#wip bookbinding

I had just rounded the spine and glued the tube on the book spine against the spine of the cover, when I noticed the front edge has gotten a bit short delicate (sometimes that happens), but it made me worry that with the stretching of the paper I’d end up with just a tiny strip of front edge. So I cut back the paste down about a mm to prevent that.

When applying glue (or any moisture for that matter), paper stretches which can be a hassle if unaccounted for. With Chiyogami the stretch is not as bad as I feared, but it still made up half of what I cut back. Being shorter than necessary is ok in this case though. When the book is closed no one will notice the paste down is actually a bit smaller than the innerbook and when it’s open, well, then it makes for a good looking front edge. The only must here is, USE SOME MACULATION WHEN APLLYING GLUE.  I forgot that once and it would have been fine had both my endpapers had the same size...  as it was I had a very neat strip of glue on the fly leaf...

I closed push down the hinge and close the cover only lightly just to lift it up a tiny bit again and check if the endpaper is straight or askew. Because the endpaper is only lightly attached to the cover it can be carefully corrected if necessary before I turn to the other endpaper.  When both are done I apply some short, but heavy pressure to get the paste down to stick firmly to the cover. Take it out of the press and check immediately for emerging glue on the paste down. This is a bit tricky, because the cover needs to be opened far enough to wipe away any excess glue, but the glue is still fresh enough that the paper can be pulled out of place if opened carelessly or too far, which would result in nasty wrinkles close to the inner hinge.  I prevent that by pushing down the cover so the inner hinge gets kind of clamped  and can’t move too much while opening the book a bit.  It looks somewhat like this:

When the book is clean I put thin cardboards between paste down and fly leaf and align them with the cover board without blocking the hinge. The cardboard is to prevent the glue-moisture from wandering into the inner book and make everything wavy. Instead it can wander into the cardboard without doing any harm. Then I settle the book between more clean cardboard (I use finnboard, but any cardboard will do, it only has to absorb the moisture and protect the cover from scratches), weigh it down and let it dry.

I took the measurements after finishing the headbands. I barely use a ruler for that though. I just take a strip of paper and mark all I need there (spine width, height, board width... all goes down on the same strip) I do the cutting of same measurements with the same setting on the boardcuttter to make sure they ARE the same measurements. When I cut the board’s width I just make sure it’s larger than they need to be. When I’m working  with A5 for example, I cut them the width of A5. In addition to the hinge that leaves more than enough board for the front edge).

I assemble the boards with a another strip of paper before covering them in bookcloth, paper or whatever I chose for materials. First on is the spine board, then I mark the hinge-width on both sides and use those marks to add the cover boards. I use a thick metal ruler to get them properly aligned. (I know there’s a way to do the assembling directly on the covering materials, but I’ve never done that and I’m a creature of habit. So this is how I’m doing it.)

For Dry Heat I had to add an extra layer of thin cardboard with the cut-out design I wanted. This was the moment I added those cardboard layers.

After everything dried well weighed down I rounded the spine and trimmed the front edge so there’s no small ‘step’ in case the thinner cardboard was not completely even with the front edge. 

I covered the case in bookcloth and returned to the front to work in the hollows for the later inlays before letting everything dry under weight. 

Almost last step for the cover was the trimming of the turn ins. this time I even remembered to take before and after pictures. One side was a bit close to the edge and I just made the others look even in comparison (it’s actually still a bit askew but no one will ever notice because it’s my copy)

Last came the parchment inlays, another night in the press and I was done.

...  or so I thought. After rounding the spine (again) and glueing the back to the inner book, I noticed the paper on the spine was splitting and the parchment wouldn’t hold. I pulled it off, removed any loose paper and glued it on again.