Better and Better, Bit by Bit

The other day I was doing a bit of bog-standard backing when I had an epiphany. I suddenly realized something about the way I was working and what I was doing that drastically changed how I looked at the process. I figured out a new way to do it, one that works better for me.

No, I'm not going to tell you what it was, because that would only interest someone who works with exactly the same equipment setup I have and that's not the point anyway. The point is that I had done that job thousands of times, and then I realized something that made one small part of the job easier and better.

That's how learning a craft goes. You chunk along at a certain point, and then suddenly one day you take a step up, and then you chunk along at that level for a while. Or one day you recall that you used to have a problem you haven't had for a long time, and you can't remember what - if anything - you're doing differently, but you do know that what used to be a problem isn't any more. Bit by bit all these little epiphanies make for better and better books.

What does this mean for you? Well, it means that if you want to be good at making books you need to make a lot of them, regularly, over time. If you make two books in Bookbinding 101 and six months later you make two more in Bookbinding 201 and then a year after that you make two more in Bookbinding 301 you may be able to say you have been taught advanced levels of bookbinding, but your books probably still aren't very good.

And you need to make different books. Not wildly different - as in one flag book, one photo album, etc. But say you have learned to do a standard sewn, rounded & jointed book. Take that one style and make many, many more. Make them with different papers of different styles and thicknesses. Heavy, light, newsprint, text weight, cover weight. Make them all, just in that one style, and make many of each, and you will learn a lot about binding that isn't in any books. Head down to your local used book store and get some of the older books that are actually sewn. Pull them apart, resew them and rebind them. Bind your newspapers and your pizza flyers, and know that every book you make, no matter what it is, improves your skill.

Teaching and Learning

I was folding some large sheets of endpapering this morning, and thought of my first bookbinding course. It was a home study thing, so I was watching a video and didn't have any direct input from the teacher, but I was sure if I followed the instructions exactly it would all work out in the end.

After running us through the whole saga of paper grain, we got down to actual work and she showed us how to fold a piece of paper. She said that if you started the fold at either edge of the paper you would get little creases in the middle, and dictated that you must always press the fold down starting from the middle and pressing towards each side. She said that several times, just to make sure we got it.

Until then I had been pressing from the side and had no little creases. Under her instruction I started pressing from the centre and soon had lots of trouble with creases. But I was paying for the class, the teacher was well-known and respected, and I wanted to do what the teacher said. I persevered, and eventually developed a technique for starting at the centre and folding towards each side and not getting any creases most of the time. But it wasn't easy.

Flash forward a year until I started working at the bindery. The very first day I was told to fold some large sheets of paper. Aha! Something I know how to do! I confidently folded the paper the way I'd been instructed.

Wrong! The bindery manager had apprenticed in London and worked in a variety of binderies for many years before moving to Canada. He knew his folding. Mine was wrong, wrong, wrong. How should I have done it? Exactly the way I had been doing it right at the beginning before I had any instruction, of course. The way that I did it where I had no trouble at all with little creases.

So was the teacher wrong, wrong, wrong? No, I don't think so. The teacher was telling us the way she did it, and outlining the problems she had had that she had solved her way - which is pretty well the only way anybody can teach. It is up to the student to receive the teaching, practice what they're taught, and when they've reached a level of confidence they can then decide whether they want to follow what they were told, or do something else.

Making Do

One of the things I love about bookbinding is that you can do it with so few tools. Sure, it's nice to have a press and specially-constructed beaded pressing boards but in a pinch, if you know what you're doing, bricks and smooth hardboard and knitting needles also work.

And it's nice to have a sewing frame that is professionally made of polished wood and a thing of beauty on its own. Sadly, the boss wanted $450 for it, so I had to leave "mine" behind when I left my job, and ever since I've been making do with sewing on the edge of a piece of hardboard and taping the sewing tapes to the back side. Which works fine for one book. Or two. But it takes time to set up, and when I contemplated making a series of books I tried not to think of the time that would be spent taping little pieces of tape onto the backside of the board, and flinging them back when they got in the way of the sewing, and otherwise fussing around with them.

So I went out into the world to have a little look-see, and this is what I found:

It's made of aluminum tubes, is very lightweight, and telescopes sideways to a maximum of 28", for those big books. And it has shelves - a number of them, though I'm only using two here. You get 8 shelves with it, each about 3" wide. As a sewing frame, it works great. The only problem is that you have to elevate your textblock somehow, but I have lots of books handy, and just shoved a couple in to support the textblock.

