#french binding

Now this one I started over two years ago and didn’t finish because of time and, to be honest, because the quality of the leather and overall sorry execution of the french binding had made me too sad to keep looking at it. It started out nice. The colour is wonderful, sadly the leather is a coated split leather (which was not clear from the description, I didn’t ask either and thus made a hasty decision because it was cheap). To work with it it was soaked with paste glue which caused the coating to detach and rub off in different areas. Most of the very prominent on the cover. I’m still thinking about how I could cover those up and at the moment I’m considering to hot stamp them. I considered dying the area, but I’m not sure I’ll like the look any better than what I have at the moment. The book as some other issues. For example was my hinge gap too small and now the cover doesn’t open to a 180° angle to the inner book but stands up. Also, when you look at it from the outside the covers are clearly not level with the spine. The pinched and tense look of the spine area in the inner book is quite normal for a French binding (it’s also the reason why it is not my favourite binding style), what is not normal, is how the signatures look kind of crumpled though. I was not careful enough when wacking it with a hammer for backing so this is what I got in return.

However the corners turned out fine, I guess mostly because I used way less paste glue there. Since the start of this bind was years ago I naturally forgot most of what I had planned. Apparently I was going for hidden/ covered leather corners. The telltale detail for those is how the edges of the leather come together on the outside of the case. A paper or other material will cover it up so only the very tip is peeking out. A larger part than usual will be visible on the inside so it makes sense to put the ‘nice’ side of the leather there. Another small detail, is the cardboard covering the standing edges of the case, which tells me I had prepared for gilding them too. What turned out really nice too is levelling the covers. Where the leather is applied there is a small step that can be made leve with the cover by adding another piece of card board the thickness of the leather. In this binding I managed to get that completly even, no ridge to find.

So this is where I am now with this book. I had some cover decoration for gold tooling prepared, but it includes tools I don’t have access to anymore. So I’ll see if I can adapt with or come up with something else.

Since there’s so much going to be ‘experimental’ with this book anyway I decided to add some more ot it. At the last binders fair I bought a sheet of papyrus paper (it’s really more of beaten papyrus fibres, one going short grain the other long grain) that I used for the cover. I have no idea how well it will hold up to wear and there were were some issues when applying it.