For more information on the origin of this project, please see the “Fish Leather” post.
In order to use as much of the fish leather as possible, I decided to do what’s called a modern half leather library binding style. This style uses leather for the spine, and sometimes, the corners of the covers. The rest of the covers are filled in with a patterned fabric or paper. I decided that marbled paper was the most traditional and aesthetically pleasant choice for both the covers and the end sheets. I chose a German marbled paper style with plenty of veins, bubbles, and high contrast.
This post series is similar in structure to the Fish Leather post, where I describe the process I undertook, but don’t lay out all the details so they can be copied step by step. There are numerous other binders online who are more eloquent and experienced who you can learn from, like I did! This is more like an exploration, since this was my first attempt at a number of these processes and much of the work was done away from my studio on campus since I was working from home at the time.
In this series, you’ll see me use both words paste and glue. While common used to mean the same thing, they are different words and reference me using different materials. Glue = PVA or polyvinyl acetate vs. Paste = Wheat starch paste. Both are great tools, but work in slightly different ways.
And with all those disclaimers done, I hope you enjoy reading about my exploration into binding with fish leather. Starting here with part 1!
1. Sewing
Many people don’t know that some books have actually been sewn together! In the 19th century, it was a woman’s job to sew the books, while men mainly handled the paper-making, leather-working or binding aspects. So my first step was to actually sew the bookblock itself. Because I wanted to create a sketchbook, I used Strathmore sketch paper (74 gsm) and folded the 9” x 12” sheets in half along the longer side to create my pages. I put four sheets together to create a signature and then kept folding until I had created ten signatures. This results in about 160 pages, if using both sides of each page. Using the kettle stitch technique (unfortunately while lacking a sewing frame), I sewed the signatures together with two tapes to hold the bookblock together. The whole process took about one to two hours to fold, jog, and stitch the pages together. I imagine it would have taken less time on a frame since I had to constantly re-evaluate if my thread was tight and my signatures even.
2. Marbled Paper End Sheets
Next step was to glue down the patterned end sheets to the bookblock. These were made with a traditional technique originally from Turkey but popularized throughout Europe. Typically these would go on the ends of the bookblock, however, for this book, I’m using split boards for the covers which have to attach directly to the bookblock. To compensate for the slips needed to go inside the split boards, I attached the end sheets just inside the first and last signatures, leaving one page to become the slip for each cover. I’ll talk more about split boards in Part 2. These patterned end sheets not only bring a brightness to the inside of the book, but will be used to hide the rough and untidy look of the inside covers, and help secure the bookblock to the covers. A closer look at the paper I chose is the banner of this post!
3. “Gilding” the edges
To make this book really special, I wanted to coat the page edges with gold so they looked gilded. There are a number of ways to do this, however, I chose the most at-home-friendly option: to use gold metallic acrylic paint. First, I trimmed my bookblock on the fore-edge to ensure that all the edges would line up. This takes a lot of patience without a guillotine or a plough, tools made for this particular job. Once all the pages were even and level, I rubbed some chalk into the edges of the paper and then compressed the block under some weight so they laid flat and even. Using a narrow paint brush, I painted a thin but opaque layer of the acrylic onto the edges. I fanned the pages a few times to make sure none of them stuck together in the process, but I still had to go through with a microspatula to separate a few of the thicker areas. It gives it a unique look, but I wouldn’t say it has the shimmer or shine of actual gilding.