Books, the Making Of: Part Two

Did you know we have a book out? We do. You can find it at Rediscovered Bookshop and A Novel Adventure (not yet available online, we're working on it, promise.) Part two on the adventures of book binding. Last time I talked about how the casing is made. The other really major part of a book, and more important, is the signature. Which isn't quite right either.

Bites From The Orchard: Bridges is what would be called a single signature book. Which is a nice way of saying that it only has one block of pages. What are you talking about? I hear someone saying?

Okay, let's go back and revisit Ulysses S. Grant (and I'll point out that some of these steps do not apply, as Bites From The Orchard is a single signature). It is approximately 300 pages long, and looking at it, has twenty different signatures. Each signature is a pile of pages folded in half. So, Ulysses has twenty of these. Each signature then only consists of four sheets of paper, and each sheet of paper actually holds four pages (incidentally, this is why if you tear out one page, you'll almost always have another page wanting to fall out).

Before I go on, I'm going to jump to a composition book, which happens to be a single signature book, and they lie to you! (at least the Top Flight I have on my desk does.) They say 100 sheets, but if you open it up, exactly in half, you'll notice some thread holding the whole thing together, and that it's actually 50 sheets, for those 200 pages. Anyway, give one of the pages a tear, the first page works really well for this. You'll then find that the back page also wants to fall out!

Enough of that though, we have a pile of twenty signatures now, and that can't be called a book, they're all loose and falling all over the place. Here's where we actually get into binding. Each one of those signatures needs holes in it. A lot of them. Remember in Part One when I mentioned that Ulysses has six lengths of cord stiffening the spine? Here's how that comes into play.

For each and every signature, in the fold, we punch holes, all in the exact same spot for each signature. If Ulysses was using the cord for the signatures (I'll explain that next, I promise!), and let us assume that it does, it would need at least twelve holes in each signature.

So, through those holes, we now take a length of (no, not the cord) thread! Linen by preference. We stack all of our recently holey signatures in a device called a sewing frame. The sewing frame holds the six cords we mentioned earlier nice and tight, and in proper alignment--the signatures holes lining up one on either side of each cord. Then? We stitch each of the cords onto the bottom signature, carry over the stitch into the second signature, and so on and so fourth up all twenty of them. You see, the stitching holds each separate signature together, while the cord holes all the signatures to each other. And no, I will not describe the stitches, if you are that curious, there are books for that sort of thing (and I'm not good enough at writing to accurately give you a picture of what is going on, but let's not tell anyone that).

I did say it wasn't very likely these were part of the signatures though, didn't I? Well, almost certainly they're not. At some point (I don't know an actual date) using cord to bind books fell out of style in favor of ribbon. People still expected those ridges on the spine though. They were attractive. If they weren't there, people would have thought the product was of an inferior quality, and what publishing house wants that? None! So, instead they glued the cord to the inside of the casing, and then pressed the leather around them to give them shape.

We now have a stack of twenty signatures, stitched and bound by cord. We have a beautiful casing, carefully made so every corner and edge is perfect. How do they come together? You see parts I haven't mentioned yet? You promised us a part 3? All are true! And all our next week.

- Sam