I'm curious. There are lots of us here and I think it would be really interesting to hear how everyone first became interested in bookbinding and how they learnt the craft.
I'm in the UK and I would call myself a serious amateur in that bookbinding appealed to me because I enjoy working with my hands and I'm a book lover. My main interest has always been restoring old books although I do make notebooks as well.
I went to weekly evening classes at a local college that had its own bindery and included traditional craft bookbinding in its curriculum. After about 7 or 8 years, earning a living got in the way and I took a long break. In 2003 I found myself with more time on my hands and discovered that my first teacher, by then retired from full time teaching, was running a weekly afternoon class quite literally a 5 minute walk from my house. I signed up and continued to attend until a few years ago when he finally retired completely and the class folded. As I became more confident, I started to look at the methods of other professional binders and pick up tips from them too. A friend and I now run a local bookbinding group of our own, although of course at the moment meetings aren't possible.
I wish I was as good at the practice as I am at the theory!
How about everyone else?
Something in the $100 - $200 range
I've recced this resource a few times in comments here, but it occurs to me that it might be better to just make an actual post about it for searching purposes! I have no affiliation with these guys, of course, but I find bookbinding a very interesting and lovely hobby, so, if anyone out there is interested, ArmoredSuperHeavy and their fanbinding community on tumblr is the go-to for this. It's an entirely voluntary not-for-profit thing that's all about honoring fanfiction as an art form worthy of being treated with the same respect as 'real books'. Check out their work!
And, more importantly, check out this comprehensive guide to binding fanfiction! It's a detailed and in-depth look at what goes into their binding, and goes over their whole process from Ao3 all the way to the finished copy.
I hope y'all will find this stuff just as fascinating as I do. It's definitely inspired me to want to try getting into this myself someday.
I’ve scraped together some makeshift tools and papers to follow a good tutorial I found on YouTube for link stitch binding here I haven’t gotten past folding and cutting the paper for the journal because I can’t get the lines even and straight. It’s infuriating and I don’t know how to fix it! I’m using a paper cutter and the blade may be kind of dull. I’ll try changing out the blade when I have another chance to work on it but I still don’t understand how to get the lines straight so each corner is at a 90 degree angle. Any tips or tricks I can use? I’m under 18 so buying something, while an option, is not ideal as I don’t know if I will pick up bookbinding as a long term hobby. Anything is appreciated!
Hello, all!
I want to try my hand at bookbinding, and start making my own notebooks. I am having trouble sourcing good paper in bulk. I live in the US.
I have tried Nanami, no luck. Yamamoto can't ship to the US due to the pandemic. Any other ideas?
My preferences would be for old Tomoe River; or Yamamoto Typewriter, Champion Copy, Eastory CoC, or 35NFC. But I would be happy with whatever I can get that is smooth and takes ink well.
I have heard about HP Officejet 32 (is that right?) but some people say it's changed for the worse.
Any insight, and especially links to sellers, would be greatly appreciated! Thanks and happy new year.
Hello-
So essentially, I have to do this uni project and for that, I decided to create a sort of booklet of photographs. Now the trouble is, that the printer I have at my disposal (it's actually a plotter) only plots one-sided and I have various images that go over a spread. So my initial plan was to bind spreads after spreads together, so that the horizontal images wouldn't be disturbed. From researching bookbinding I have come to realise that I'll almost always see some sort of string in the centre.
What would you suggest?
TLDR: stitching bunch of a3 pages each folded at the centre to form a4 booklet - each has to be individual to allow for a horizontal image. What bookbinding technique could you recommend?
thanks!
Hi everyone,
Maybe some of you had the same problem so I try my luck here. I'm new to bookbinding, and after working with blank pages, it's now time to work on printed pages. I have everything done pretty nicely... but my printer is not cooperating at all.
I'm printing an A6 book on A5 paper, and my printer is adding a small margin on top of mine but only at the end of the paper (landscape format). It did the same with an A5 book printed on A4 paper...
My margins (on the A5 paper) are 10mm all around, everything is printed perfectly on all sides except for the side printed last (meaning the side coming out of the printer last, whatever the orientation of the landscape printing - top on the right or on the left). So it's not even a matter of left or right margin on my document, it seems to be an "end of printing" margin. It's doing the same with printed lines :/
HP gives this specs for the printer margins:
A5, B5 and User-Defined Paper Top: 1.8 mm Bottom: 12.7 mm Left and Right: 3.2 mm
It systematically adds 3 mm on top of my 10 mm margin, which fits the specs above, but it shouldn't be added to my margin... Obviously, the text is cut out. If I use the "fit" option of the printer interface, the margin are just really to big: 22 mm on each side. On an A6 book, it's quite a lot.
Any idea why a printer would add this margin only at the end of the printing process only AND on top of a bigger margin? I tried many things, printing from InDesign, different PDF readers, and I can't change the printer margins, for what I saw. I'm planning on buying a new printer but I just can't right now so if I could solve this... it'd help me tremendously!
Thanks!
I raided all the Michigan libraries for books on bookbinding. My favorites are Introduction to Bookbinding and Custom Cases by Tom Hollander and Bookbinding Basics by Paola Rosati - probably because I'm a newbie.
https://preview.redd.it/cghgo3k294961.jpg?width=2016&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e73c6855346e1100648cf64093eef4201772c1ee
I know that making a diy copy of a copyrighted work is a big no-no, but what about books which have become public domain? Are those ok? I would make them for myself or for a personalized gift.
