Bind your own books at home in just 32 easy steps!

January 27, 2013 7:55 AM

A photographic guide to bookbinding.
posted by grouse (17 comments total)

Beautiful craft. But, now you know why they invented saddle stitching and perfect binding.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:13 AM on January 27, 2013

Sloppy. That is not how you do the corners of the cover.
posted by charlie don't surf at 8:15 AM on January 27, 2013 [6 favorites]

Ah, book binding, my favorite pastime. I may, perhaps, neglect 30 of the 32 steps, but I still deeply, fundamentally enjoy opening a book and ascending into its unknown treasures.

We are all book binders, aren't we all?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 8:32 AM on January 27, 2013

Nice little craft project.

But at the risk of self-linking, there are a *lot* of different ways to do this:

Rebinding a 1633 Danish bible.

Doing a limited-edition project of my own: Making Lemonade and Done With Backwards.

And a mess of things going back the last five or six years under this category: book conservation.
posted by Shadan7 at 8:47 AM on January 27, 2013 [3 favorites]

What's wrong with staples and duct tape?
posted by blue_beetle at 8:51 AM on January 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite elemenary school projects was when we wrote and bound books using pretty much this method.
posted by not that girl at 9:17 AM on January 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

And how this is (other than the craftishness fun) functionally different than emailing a file to my kindle?
posted by sammyo at 9:58 AM on January 27, 2013

Charlie don't surf, how should the corners be done? I'm interested in trying this!
posted by windykites at 10:14 AM on January 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

And how this is (other than the craftishness fun) functionally different than emailing a file to my kindle?

How is your kindle (other than the Amazon-can-delete-your-entire-library-on-a-whim fun) functionally different than any book?
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:17 AM on January 27, 2013

How is a raven like a writing desk?
posted by sixohsix at 10:23 AM on January 27, 2013 [2 favorites]

windykites, he cut off the corner of the cover cloth too close to the board, so when he wrapped it around, it left the interior corner uncovered. This is mostly due to sloppy measuring, or perhaps, a failure to recognize this needs to be measured and cut accurately.

Here's a random web page I found that describes how to do a "corner hem."
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:35 AM on January 27, 2013 [2 favorites]

Because Poe wrote on both!
posted by windykites at 10:52 AM on January 27, 2013 [3 favorites]

Thanks... I want to try this to make sketch book gifts!
posted by chapps at 11:23 AM on January 27, 2013

Ahh bookbinding.
posted by adamvasco at 11:47 AM on January 27, 2013

Thanks very much for this, grouse (and charlie don't surf for the pointer to the csparks.com pages.) Very timely for me; I was just setting out to repair an old book (of no value except to me) from which the boards and spine have come off in three pieces. Now I've got something to study. And I've already learned that the staple gun and the duct tape won't be needed.
posted by jfuller at 12:39 PM on January 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

If you want to see it done the way it was done a century ago, watch this.
posted by Sourisnoire at 3:10 PM on January 27, 2013 [4 favorites]

Sourisnoire, thanks for that link. I really enjoyed it.
posted by not that girl at 3:30 PM on January 27, 2013 [1 favorite]