An Introduction to Bookbinding Particularly aimed at the preservation of old DEC handbooks By Douglas Jones jones@cs.uiowa.edu 1992 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PREPARATION FOR PHOTOCOPYING PHOTOCOPYING COLLATING AND FOLDING MAKING A COVER PUNCHING THE PAGES SEWING THE PAGES TO THE COVER TRIMMING THE PAGES MAKING DUST JACKETS INTRODUCTION after 1966, DEC began printing their logic handbooks and CPU reference manuals in a paperback format on inexpensive pulp paper. This had the merit that the books were inexpensive, but the shelf-life of the books was not much greater than the market life of the hardware. For those of us who are trying to restore old computer systems, it means we have to use handbooks that are printed on yellow, brittle paper. I have consulted with people at the University of Iowa Book Conservation Laboratory, and they say that there is a simple test used to determine if the paper on which a book has been printed is beyond saving. Dog-ear a page; if the dog-ear breaks off at the crease after folding and reverse folding, the paper is beyond saving. This does not mean that the book itself is worthless! It is ripe for photocopying, and if the the copies are made on archival paper and properly bound, they will last for centuries with reasonable care. I wouldn't recommend undertaking this project more than once for any particular book! It's lots of work! Read this whole report before trying it yourself. The process I'm describing destroys your copy of the book in the process of making one or more new copies. If your copy has sentimental value, you might not want to do this. Furthermore, if anyone else has done the job, you may be able to cut your work in half if they saved an unbound photocopy that can be re-copied for you. Finally, this writeup applies to manuals that are bound in book form -- if you've got a looseleaf binder or spiral bound manual, it's all quite a bit easier; you simply remove the pages from the binder, photocopy them, punch them and hang them in a new binder. You'll still want permission to make a photocopy, and the advice below on archival paper selection still applies. PREPARATION FOR PHOTOCOPYING Once you have concluded that a paperback is beond repair, the first step in preserving its contents is to complete its destruction. Slice off the glued spine of the book, so that the pages come apart as separate sheets. You can cut the sheets from the spine with an X-acto knife, or you can find a shop with a paper shear that will cut the spine loose. Here in Iowa City, one of the larger copy shops has a shear; they charge $2 a cut, which isn't a bad price considering the total cost of the project. Keep the pages in order! The next step is to tape the pages into pairs for copying so that the pairs can be folded and sewn into a bound hardback book. If you examine commercially bound books, you will find that the pages are organized into "signatures" of 4 to 16 sheets (always a power of two), and we are about to reconstruct such a signature structure. Get a supply of white paper tape, "Scotch Brand Post-It Tape" works very well; it took three rolls to make up DEC's "Introduction to Programming 1973". Make a jig for taping your pages out of a single sheet of standard size typing paper. This is the size paper you will be making the photocopys on. Note that two pages, side by side, of the original book are slightly smaller than the sheet of typing paper. You will need a margin in the middle of each copied sheet to sew the binding and similar margins around the edges are no problem, so draw the following layout diagram on your sheet of paper: ______________________________________________ | __________________ __________________ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |<---------------->| | | | | | Width of one | | | | | | page cut from | | | | | | paperback | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |__________________| |__________________| | |______________________________________________| The gap between the outlines of the two pages must be narrower than the white tape, enough narrower that a strip of tape can get a firm grip on each page without covering any print. Note that DEC paperbacks were cheaply made, and that this means that they frequently had sloppy centering of the printed material on each page. Now you are ready to set to work. Take the stack of original pages, in order, right side up, and turn over the top 8 sheets, placing them beside the stack as if they were still bound to a common spine. Then pick off the top sheet of the left stack and put it on the left square of your jig and put the top sheet of the right stack on the right square of your jig, and tape them together, being careful not to shift their alignment. Pause to doctor any dirt specks, pencil marks or other marks that might spoil your photocopy, then flip the pair of taped together pages, tape