This is the first one I made a couple years ago. It's not too bad, but it's obviously rough. The covers are plywood and the pages are printer paper, but it's a been a good companion. After I made this one, I decided to do others.
Two have covers right now. The third will need some soon. The fluffy stuff is the binding that will be joined to a pair of covers with glue later on. Here is how I assemble one of these.
You will need for this project:
- paper, can be fancy or plain
- an awl
- twine
- tacky glue
- plywood, leather, or thick paper board for the covers
- cloth, small section to cover the spine
- cloth, optional, to cover the covers
- paint, optional, to cover the covers
First, select your paper, You can use copy paper like my first one or you can use heavier, nicer paper like I did for this project. This is sketchpad paper, so very heavy to accept pastel and watercolor, but thin enough to be flexible. Once you have your sheets of paper, fold them in half. Now you have four pages, or a folio.
Once you have a set of six folded pieces of paper (24 pages), place them inside of each other in a stack. This is called a signature. Signatures can be any number of folios, but I typically choose six.
Once you have your signatures done, remember that you can have as many pages as you want. The number of pages is equal to the number of sheets of paper, times four, times however many folios are in a signature, times however many signatures you have, all minus two. This will make sense in a minute.
Now, you are going to need to pierce the signatures with an awl right in the fold. You can pierce individual folios, but piercing signatures at a time is faster. You need to have an even number of holes and you should space them evenly. I keep about a half inch (13mm) away from the bottom and top edges.
Now, stack up the signatures and line them up so that all the holes in the fold of the folios will be on one edge. This is the spine of the book.
Once you've got that all done, you're going to lace together the signatures. I use a simple twine about two millimeters in diameter. Lace each signature one at a time. Start by piercing each signature coming from the spine side of the book to the inside of the book. From there, lace in and out through the holes down the spine until you come to the end. This is why it is important to have an even number of holes to ensure that when you lace the last one, the twine will come out on the spine side of the book. Then you can lace from the bottom of the next signature to the top.
As you can see above, as I lace the second signature, I intertwine the lacing of one signature to the one above it. This is unnecessary, but does help keep the binding stay tight. Once you've got the signatures done, simply tie off the ends of the twine, or at least tuck them into the lacing.
Once you get your signatures laced up and laced to each other, take two blocks of wood and use them to clamp them together to bind them tightly for gluing.
After clamping, take a simple glue like tacky glue and and spread it on the spine from approximately the bottom set of holes and the top set of holes. Then take a piece of cloth and lay it on the spine. The cloth should go the extent of the holes, but not any closer to the top and bottom of the pages. I use either thin cloth like cheese cloth or medical gauze. I leave the cloth shorter than the pages so that it won't show in the final project.
Allow the glue to dry before unclamping.
Once this is done, you now have the essential book. The flaps of cloth (now on another book), are how the covers are attached. These are glued to either plywood, leather, or thick paperboard. These can be covered by cloth or paint, or left alone in the case of leather. I chose plywood, for this particular book. This is thick, but durable. Make sure to use plastic wrap to keep the pages from sticking to the cover.
Once you have the cover glued to the book, take the first and last page of the book, glue those two pages to the cover, to cover up the cloth from the binding. Painting and decoration can commence at this point. Now, you've got an actual book.
The only step left is to cover the stitching. I typically use gaffer's tape, but more cloth and glue can be used too depending on the look you want. You can either just cover the spine, or wrap it all the way around the cover to the inside.
That's how it's done. Takes some time to let things dry, but the whole thing shouldn't really take more than a couple of days.
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