This tool didn't cost anywhere near $450. In fact, it cost $32.98.

What is it? It's an expandable under-the-sink storage shelf. I got mine at Bed, Bath & Beyond, but I'm sure they can be found any number of places.

Do you have any tools that are really something else?

Covers 0, Wine 1

I really like labels. You can print them out and cut them out and then when they're absolutely perfect glue them onto your book and there's really very little chance of ruining an entire cover in the process.

But, sadly, this post isn't about labels. It's about stamping directly onto the cover - which I find nerve-wracking. I'm lousy at it and it's the most expensive way to ruin a cover. If you don't have the money to buy endless supplies of bookcloth and board, or the time to make cover after cover to replace the wrecked ones, stamping can ruin your bottom line faster than anything else. Because one wrong stamp and you're hooped. If you're doing goldwork on leather you might be able to take it out and re-do it once, but with the modern foils on standard bookcloth, even if you have the right chemicals to dissolve the glue, a mis-stamp is still going to show.

The past two days I've been trying to make 2 covers at 6 stamps per cover.
The current score is:
Covers wrecked with first stamp: 3
Covers wrecked with second stamp: 2
Successful covers: 0
Bottles of wine drunk to recover: 1 
Cocktails drunk because ran out of wine: 2

Now I've run out of cloth and as it is Good Friday I won't be able to get more cloth until next week. I don't know why I'm having a particularly bad time with these - I did the same book a couple of months ago and it went fine. My New Age friends assure me it's all about Mercury Retrograde, which will end tomorrow, so maybe it's a good thing I've run out of cloth.

I suspect it's my legendary lack of strategic planning skills, but a planet seeming to reverse in the night sky works too.

So what's this post about? Beyond bookbinder tribulations, I think it's about a big problem with two solutions. Depending on who you are and what your bookbinding problem is, you could go at it in different directions. First - what's so bad about a label? I make you nice book with label inset. Happy label. Happy book. No drinking. Then, if you *must* have the title stamped directly on the book, why not just make it one stamp? A modest little title on the spine. That's what you want.

Well, it's a start.

Just got a big fat envelope from the Alcuin Society. If you’re into books you should know these guys. They put on the only commercial book design awards I’ve ever heard of - the Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. If you’re a member, each year they’ll send you the catalogue of the prizewinning entries, with input from the judges. If you’re studying book design you’ll do well to study that catalogue, and to go see the prize-winning books, which are exhibited in Canada and in some international shows.  And no, they’re not paying me to say this. They don’t even know I’m saying it.

My big fat envelope contained the latest edition of the Society’s newsletter: “Amphora”, which I would go on to talk about except I don’t want to turn this post into a fave rave and besides, I have other things on my mind.

I thought for Post #2 I’d go with my definition of a book. Definitions are slippery – you think you’ve got them wrestled to the ground and then exceptions pop up and start the argument all over. So I’ll just say what I think.

What I call a book is one of those things you find on the shelves in library. More properly called a codex, the basic form hasn’t substantially changed in the past 2,000 years. I see them as a protective information storage and retrieval system designed to handle text printed on paper.  It’s important, so I’ll break that down:

Protective: the covers protect the textblock. The beginning and end pages of the textblock are sacrificial (and therefore usually blank), and are intended to protect the actual text. The pages ideally have wide margins which protect the words from accidental destruction by handling, sunlight, mice, dogs, etc.

Information storage and retrieval: the information is contained in words which must stay in order but need to be accessed out of order.  So the words are printed in order on pages that are usually numbered for easy reference. And if you’re really intent on providing easy information retrieval you might include an index, table of contents, cross-references, etc.

Why the definition? Because when you look at a book – whether you want to print one or bind one or repair one – you need to keep all this in mind.  When a book has problems it’s often because the person who made it lost track of its purpose.

It’s nice if the covers are pretty. It’s great if they provide information or help sell the book. But if your idea for a cover is something that wrecks the textblock, I’d say you need to go back and rethink.

Maybe a cover made with chicken wire is incredibly artistic and clever in light of the book’s content – but is “I want this book to shred itself under the customer’s very eyes” really what you’re thinking?

Maybe it’s way cheaper to cover a heavy book with lightweight paper but when the covers accidentally rip off before the customer pays for it – is that really a saving?

Repairs. There are many schools of thought, ranging from the ludicrously over-protective to the cavalier, but that’s for another day. I want to go read my “Amphora”.