them together on the flip side, and doctor that side, if needed, before setting the pair of pages aside. Do not turn over pages except when turning blocks of 8 or when flipping pairs of pages, an operation done once with each pair! This greatly simplifies keeping the book in order through this process! Keep making pairs of pages, where each pair consumes the top page from each of two piles of pages, until you have exhausted the smaller pile. At this point, you will have a pile of 8 pairs of pages. this is the prototype of one of the reconstructed signatures of the book. Having carefully set aside your a signature, turn another block of 8 pages and repeat the process, reconstructing the next signature. In copying DEC's 1973 Introduction to Programming, I found (from occasional ink smears and other printing defects) that the 8 sheet signatures I reconstructed were the original signatures as printed for DEC. The book was made of 19 such signatures, which comes to 152 double sheets of paper. In the original printing, each signature was printed on one sheet of newsprint that was then folded 4 times and cut to size before being glued into a paperback binding. PHOTOCOPYING When talking with a photocopy shop about copying what is obviously a book, they'll demand permission to make a copy. I got permission by calling 1-800-DEC-DIRECT; they referred me to the right person, who told me to fax a request for permission. They faxed me a letter of permission a week or two later. In my letter asking permission, I made it clear that I was interested in preserving out of print documentation, and I made it clear that I intended to trade some of my photocopies for other hard to get documentation. DEC required that I include a statement that the copies were made by premission with the DEC copyright notice. Since you most likely have over 100 sheets of paper that need copying, check a variety of photocopying houses, looking for a good price. Your taped pairs of pages are too fragile to be put through an automatic sheet feeder, and because they are slightly undersize, they will need to be hand centered on the glass of the copying machine. Most photocopying houses will charge you extra for hand placement of originals. When I copied DEC's Introduction to Programming, the handling charge was $0.05 per page, but some places charge up to $0.25. You've done a bit of work to make up page pairs, and you'll want the copies to last, so get them photocopied on archival paper; 25% cotton bond typically costs a penny or two extra per sheet. For DEC's 1973 Introduction to Programming, the total cost of paper, copying and special handling came to $0.20 a two-sided sheet for the first copy and $0.11 a sheet for all subsequent copies. That means that my first photocopy of the entire book cost $30.40, while subsequent copies cost $16.72. At these prices, I strongly recommend making extra copies! You have just destroyed a copy of a book that is out of print, so why not make a few extra copies; also, keep one copy in unbound form in case you or anyone else ever want more copies. The copy will be on good paper, so it can be put in an automatic sheet feeder, avoiding special handling charges. To minimize the problems you have with your photocopying house, provide them with the jig you used to paste up your pages and say you want them centered exactly as shown by the outlines on that jig. Then give them the jig and say they're free to cut out the center of the page and stick it to the glass of their photocopying machine with post-it tape to help them center the copy. If they screw up the centering, you can and should get hard nosed about it. Finally, tell them to keep the signatures together! Make it clear that you don't want your pages shuffled. Collating costs a bit extra, so I decided to do it myself, but I asked them to cleanly separate each signature from the next in the stack of copies I got, and to keep the sheets in order. They did. COLLATING AND FOLDING When you get your copies back from the photocopy shop, you'll have a box of paper, and you want to have a box of books. The steps you need to go through before binding the books are collating the pages of each signature, folding the signatures, and collating the signatures. Collating a signature is easiest if you pay the photocopying shop to do it for you, since they have collating photocopying machines. Lacking this, lay out the 8 piles of paper representing the 8 sheets that make up the first signature and pick the top page off each pile to make one signature. Stack them so that the top page in the stack has consecutive page numbers on top, and so that reading up one side of the pile and down the other, the page numbers are in order. You may have to shuffle things a bit before you get the hang of this, but it's not hard once you get going. Once you finish collating the first signature of each copy of your book, set it