Reviews
Part of Bookbinding Mistakes: Structural Failures to Watch For
Choosing recoverable materials keeps a bookbinding mistake from becoming permanent
Choose so a mistake stays recoverable. Reversible adhesives, replaceable coverings, materials that carry their own hazards, and a ten-minute test.
What to take away
- Choose materials so that a mistake stays recoverable, not so that mistakes become impossible.
- Reversible adhesives and replaceable coverings are what turn a ruined book into a repairable one.
- Some materials carry their own hazards regardless of your technique, and it is worth knowing which.
- Test every new material on a scrap before it goes near a book you care about.
Recoverable beats perfect
Every binder makes errors, so the useful question is not how to avoid them but what happens afterward. A cover pasted on with reversible paste can come off. A cover glued with a strong synthetic cannot, and the mistake becomes permanent the moment it dries.
Recoverable vs Permanent Choices
Recoverable
- Adhesive
- Starch paste
- Board attachment
- Sewn through
- Covering
- Cloth over case
- Repair tissue
- Japanese tissue
- Labeling
- Pencil on flyleaf
Not recoverable
- Adhesive
- Synthetic glue
- Board attachment
- Glued flat
- Covering
- Cloth glued to block
- Repair tissue
- Pressure-sensitive tape
- Labeling
- Adhesive label
That principle ranks materials differently from a supplier catalog. Cheap and reversible often beats expensive and irreversible, and the ranking has nothing to do with which sheet looks better on the shelf.
Recoverable
- Adhesive
- Starch paste, methyl cellulose
- Board attachment
- Sewn through, laced
- Covering
- Cloth over a separate case
- Repair tissue
- Japanese tissue and paste
- Labeling
- Pencil on the flyleaf
Not recoverable
- Adhesive
- Strong synthetic glue, tape
- Board attachment
- Glued flat to the block
- Covering
- Cloth glued to the text block
- Repair tissue
- Pressure-sensitive tape
- Labeling
- Adhesive label on the cover
Some materials carry their own problems
A few materials are unstable no matter how carefully you work with them. It is worth recognizing them before they appear in a project.
Park Service guidance on caring for blueprints and cyanotypes is a good example of the type. It dates the process to 1842, first used to record herbarium specimens directly against chemically treated paper without a camera. The prints were popular from negatives between 1880 and the 1920s, and used from 1890 onward for copies of architectural and engineering drawings.
If someone brings you a set of blueprints to bind, that history tells you what you are handling before you choose an adhesive. The same applies to newsprint, thermal paper and anything coated.
Learn from what early binders used
Materials choice was once dictated by availability, and the results are still on the shelf. The University of Leeds' notes on its incunabula in the Brotherton Library describe three copies of Ovid printed in Parma in 1477, with separate sections on their condition and binding and on their provenance, including hundreds of marginal annotations.
Books like these were bound with parchment, thread, wooden boards and animal glue. Nothing exotic, and nothing that a supplier today would call advanced. What kept them going was that each component could be replaced without destroying the rest of the structure.
Test before you commit
Cut a strip of every new material and do three things: tear it to find the grain, wet a corner to see how it behaves, and paste a sample to scrap and press it overnight. Ten minutes.
That habit prevents most of the failures cataloged in what binding failures look like later, and the general property checklist is in choosing materials for book arts.
