What is Hand Bookbinding?

We live in an age when the book is probably more accessible than ever. The vast majority of people know what a book is and they own at least a few. The physical book nowadays can have many different formats; it can be a hard copy or digital, it can be a cheap paperback or a luxurious illustrated hardback. We can get one almost free at a secondhand shop or pay thousands to get a signed first edition with the original dust-jacket. It is definitely a great achievement of the industrial revolution that books cost less and that most of us can have plenty of them without costing us an arm and a leg. However, in the name of low cost and large production runs, quality was sacrificed. Therefore, the content of a book became more accessible but the book as an object lost its strength and integrity.

Until the first decades of the 20th century, books were made by the many hands of highly experienced craftsmen and women. Today, there are only a few people who preserve these traditional hand bookbinding skills, compared to the thousands of books which are available. Traditional bookbinders don’t use machinery to produce a book, they also have different values regarding the process of a hand bound book. There are five major factors that make a handmade book different from mass produced ones: time, materials, technique, experience and aesthetics.

Time

The hand bound book requires time and effort. It can take from days to years to finish a book by hand. An average time would be 3-7 full days of work for a book like this. As in many crafts, binding involves a lot of drying stages and multiples are often worked on simultaneously, so doing just the one book - it can take longer than that. The truth is that if you respect your work, time will also respect it. Therefore, a book made slowly with the traditional methods will last longer. Additionally, every book is different. Older books can require paper repairs or other treatments and special books with unique designs require a lot of hours decorating and tooling them.

Materials

We mentioned how long it can get to bind a book by hand; it would be a real waste of time if we did not use high quality materials. Even so, in some binderies they will often try to reduce the overall cost by using materials of lower quality in order to meet the customer’s budget.  A good hand bound book cannot happen with unreliable materials. Quality is everything. The selection of materials is very important and it takes a lot of experience to know what works and what does not. So, a bookbinder who respects his/her work and their customer will aim for the highest possible quality of materials. These include vegetable tanned leather or high-quality cloth, handmade papers or good quality acid-free machine-made paper, linen threads and tapes, acid-free millboards, homemade wheat starch paste or other reversible adhesives etc. Sometimes the binders might have to travel to pick the right materials or they might have to import them from another country and that increases the cost of the production. But it will be worth it.

Technique

There are definitely hundreds of different techniques, every country has its special methods and traditions. Nevertheless, we should not forget that the book is always a functional object, thus it has to function. A trained bookbinder will know how to manipulate the materials to work together and produce a well-engineered object. One of the essential features of handmade book is the sewing. A hand sewn book has some kind of support such as linen tapes or hemp cords where the linen thread goes around and links the pages together. Another significant characteristic of a handmade book is the laced-on boards. This means that the boards are attached mechanically (with the sewing supports) to the pages which creates a considerably stronger book. On the contrary the commercial hardbacks are made out of two pieces glued together: the case and the text block which often does not have any kind of sewing. One of the reasons books which are centuries old are still surviving to this day is that all the parts are mechanically attached and they do not rely on adhesives which will eventually dry out and fail.

Experience

A good breadth of training and experience is really important. In England, the apprenticeships used to last seven years before someone could get employment as a bookbinder.  Nowadays, it is quite hard to have a comprehensive traditional education in bookbinding. However, there are still places where someone could learn a lot and gain the required experience in order to work on more demanding projects. The biggest change in the field is probably the broadening of expertise required in one person. The early bookbinders, probably had to be generalists, but in the 1890’s or the 1920’s they would be trained to do a specific job and the book would be a collective work made by many craftsmen. We do not see this kind of division anymore, between the forwarders and finishers, with even further divisions, such as edge-gilding. We have a wide range of self-employed bookbinders or co-operatives who try to attain all the range of  skills and produce a binding from start to finish.

Aesthetics

A bookbinder might have all the above but there is something more: the art of it. The good mechanics of a book do not necessarily mean that it will be an incredibly beautiful book at the same time. The depth and range of knowledge is different for every person. Nonetheless, more and more contemporary bookbinders come from an art/design background which is promising for the evolution of contemporary bookbinding. As with any other art, the study of its history helps a lot. Knowledge of colour theory and typography can be very beneficial as well. The beauty of bookbinding, is that every little thing that someone might have done in the past, can be useful to produce a stunning design.

In conclusion, it might not be so affordable to have all our books handbound and own an impressive shelf of them, if not a whole library; but a handmade book does make you feel differently. Maybe it is the weight in our hands, or the feel of the leather, maybe it is the sparkling gold letters and the old-fashioned type on the cover, or the delicate sewn endbands and the vibrant colours of the marble paper. An important book for our family or an old damaged copy deserves the care of a bookbinder. A special gift or a rare edition will stand out with a design binding. A sketchbook or a photo album will last for future generations. A special gift or a rare edition will stand out with a design binding. 

Sewing on Hemp Cords