aside and collate the second signature of each copy. Keep the collated signatures for each copy together, stacked in order, so that you will end up with each book in a separate pile. If you don't want a hardback book, stop here! Cut each signature in half where you would otherwise fold it, then either punch the holes needed to hang the page in a downsized 3 ring binder or have it punched and spiral bound. A sewn binding is more durable, but it's lots of work. The final step prior to binding each copy of the book is to fold the signatures that will make up that book. I do this freehand, rolling the 8-page bunch that makes up one signature until the edges are even, then holding the edges together with one hand while I crease it with the other. When you get all the signatures of one copy of the book folded, they won't stack very well because the creases aren't properly set. To set the creases, force the books into a neat stack and clamp them that way overnight. Lacking a bookpress, stack an unabridged dictionary or a few volumes of the encyclopedea on top of the pile of folded signatures. MAKING A COVER You've got a decent book now, on archival paper, and you need a cover that will be reasonably durable. A full hard-backed case binding is a big project, so I'll recommend something less, a long-stitched soft-board binding. This was recommended to be by the book conservation lab at the University of Iowa. The cover is made of cardboard -- specifically acid free two ply museum board. Good art-supply stores carry this. A sheet will make about eight book covers. In determining the size of the cover, you have to allow for not only the thickness of the paper, but the thickness of the thread used to sew the binding, so now is the time to get the thread. Traditionally, unbleached linen thread is the preferred material, but unbleached long-staple cotton will do almost as well. The key is that it is a natural fiber comparable in expected lifetime to the paper and the cover material, and it has very long fibers, giving it great strength. The thread should be heavy, heavy enough that you might rate it as fine cordage as easily as rating it as heavy thread! Thread diameters of close to a millimeter (when uncompressed and not under tension) are quite reasonable. The thread should compress to about 1/2 millimeter when successive turns are wrapped tightly around a pencil. If you have 19 signatures, as in DEC's 1973 Introduction to Programming, you'll need to add the thickness of 19 threads to the thickness of your book. To find this, wrap 19 turns of thread tightly around a pencil and measure the length of the wrapping. The museum board has the interesting property that it flexes fairly easily in one dimension but it is fairly stiff in the other direction. You want your cover to flex easily from side to side, since that's the way you tend to bend the covers of a book when you hold it open to read. You want the book to be stiff from top to bottom, since bending in that direction should never happen. Taking this into account, cut a rectangle of museum board with the following dimensions: ______________________________________________ _______ __ | __________________ _____^____________ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | >|--|<-- Thickness | | | | | | | | | of the | | | | | | | | | thread. |<-------------------------------------------->| | | | | Width and height of one | | | | | | | unfolded sheet of one of | | | | | | | your signatures, that is, | | |<----->| | -- Thickness | | a sheet of typing paper. | | | | | of the | | | | | | | | | stacked | | | | | | | | | pages (not | | | | | | | | | measured | | | | | | | | | at creased | |__________________| |_____|____________| | | | edge!) |_______________________________v______________|_______|__| |<-------->| Planned thickness of spine of book. Do not cut the cover oversize. This cover is intended to cover the pages of the book in roughly the way a conventional paperback cover does, with the edges of the cardboard exactly even with the edges of the bound pages. I did all my cutting with a carpenter's square to guide a large X-acto knife. It took two or three scores with the knife to cut all the way through, and I used a sheet of crummy cardboard as backing so I wouldn't cut into the table top. Having cut out a rectangular piece of cardboard, you need to score the creases where the cover will hinge to wrap around the pages. I measured twice, then set my straight-edge along the planned hinge lines and used a blunt tool (the rounded corner of a smaller metal ruler) to score the crease. You don't want to cut or tear the fibers of the board when you do this, only compress them to guide the crease. _________________________________________________________ | | | | | ||--------|| | | | | | | ||--------|| | | | | | | ||--------|| | | | | | | ||--------|| | | | | | | ||--------|| | | | | | | ||--------|| | | | | | | ||--------|| | | | | | | ||--------|| | |_______________________|__________|______________________| Before