how to bind a book by hand

Stumbled across this nifty little how-to today. It's a detailed how to on making your own book binding. This would be a super sweet gift for pretty darn cheap.

Here's The Full Instructions

Jimmy Diresta posted a book binding video via Make on youtube recently. I'll post the link here in case anyone is interested in seeing this process in action.


Direct link in case the embedded option only plays in flash:
DiResta: Book Binding

Hello Cassie,

That's what's called a Coptic Stitch book! It was first invented in the Coptic region of Egypt where lots of early Christians settled. (Also spelled Koptic.) Wanting to spread the word, they developed this for individual books of the Bible. As you noted, it's cheap and easy to do and ends up looking very handmade, homespun, artistic and beautiful.

It's really an amazing process and I am eyeing the system for a series of books I want to self publish. The books have a lot of art, so building them this way would make the book itself a piece of art.

At the very least, this is a great way to make gifts and in a barter economy, might just be a product one can sell. If a world disaster like a solar flare hits, there would be an immediate need for blank books used as record keepers.

People think I am crazy when I say that not only could a solar flare happen again, it is only a matter of time until it does happen again. The world's communication infrastructure was once destroyed back in 1859 when a huge solar storm struck the earth. "Northern Lights" were seen at the equator and telegraph lines the world over were melted. Fires were started in telegraph stations the worldover and the transatlantic telegraph cable had to be re-laid after it was fried by the electromagnetic fields created by the solar storm.

This was before the invention of AC power lines, but just imagine what would happen to the infrastructure of the world if this were to happen again. All of our power lines are potential targets, as well as our phone and data lines. Basically, any wire made from metal and longer than 30 feet could be affected!

It could take decades to recover, in which case blank accounting books would become a real value again.

Lol, I really am an optimist though. We will all get by, especially those that can grow food. Might be a good thing for modern man to suffer a blow to his technological achievements. Might make everyone realize just how dependent they are on agriculture.

Jeff

I actually learned how to do this in school a looong time ago. It gives a spectacular result and it is easy to do.

So glad there's a forum on this!

Coptic binding is amazing. And yes, you can sell them even without solar flare disasters!

I've been making mine with wooden covers and engraving them using a Pyrograph. Check them out on Etsy :) https://www.etsy.com/shop/ElLibro

I do like this idea!
The link in the first post didn't work for me (imgur links currently inoperative in UK), but I found a pretty good instructables: https://www.instructables.com/Bind-Your-Own-Journal/ that I thnk can make work...

There is a PEP BB [badge bit] for that:

https://permies.com/wiki/149690/pep-textiles/Leather-notebook-PEP-BB-textile

If a book needs to be repaired:

https://permies.com/t/84166/Repair-Books

I finally got round to trying this for my sisters' xmas gifts (everyone needs small, cute notebooks right?)
I Used coloured drawing paper that I had in a drawer from when my nephews and nieces were little, cardboard from packaging, fabric from my 'stash', wood glue and some linen thread that luckily the dog had only chewed the top few wraps of (!)

I was happy to find I could do a rainbow of pages. I tore the pages into four, which gave me almost enough sheets to do 7 bundles of four different colours (I had to make up the yellow and orange slightly). The first stage is to sew the bundles together and into an assembly (or text block).

folded paper bundles

piercing the stitch holes with a pair of compasses

stitching the bundles

Then the text block is glued to a fabric strip at the spine as a carrier strip. I used some small pieces of 'aida' cross stitch fabric for this which worked very well. Luckily the scraps happened to be exactly the right length to fit the spine.
The cover board and spine reinforcements were cut to size and then glued to the cover fabric with a small gap in between, to allow the covers to flex as the book is opened. In retrospect it would be worth making the gap slightly bigger than smaller as that makes the book more flexible and you are less likely to glue the gap closed....

flysheets, book inner and cover

I used some pages cut from an adult colouring book as interesting flysheets which were carefully glued to the cover and the spine reinforcement. The spine is left not glued.

gluing book cover to flysheets

Having left the books to set overnight with a weight holding them closed the proof came in the morning - carefully opening the covers, checking that the pages weren't stuck too badly together and that the covers had full articulation.

the finished notebooks

I wonder how easy it would be to sew the pages to the spine reinforcement rather than glueing it? And maybe a full fabric cover could then be sewn to that to avoid the glue in total.

I'm pretty happy with the results though and may well do some more in future, as they were fun and satisfying to make.