The Complete Guide to Bookbinding

Chapter 1: What Is Bookbinding and Why People Love It

Let's clear something up right away: bookbinding is not about sitting in a dusty library carefully gluing ancient scrolls back together. That's conservation, and it's a different trade. Bookbinding is the craft of taking loose sheets of paper - the kind you might print on at home, or buy in bulk, or even make yourself - and turning them into a sturdy, beautiful, functional book. You're not repairing something old. You're building something new from raw materials.

Concretely, that means you'll spend your time folding paper into small bundles of pages called signatures, then sewing those signatures together with thread, then attaching them to a hard cover made of cardboard and cloth or paper. There are variations - you can punch holes in a stack of paper and bind it with a single stitch down the spine in a style called a Japanese stab binding. You can glue pages together and wrap them in a soft cover for a simple pamphlet or notebook. You can even bind without sewing at all, using the same kind of glue that's used on the bindings of paperback novels. But the core of the hobby, the thing that feels most like "real" bookbinding, is the process of folding, sewing, and casing in - which just means attaching your sewn pages to a hard cover.

Let me walk you through what that actually feels like, because the day-to-day experience is often nothing like what people