#first bind

The Austens are going to be my Fuck Around and Find Out binds, so I threw everything at them and tried to make something stick. So many firsts! First time making my own book cloth, following this tutorial. First time trying made endpapers, as per DAS. First time testing how that edge decoration shtick works, hell. I looooooove the beautiful edge decorations on commercial binds, I wanna get there! But my book plough work still needs practice, and I got self-conscious about sanding the edges on my balcony, so the result is rather predictably poor.

Pleasant surprise was the bradel binding! Took me long enough to understand what a bradel binding is (connecting the spine board and the front and back boards with a piece of paper before you cover the whole thing with cloth or paper), but once I got it, I loved it. It sounded so complicated when I read up on it, but it actually made the whole casing in process more predictable and less anxiety-inducing.

I screwed up the first cover for Pride and Prejudice, left the front and back cover too long. They stuck out almost a centimeter beyond the text block, it felt so wrong! So I made a second one.

The cover decoration was just the title cut with my Silhouette on some heat transfer vinyl.

In this photo we can see:

--Too much glue when attaching the leather-print paper, so it oozed out onto the cover.

--Cricut font too thin and too much heat/too long of a press, so the letters have gaps and the glue also oozed out here. It's a continuing theme with this bind.

--I tried to use a bone folder to give it a sharper hinge crease and accidentally pressed too hard and tore a hole in the paper; you can see this in the little white vertical line near the top of the hinge

The fore edge is not square. I actually don't remember why this happened. I may have eyeballed the board position when I made the case, or the paper may have slipped while the glue was wet, or I cut it crooked and didn't notice till later. Either way it's bad enough that the book doesn't stand on its own. There was a crooked man/who walked a crooked mile/and found a crooked sixpence/against a crooked stile./He bought a crooked cat/which caught a crooked mouse/and they all loved together in a little crooked house, and I bet they read this little crooked book from their little crooked library.

Top view, you can see that the case is too big and the text block doesn't sit straight in it. It has no endbands or bookmark, and it's hard to see in this photo but there's glue on the top of it, at the spine. This still happens to me but I know how to trim books now so this bit gets cut off. You can also see that the scrapbook paper has some cracks where its white core is visible. This is why I do cloth or actual faux leather on the spines now. Endpaper shows uneven trim (did I not use a ruler for this??), too much glue causing major seepage, and it doesn't sit evenly in the case. I'm not sure if this is because of the case itself being crooked, a badly-trimmed endpaper, or if the text block is also crooked. Or it may be a combination of all these factors. Unclear.

Typeset photos! Here we see:

--Title page has a page number on it. This is a pet peeve of mine and I fixed it after this book.

--There is no half title, summary, or metadata. All my later binds have these things.

--It's typeset in Times New Roman. Unlike many I don't actually hate this font but reading it reminds me of being in high school so this is the only book I used it for. Baskerville is my beloved now. The font is also much bigger than it should be. It's not huge but it's like a large print book so it feels weird for me to read it.

--Lol what are margins

--Lol what are page headers

--Actually I think I left the headers out so it wouldn't have a header on the first page of each chapter, because I knew about page breaks but not section breaks at this time.

--It's on regular-ass lightweight printer paper. There's nothing wrong with this but I switched to heavier weight paper shortly after to help with bleed-through and the light stuff feels so flimsy now.

--I didn't understand how Word's book fold worked at this time, so when I had to set the sheets per booklet and it had an option for 4, I chose that thinking it would give me 4 sheets of paper (16 numbered pages) per sig. It did not do this. It gave me 4 numbered pages per sig. So every signature is 1 sheet of paper. Every page is its own signature. I am still mad about this but it sure drove home how the setting works and also how to make kettle stitches since you make one after every sig. A book of 48 pages has 12 signatures which is just ludicrous.

--There's no photo of this but it has a piece of printer paper on the spine because I didn't have mull. I did use PVA though. Lots and lots of PVA.

--It's stitched with regular sewing thread, which means it doesn't have much swell for a book with that many sigs, but it's less sturdy and more likely to tear the paper.

So to start with the top, I knew I was skipping headbands, but I also hadn't figured out yet quite where the block was supposed to sit with respect to the shoulders. The book opens and closes perfectly well, but the spine is definitely weird. And also uneven.

The cover material is plain quilting cotton - it might be backed with paper using Heat'n'Bond but I'm not even 100% sure of that. The corner turn-ins are a bit too tight, and the pattern has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents, but it's a very pretty print with silver accents.

I was working with what I had around the house, so the endpapers are just text-weight colored printer paper. I'm not bothered by being able to see the turn-ins and the mull, I kind of like it, but it's really hard to get paper that thin not to wrinkle. The back is not this nice-looking.

Also the square is a little too large at the head and tail, and the block is unevenly placed. Honestly the square at the fore-edge might have been big too if I'd pushed the block all the way up against the spine. Not long after this book, I made myself a spreadsheet to do all the calculations. I put in the textblock dimensions and it'll give me the board and cloth dimensions I need. I've had great results with it.

To date this is the only book I've chisel-trimmed (head only, I think) and it's a bit rough. My chisel wasn't truly sharp enough and I really still don't have the hang of the process. These days, I have no problems trimming a 3-signature book with the craft knife. Larger than that either goes in the guillotine or just doesn't get trimmed.

For the most part, I was pleased with the typeset itself. I picked a shortish story so I could practice fast, had a lot of fun with Star Wars fonts, and really my only regrets are not making the text larger when I had the chance and not getting the right-hand pages' page numbers right-justified. That is ingrained on my mental checklist now.

It's printed on plain white printer paper, and I think that's just fine.

The downside of it being so short is that it's only three signatures. Three signatures is actually harder to sew and manage than larger - you don't really get your first kettle stitch until the third signature. If I had it to do over again, I would either have reimposed it or started with a larger story to have five or more signatures.