Cooking, Carpentry, and Sewing

That’s how one of my classmates described the activities in the Bookbinding III class I took this weekend at the San Francisco Center for the Book. This time we only produced one book, but this was a large and complicated one, with 20 signatures, sewn endbands, and a split-board binding. The cooking bit was learning how to make wheat paste glue, for the carpentry we had to do lots of precise cuts with the board shear and guillotine, and the sewing of course was the signatures and the endbands, the latter being very finicky and difficult. I’ve now completed the introductory bookbinding series at SFCB so it’s time to start applying these skills. It would be nice to produce something other than blank books, so my next project might be to typeset some text from Project Gutenberg, print it up on a laser printer, and bind it as my very own book design. Imposition problems here we come.