This is the last part! If you’ve followed the adventure since the start of “Fish Leather” till now, you’ll have seen the entire progression from raw fish to finished book! How exciting! Catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 first, and let’s dive right in, shall we?
7. Leather Prep
Now that my book was basically assembled, it was time to work the leather elements to become part of the covers. This was the part I was most apprehensive about since I hadn’t really worked with leather before. I cut the leather a bit longer than the spine length but I didn’t cut the width because I wanted the use the natural edge of the skin. I decided not to do the corners in leather because of the size and shape of my leftover pieces and I wanted practice with rounding corners with paper. After watching many videos about paring/thinning leather for covers, I figured I just had to try it, even if I only had the one skin and no official paring tools. Using my kitchen surfaces and my smallest knife, recently sharpened, I attempted to pare down the edges of the already very thin fish skin pieces, and I found that the skin was pretty difficult to pare due to the woven fibers in the skin. I ultimately thinned only the outermost ¼” edge all around to as thin as I could and moved on.
8. Attaching the Leather
With the leather cut and pared to the shapes I needed, it was time to actually paste the pieces on the covers. Leather, like paper, has a fiber structure. Leather is stronger in specific directions due to the fiber structure, but in fish leather, the fiber structure is woven almost evenly. It gave me a lot of room to adjust and adapt the pieces to fit how I wanted, but it also resulted in the fish skin not laying smoothly at first. First I wet the scale surface of the leather because hide leather has a tendency to darken, and I wasn’t sure if the fish leather would do the same. I knew that if I put paste on the flesh side of the leather, it might go through the thin skin to the other side and leave uneven patches of darker tones.
Flipping the pieces over and working one at a time, I layered a coat or two of paste on the flesh side of the leather, letting it absorb into the fibers. Before placing each piece, I re-coated another thin layer of paste on to the leather to make it pliable and maneuvered it into its position on the covers. The bone folder became my best friend for these steps, but I was also worried about working the leather too much and putting unintentional impressions on the surface since the skin was so soft. Also, the reason I used paste here instead of glue is because the paste is much more manageable for finessing projects: it takes longer to dry, but it also allowed me to correct my mistakes as I went along. This was especially useful for the head and tail caps which needed to be folded over themselves to create a clean line at each end. For the hardest points to tack down, I did use a bit of PVA glue to hold it in place while I worked on other areas. The last step was to reinforce the groove of the shoulders on each side and at the head and tail using first the bone folder and then some twine or yarn wrapped around the shoulders. I left it to dry overnight since paste does take a lot of time to dry in humid temperatures.
9. Finishing the Covers
The last steps for the cover involved adding my German marbled paper sheets to the spaces without any leather. Since I left the fish leather with a natural edge, I found this part rather difficult to shape and cut evenly. First, I made a tracing of the blank space for each of the covers and then cut a sheet of blank card-stock to those tracings. Unlike many of these steps, I didn’t borrow this technique from a bookbinder, but an illuminator I met in Italy years ago. Then I cut the marbled paper sheets a bit bigger than the tracings so that I could wrap the edges of the sheet around the three sides of each cover board. The thicker card-stock sheet was glued down first to fill in the depth of the leather and then the marbled paper sheet was glued down on top so that it overlapped the leather just barely. The three sides that extended beyond the cover were cut at an the angle on the two corners, folded the edges around the book covers, and glued down to secure it even more.
10. Final Step
The final step for the whole book was to glue down the marbled end sheets to the inside of the covers. With the covers already affixed to the spine, it was significantly easier to align the sheets than in a case binding where the covers are built separate from the textblock. All I had to do was add glue to the inside cover and press the paper flat on to it for both sides. A few hours under a press and it was dry!
That’s all folks! From fish skin to a fully-fledged book. It’s been an adventure for sure. I hope you really enjoyed this exploration with me. It’s definitely allowed me to continue improving my skills away from the studio on campus without any extra pressure of working on historic collection materials. I’m hoping that with this exploration I’ll be able to identify and diagnose potential issues with other bindings now that I’ve worked the processes myself.
Artist’s Postscript:
While I was schooled to be an art historian, I always argued that there are so many aspects to art and craft-making that must be understood first-hand through manual practice. Sure, I could read and watch all that there is about bookbinding (and trust me, I try), but I’ll learn more about the processes from doing them myself and experiencing the craft and skills. My minor in college was studio art, and while all the other art historians chose business and pushed to go into museum curatorship, I knew my place was with the art objects. I needed to learn from the art forms in order to speak about them. Because of this dedication to the art process, I love experimental archaeology, and I hope this exploration is one of many I’ll get to showcase for you on this blog. Thanks!