Maintenance
Part of Budgeting bookbinding supplies by category beats chasing a single price list
Bookbinding Supply Mistakes That Waste Materials
Bookbinding supply mistakes can damage paper, waste stock, or clutter a shelf. Learn what to watch with acidic paper, newsprint, cutting, and storage.
Bookbinding supply mistakes to avoid
- The expensive mistakes are made before any money is spent, at the point of choosing stock.
- Fixing acidic paper later costs far more than avoiding it, and often is not recommended at all.
- Newspaper is the worst material to build into anything you want to keep.
- Buying to fill a gap in a collection of supplies is not the same as buying for a project.
Buying stock you cannot fix later
The temptation is to use cheap paper now and treat it later, assuming treatment exists. It does, but it is rarely worth it.
Accession book paper pH
- pH 6.0-6.850%
- below pH 6.028%
- above pH 6.822%
The Park Service note on salvaging acidic or damaged accession books reports the results of servicewide pH testing. An estimated fifty percent of accession books used paper between pH 6.0 and 6.8, twenty-eight percent below pH 6.0, and twenty-two percent above pH 6.8.
Its conclusion on treatment is blunt. Deacidification is generally not recommended, partly because it is expensive and requires a series of treatments, and partly because buffering agents can interact with dyes and pigments and cause text to fade.
The same note adds that an acidic book does not need immediate attention and may last many decades if stored cool, dark and dry, and handled properly. Storage is the cheap intervention; chemistry is the expensive one.
Building newspaper and clippings into work
Collage, journals and scrapbooks pull in newsprint, and it is the one material that will visibly degrade the things around it. Newsprint is mostly acidic groundwood pulp with no alkaline reserve, so it yellows and embrittles on its own and takes its neighbors with it.
The cheap answer is to copy, not paste. Park Service guidance on preservation through photocopying treats copying as a preservation strategy in its own right: stable copies often preserve a document's information.
Standards exist for plain paper electrostatic copying onto archival paper and for silver-based microphotography. At the time of writing, neither magnetic tape nor optical disk had proven safe for very long-term storage.
Copy the clipping onto stable stock, use the copy in the work, and keep the original separately and interleaved. A newsprint clipping pasted opposite a good sheet will discolor that sheet along its outline within a few years.
Five habits that waste materials
- Buying assorted packs, which produces offcuts in sizes you will never use again.
- Ordering little and often, so shipping quietly becomes the biggest line.
- Cutting boards to fit the sheet rather than to the grain, halving usable yield.
- Storing stock upright in a corner, where it curves permanently.
- Replacing a blade too late, so a dull knife ruins board that cost more than the blade.
Buying for the shelf instead of the bench
The distinctive beginner error is acquiring supplies as a collection. A second color of cloth, a third board thickness, another adhesive. Each purchase feels like progress and none of it produces a book.
The test is simple: name the project the purchase is for. If you cannot name one, the item is stock, not a supply. Stock is only cheap while it stays flat and dry.
The category budget in a planning method for supply costs makes the pattern visible, and the technique failures that waste material are in book arts mistakes.
