Making books

My wife just made some books. Actual books. To me, this is a little bit as if she built a new television set. It’s sort of like magic.

Essentially the magicprocess goes as follows. The paper is folded, then hand-stitched into groups of pages called signatures.

These separately stitched signatures are bound into essentially the inside of a book.

Then there’s a cardboard cover, in three parts so as to give it a flexible spine.

This is rounded to make a proper book shape. Here are three raw books.

Then the whole assemblage is glued together. Extra sheets link the cover to the inner pages, the cover is coated in book cloth/paper, and a cover design paper is glued over the top. Et voila! Three finished books

The end result is a little blank notebook that, frankly, I’d have a hard time telling apart from one bought in a shop. And all this from nothing but paper, cardboard, fabric and glue. How cool is that?

EDIT: And here’s an open book, so to speak.