you bend the cover, you need to cut a series of equally spaced square-ended slits in the cover. Typically, these should be about an inch apart, (anywhere from 2 to 3 cm will do) and the end slits should be closer to the ends (about 1/2 inch or 1.5 cm is nice). Each slit should be about 1 mm wide, but the precise width is less important than the uniformity. I cut 8 slits for this purpose, but 7 would be just as good. The ends of the slits should come to about 1/2 the thickness of one signature from the creases that you just scored. PUNCHING THE PAGES Paper is hard stuff, and pushing a sewing needle through 8 layers is no fun, so it is far easier to pre-punch each signature! To do this, make a jig out of a scrap of cardboard with a very straight edge. First, cut a shallow wide notch in the cardboard. The depth of the notch should be about the thickness of 8 sheets of paper. The width of the notch should be the height of the finished book. Then, put the jig parallel to the length of the spine, so the notch just brackets the cover and carefully mark where each slot in the spine passes your jig. Finish the jig by making a V shaped notch at each mark. These notches show where each hole goes in the signatures. It's a rare day that you can get the slots in your spine perfectly symmetrical, so mark one end of your jig as up, so that you can punch all of your signatures the same way. Always make the up direction point towards the top of the page, and you'll get an even book as a result. Here's you jig, resting against the spine: | __ __ __ __ __ ____| || || || || || |____ | |____||________||________||________||________||____| | | \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ | | | | UP -------> | |____________________________________________________________| | | The purpose of the V shaped notches is to guide the tip of an awl as you punch holes in your signatures. Rest the notched edge of your jig in the crease of a folded signature, with the back of the fold against a wood block, and use a good sharp awl to punch holes. Keep the signature folded fairly tightly, and the awl will find the center of the crease in the signature and the center of the notch fairly naturally. SEWING THE PAGES TO THE COVER Now, you're ready to sew the book! The long stitch I used is a fairly modern modification of an ancient style of stitching; the basic rules are simple: Each signature is sewn to the cover in turn, starting at the front of the book. The thread runs once, the length of each signature, alternately inside the fold of the signature and outside the spine of the cover. The thread always runs inside the fold of the signature at the ends of the book. Except at the ends, the threads of successive signatures take turns being inside and outside. Looking at the back of a finished book with 4 signatures that follows these rules, you'll see something like this: __________________________________________ | | Start -->|---|------| |------| |------| _-| |-_=| |------| |------| |=--| |- |------| |------| |------| _-| End ---->|---|------|------| |------| |=--| |__________________________________________| The book is sewn with a single thread, between the indicated points. Note that it takes a bit of cleverness to sew the ends of the signatures, since the natural alternation of over and under brings the thread out somewhat randomly in one or the other orientation. Note that the thread always passes over the end of each signature and around the end of the spine. This helps prevent the pages from tearing out, because tears almost always begin at the end of the crease. Before you start sewing, you need to measure out enough thread to sew the entire book. For a book with 19 or 20 signatures, wrap the thread 10 times around the handfull of signatures when they're clenched tightly in the cover. Then wrap one or two turns for good luck. It's better to have a bit of extra thread than to have to knot the thread in midbook! Before you start sewing, it helps (but is not strictly necessary) to wax the thread with beeswax. To do this, clamp the thread against a block of beeswax with your thumb and pull it through with your other hand. The thread will tend to cut a slot in the wax, so keep changing the angle of pull to even out the wear on the wax. Do this two or three times with the full length of thread before you start sewing. Here, in some detail, is a cross section of the knotting at the end of a thread: loose end ______ _________\ _________ _______ / \ / \\/ \ / | ====== X ========= X ========= \ ======== / ======= \______/ \_________/ \________/ Try to keep the knot and the loose end on the inside of the book. A tight square knot will do well here. You'll begin by making this knot at one end of the first signature, then finish sewing the first signature to