Make a book

I found a great website that reviews the book binding process and reminds me of the meditative, peaceful library where I worked between the ages of 14 and 17…I think I used to participate in gluing and positioning books in blocks in book presses under the watchful eyes of the intellectual librarians…the only liberal intellectuals and feminists in the conservative Midwestern town where I grew up to whom I was regularly exposed, little did anyone know…

Anyway the webpage is http://www.indiana.edu/~libpres/manual/treatments/cbind/front.html

I just purchased a bone folder and am looking forward to jumping into this.

One of the highlights of my art degree was my book arts class! I love book making, and have returned to it again and again over the past five years. (Wow, has it been that long?)

If you really want to learn, you might try a single signature pamphlet or an oriental stab binding. (For the stab book, you can omit the “paper string” and the corner reinforcements, skipping straight to the stab-and-sew part. It won’t be as strong, but that won’t matter for a practice book.)

Definitely practice with scrap materials; my teachers made us make two practice dummies and two “good” books for each style. That way, you won’t ruin your beautiful, fancy papers!

I took a preservation workshop this summer, and our take-home project was to make a book. We were provided with the materials, so the books all looked the same - except for the color of the cover - but they all looked so nice. I’m very proud of mine.

This was actually an English project for The Scarlet Letter, the main criteria were to either draw a symbol from the book or write an essay on a symbol. I made colored pencil sketches of the characters and explained how their appearences reveal their character, then I bound it with tissue paper and ribbon.