. I've used crochet thread, I've used doubled up regular sewing thread, I currently have the nice linen thread, it doesn't really matter. And for the needle, you just need something that can fit your chosen thread. Some people use a curved needle, but I don't like them

Glue and brush

"I looked at bookbinding glue online or at my local craft store and it was $40 for a large bottle! This is too much!" I feel you, but also it's ok, you don't need the $40 bottle of glue. You need a $5 bottle of white school glue from any store that sells school supplies. It's a little runnier than """proper""" bookbinding glue but I've used both and honestly it isn't a big enough difference to care

Bookboard

Bookboard is at its core, fancy cardboard, and therefore can be replaced with any other non-corrugated cardboard. I've used cereal boxes. I've glued together card stock until they were the thickness I wanted. You could probably glue together printer paper until they're the thickness you want, but that would be a lot of work honestly. Just keep in mind that the cover will warp when liquid (glue) is applied, but controlling that warp is part of bookbinding, and is a skill thing more than a materials thing.

Book cloth

Once again, you don't need anything fancy. I personally use quilting cotton that I've stiffened with corn starch paste that I make at home (1tbsp corn starch, uuhhh probably 5tbsp of water, whisked in a double boiler, or mixed, microwaved for 30 seconds and then mixed and microwaved again, repeat until the starch is thick and a little transluscent). You can also use like, heat and bond to attach the fabric to a piece of paper, but I do prefer the starch method. And, on my first few books, I just straight up didn't use any stiffening at all. The corners of my books are looking a little ragged, but if you don't care about that, then have fun.

Awl

For stabbing the sewing holes. I personally used a really thick needle I own, but I've also used a finishing nail and a hammer, on top of a really thick bed of flyers so I didn't damage my counter top. Awls can be gotten for pretty cheap from hardware stores, but anything pointy and thin and strong enough to get through several sheets of paper without breaking will do the trick.

Bone folder

For making the folds on your signatures Crisp. When I first started out, I just rolled a nail polish bottle over the fold to crisp it up. I got the idea from when I was a kid and ran a scissor handle over my folds to make them crisp. (I don't recomment using scissor handles, they almost always leave a mark.) But anything solid and rollable would probably work. Jam jar, can of tomatoes if you can get one without that top edge that cans have, water bottle

Knife

This is for cutting your book board to size, mostly. You can use scissors, or any utility knife will do the trick. Honestly, the professionals use utility knives (although theirs are Fancier, obvs, and I'm pretty sure they change the blade our way more often than I do). But yeah, nothing fancy here, just whatever can get your bookboards to a size you can use. You can also use a knife to make the front edge of your book straight (the way signatures are folded, the center of the signature sticks out more than the edges, which can't really be avoided), but don't try this on a book you like. Better to have an un-straightened front edge than to get something messy. Make a practice book block and try and straighten that instead

I finished the fanbinding for @septemberrie 's Silrah bodyguard AU, Battle Lines, earlier this week and I forgot (of course) to take photos of the process but here is the end result! This has been a learning experience and there are definitely things I want to change for the next binding (the level of detail in the foil for example! Took me d a y s) and I am excited to try again but I am incredibly proud of this first ever full pdf to hardcover book bind!

Disclaimer that the wings and crossed swords were from a Google png search so I did not design but as this is for fully personal use its OK. Unexpectedly it was the swords that caused more problems at foil weeding! Wild. And there are paired birds on the endpapers!

I recently learned about fanbinding and custom bookbinding, and I've decided it would be a super neat thing to learn how to do. Since i've never done anything like it before besides like, those little books we'd make in elementary school with folded printer paper and a staple gun, I'm looking for outside advice!

I got a very nice sci-fi book from my dad, but calling it well-loved is an understatement.

It's torn completely in half, but in my (limited) experience it's still salvageable. Like, as a book, it's still usable, i can and do read it i'm just careful with the outermost pages of each chunk.

I'd like to try my hand at rebinding this book, just as a beginner side project, since it's here and I already own it and nobody will read it except me, so who cares if the binding job is sloppy or crooked?

Each half is mostly solid, although the cover pieces and outer pages are only hanging on by threads.

The paper of the spine is pretty cracked, but the two cover pieces are in pretty good condition except for nicks and fraying around the edges.

the second chunk has a hole in the top page, but it only takes out like two words and i'm ninety percent sure i can extrapolate the blanks from the context if/when i patch that page.

It's about 860 pages long not counting the non-story ones like title pages, about the author, etc. I know there's a limit for how many pages certain binding styles can handle.

it's also printed on like, i don't know the name for it but it's that really thin yellowish paper that a ton of those old paperbacks are printed in (is pulp fiction the right word?)

Since it's a paperback, it doesn't have endpapers per se. Whatever cover I made and attached, would I need endpapers to glue to the inner cover? Would it be better to sacrifice the existing first and last pages to be endpapers (which i don't mind doing since the first has a story snippet and the last is blank), or better to glue dedicated endpapers to the text block at the same time I glue the two chunks together?

I don't really have a preference on hardback or paperback cover, I think hardbacks are easier for beginners to make?

I'd like to preserve the cover or at least the design of it somehow, so one of my ideas is to scan the cover and spine and print them out bigger onto a larger piece of paper if I decide to go with a hardback cover.

The second chunk has the paper of the spine on it (also hanging on by a thread). I'm not sure if I should scrape off the leftover spine paper/glue that's on the spines of the text blocks before I glue on a cover, or if it'll be fine to glue a fresh cover on top of it (after separating the graphic paper of the spine).

In terms of materials, I actually own a bottle of acid free archival quality book glue (I bought it ages ago in hopes of patching another book that tore in half from use), I have plenty of scrapbooking paper and cotton fabric left over from other projects, and I think my local makerspace has a dedicated bookbinding press!

It's a neat story, but the physical book itself has no sentimental value to me or my dad, so if I can't fix it I'll just buy a fresh copy and sacrifice this one as material for other paper crafts. I just thought it'd be a fun place to start learning how to bookbind, rather than trying to format and print and shape a fresh text block from scratch.