Book-a-Day: Day 4

I've been moving -- slowly, I know -- through the products of my BookWorks class with Dan Essig. On the fourth day (this series is beginning to sound like an installment from Genesis) our focus was a concertina binding. Think of it as one, long continuous spine-guard that covers the spine-edge of each signature. The concertina adds particular strength to the binding. Folding the concertina EXACTLY is one of the challenges of making this book. In the photo to the right you can see the folds of the concertina between each signature.

It's not an easy binding to stitch, since you're trailing the concertina while you're attaching each signature, but it gets easier with practice (and, of course, as you keep attaching signatures, the remaining amount of concertina lessens). We used a coptic stitch with bent needles. Dan doesn't like curved needles, but straight needles don't do the job, so we softened the metal of our needles over a candle flame and bent the ends at a 45% angle with pliers. Personally, I love curved needles for coptic bindings.

The cover was attached in a style very similar to the one we used for the papyrus book on Day Two. With this fourth book, when we covered the front and back cover-boards with paper, we left a "flap" on each cover on the spine side. We sewed through the inside fold of each flap, treating the cover like another signature. We used Cave paper for our covers, so it was strong enough to withstand being sewn through. If you were using a lighter-weight paper, you'd want to reinforce the area with a material such as Tyvek, which is strong and thin.

We also practiced making insets in the cover (indentations made by lifting layers of board with an exacto knife before we covered the boards). I adhered leftover bits of paper I'd painted and used for signatures in an earlier book.

Dan's primer on concertina-folding

We had great fun, but worked pretty intensely too.