The YouTube channel “Four Key Book Arts” is fantastic for learning all about the art of book binding and book repair and when I saw in the latest videos he was planning to actually print a book and bind it himself I couldn’t resist giving it a go.
The chosen book is called “Bookbinding, and the Care of Books” by Douglas Cockerell which was originally published in 1901 as a technical manual, ideal for both amateur bookbinders and librarians, and is now available to download for free from the Project Gutenberg website.
Following the instructions I managed to download an EPUB copy, transform it into a pdf and then set about making the relevant changes to make sure the printed copy would be to my satisfaction. This involved correcting missing letters from the start of chapters, removing extraneous pages and adding page numbers. I also had to update the index so that the page numbers shown corresponded to the correct pages. I also sharpened up most of the images so that they’d look better once printed.
Once I was happy with the new layout, I changed it back to a pdf file and headed to the suggested website, Bookbinder.js to correctly format the book for printing. Thankfully my home printer has a duplex option, so printing all the pages was really straightforward.
The signatures were then put together, folded and are now going to sit in the press overnight ready to be sewn together tomorrow.
Better watch his second video so I know what to do next…
