Bookbinding

 

I've been watching a lot of bookbinding videos on YouTube lately, and I thought I'd give it a go.

I've done some bookbinding before, but I never really knew what I was doing — I was just guessing really. This is the first time I've actually followed any sort of instruction. In the photo it's sitting splayed out to dry overnight.

It's a very slender volume, just 48 pages (so 24 leaves), roughly A4. The text block is just a double-fan glue binding; I would have liked to try stitching it, but I don't have access to an A3 printer to make folded signatures of this size. The cover is a bradel binding, and I made the book-cloth covering from a scrap of printed cotton, saturated with a paste and acrylic medium mix to give it some stiffness and prevent glue strike-through.

The boards are 3mm grey-board. I could have gone a bit thinner I think; 2mm would have been quite adequate. They've warped a bit with all the glue, and I'll see if they settle down as everything dries out properly. If not, maybe a bit of clamping will help. And if it doesn't... well, it's not the end of the world.

2023-06-29 — More Bookbinding

This one is a copy of the GORE d100 system retroclone, built via Chaosium's BRP SRD to more or less replicate the game as it was in the early to mid 1980s.

This binding is more successful for various reasons, but not least because I did leave enough space at the spine this time for it to open fully flat

Also, this one is stitched rather than double-fan glued, and it's (roughly) A5.