The Book of the Erinyes

As the pace has star­ted to pick up on the Book of the Erinyes pro­ject I decided it was time to get some much-needed book­bind­ing practice.

I’d sewn together a col­lec­tion of blank sig­na­tures a week-or-so ago and tipped on the end­pa­pers, but I was feel­ing some­what nervous about the case binding.

Today I took the plunge and put together my first case bind­ing, and attached it to the sig­na­tures to pro­duce a fin­ished book.

I was fairly pleased with the res­ults — although the edges of the pages are very uneven from where I’d had to cut them with a knife since I don’t have a guil­lot­ine or a plough for trim­ming the pages properly.

I’ve been teach­ing myself book­bind­ing, and there have been three books which have been a great help:

• Hand Book­bind­ing — A Manual of Instruc­tion by Aldren A. Wat­son, Dover Pub­lic­a­tions Inc.
• Hand­made Book­bind­ing Tech­niques by Josep Cam­bras, A & C Black.
• The Book­bind­ing Hand­book by Sue Dog­gett, Search Press.

I’d recom­mend all of these three books to any­one think­ing of teach­ing them­selves hand bookbinding.

The Hand­made Books DVD from Shep­herds was also an invalu­able help — although the books men­tioned above are excel­lent, watch­ing the tech­niques being demon­strated lets you fully under­stand the process.

So my first book is bound and I’ve learnt a lot about all the neces­sary tech­niques that I can use on the Book of the Erinyes.  I’ve got at least a couple of months until the text and pho­to­graphs for the Book of the Erinyes will be ready, so I’m going to do a few more prac­tice pieces using blank paper over the com­ing weeks.

Tags: bookbinding, bound, case, casebound, handmade, journal

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 7:57 pm and is filed under bookbinding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can add a footnote, or trackback from your own site.

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