A little about bookbinding

I love old crafts. I mean really old crafts, hundreds of years old. Bookbinding is one such crafts. Back during the dark ages, 1500 or so years ago, Benedictine monks were hand writing and painting beautiful bibles and other books, binding them in leather and studded with precious stones. These were works of art, literally priceless. Throughout the intervening centuries, books remained incredibly valuable, the preserve of wealthy monasteries, kings and noblemen. Then during the 1400s, Johannes Gutenberg revolutionised books with the invention of the printing press. Suddenly books were more affordable, but they still cost maybe a month's wages for the average man, and things stayed this way until the 19th century.

Because books were so valuable, they were made to last, with quality components and skilled craftsmanship. I once took a course at the local university near me, and got to look at and handle some tomes from the rare book collection. I held a book that was a thousand years old, and I'm sure with proper care it would last another thousand. Books today get battered and thrown out after only a few years at most.

Bookbinding was certainly a skilled craft, with young men apprenticing for many years to become a master bookbinder. They usually worked together with a printers, for both skills were needed to make a book. A couple of years ago I went to a traditional bookbinders in the restored colonial town of Williamsburg in Virginia, USA (an amazing place, lots of traditional crafts and a tonne of great living history, worth a blog post of its own sometime). It inspired me to want to try bookbinding myself.

So how is a book made? Well pages are grouped into signatures, folded using a bone folder and then stitched together on a sewing frame. Endpapers and then glued on and covers are then sewed and glued on to the book, and the book is pressed together in a bookbinding press. It's a little more involved than that, and the book needs to spend a day in the press at a couple of stages of assembly so it is a time consuming process. The covers, often made of leather are then decorated, often either with 'blind tooling' or 'gold tooling'. I am lucky enough to have a father in law who is exceptionally good at woodcraft, and he made all the tools I needed. I have had a go at proper bookbinding with reasonable results, but not yet anything good enough to sell or give to someone as a present.

I've also had a go at a quicker, slightly easier bookbinding method, still hand stitched, but without the need of the sewing frame or the press. It's called coptic stitching, and I'll post a guide to it in the next few days.