#void book

The childing autumn, angry winter change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world,

Into the void I fly on raven wings. No matter how deep I go there is still a light. This is my first ever springback / ledger bound book. I followed the directions of the amazing @gatzbookbinding and even though I messed up on a few steps, it still worked :D Also I have been wanting to do an entirely black book for a while too. Now I don’t want to go into the technical details on this book because I don’t want to be giving either wrong advice, misinformed information or instilling bad habits. I’ll save the more technical blog post for the future when I actually understand the whats and whyfors of what I’m doing with this particular style.

They say that if you want to truly understand something you have to dive right into it and wear its skin for a week... or a mile... I’m not exactly sure how this malaphor works. Anyway! I dove right into the deep end. The first difference is that I needed to make special sewn on endpages, which is why there is a strip of cloth on the end page. Make note that I used black paper... and sewed it to black tape... with black thread.

The stack of void guts (after trimming) got rounded in the same manner as a regular book.

So first deviation to the plan was around this step. What is the point of being dark and edgy if you follow directions ALL the time? I jumped ahead a bit and glued the tapes down and then glued flappy bits to boardy bits.  That was supposed to be done differently, but oh well. Like I said, this worked fine. Note the the thin board is oversized and has some lines drawn on it. Those lines are in line with the dimensions of the void guts.

Ah you can’t compare the eye rending of sewing these end bands on to anything else.  BLACK thread onto a BLACK headband core with a background of BLACK paper.  Also due to the nature of the book the headbands actually extend out past the spine and onto the covers. Now I’ve only done “sew directly onto the book” headbands so I attempted to tackle this the same way. I punched a line of holes into the cover board and went to town on it. It worked but I didn’t enjoy it.

Okay here is the light in the darkness, ready to be hidden. I didn’t have any black card so I had to use some yellow. I backed it with black cloth and after it’d been sitting in the crushing darkness of the press overnight I scored the spine and hinging lines on it.

That got glued over the whole thing, making sure not to get glue on the spine or the 1cm either side of it. Everything is still oversized at this point...

... and that gets rectified with some careful measuring and trimming. The spine portion gets left long to help form the spine.

After everything is trimmed to size it is time to start working on the rest of the main cover and the spine.

For the first time ever I saw cut my spine! ... That sounds really disturbing out of context... The main cover is an extra 3mm sheet bevelled on all 4 edges and glued directly down. It doesn’t extend past the 1cm fold line that I put on the yellow card earlier. I assume if i did go over that line an appreciable amount the book would not open properly. The spine was done by first wetting a strip of cut-to-size cardboard and gluing it to the spine. I didn’t really like this way of doing things because the cardboard started to delaminate. So after fixing that I did my usual hand lamination of paper directly onto the spine.

Okay so there is a lack of photos of covering the book with bookcloth, but I do have some showing the pain of turning in the cloth over the spine was. The spine was a lot thicker than I’m used to so I had to deal with wrinkling in addition to having to adjust for the extra wide hollow.