the spine. At the end, you'll face a problem -- how to finish one signature and start the next. A note of caution: The final quality control check happens when you commit yourself to sewing in a signature! Once the wrong signature is sewn in or the right one is sewn in with a missing or inverted page, it's no fun to undo. Check what signature you are sewing, and make sure it is all there! Also, with each signature, check that all the pre-punched holes line up with the slits in the cover. If they don't you've probably got the signature upside down. If they still don't line up, you've done a bad job punching the holes, and you'll have to repunch a few. Here, in some detail is the sewing pattern used to change from one signature to the next. If the thread emerges from the end of a signature in the crease of that signature, go outside the cover and down into the prepunched hole in the next signature, then out the crease, over the spine, and through the same hole as you begin sewing the length of the next signature. If the thread emerges from the end of a signature outside the spine, go around the end and down the crease, re-using the last hole in the same signature before going outside, around the end of the next signature, and up the crease. In both cases, the above sewing pattern will produce a result that looks like the following: // | ======= and // thread outside back of spine. |###---------========== // | // ------- thread hidden in fold of signature. |// |---=========---------- ####### thread outside and hidden along | the same line. Whenever you use the same hole twice, always be sure not to sew the thread through itself. Pull the thread that goes through the hole off to one side, then thread the needle through to the other side of the same hole. As you reach the end of the book, it will get hard to squeeze the last signatures in. You'll have to press hard to move the already bound pages down the spine to make room for the last signatures, and as you work on the very last one, you'll have to squeeze the book again each time you try to get the needle through. If you measured the spine width correctly, you'll just barely manage to fit the last signature in -- that's the test of a perfect fit. If you run out of thread before you reach the end of the book, follow the instructions below for tightening the thread before you tie on a new length of thread! Otherwise, you'll end up with a knot that you may well have to pull through a hole in the sewing when you try to tighten the thread later. Before you tie the final knot in the book, tighten the thread, working along the spine from the inital knot towards the end, pulling out any slack until the thread is uniformly tight throughout the sewing. I use a sharp awl (the same one I used to punch the holes in the signatures) to do this, since it is easy to insert the tip under a tight loop of thread and pull the slack forward to that loop, tightening the previous loop. You don't need to pull too hard, but you don't want to leave any slack in the binding. Finally, when the sewing is uniformly tight, tie the final knot, and you have a book! If the pages aren't in the right order at this point, though you'll have trouble fixing the order without cutting the thread and re-sewing! TRIMMING THE PAGES You now have a book, but you'll notice that the pages don't come out even along the "working edge" of the book. The innermost pages of each signature stick out farther than the others, and this makes it hard to thumb through the book. People who do "art bookbinding" seem to like this irregularity, but for a book you intend to be read, it's worth trimming the pages to make an even face. The easy way to do this is to take the book to a place that can shear off the edges. The same shear that works for trimming off the spine of the original book will also serve to trim the pages of the new book, so if you can have the book trimmed for only a few dollars, do so. Tell the people who are trimming the book to square up the edge before they trim it, and then take off about 1/8 inch or 3 mm. If you've got appropriate margins around your photocopies, this shouldn't cut into the images of the original pages. Do not try to have the top and bottom trimmed! No matter how irregular this is, your thread reaches all the way to both ends of the spine many times, and trimming the top and bottom would cut it! You can make a tool to trim your own book out of a wood chisel (1/2 inch or 15 mm minimum width) and a few blocks of hardwood. You'll need two planks about 3/4 inch or 2 cm thick and a few inches longer than the book to use as clamps. Clamp the book loosely between these planks, using C clamps or bolts through the ends of the planks, then square up the irregular edge of the book by pressing it edge down on a tabletop. Use shims about 1/8 inch thick to hold the two planks back from the irregular edge (I used thin LEGO bricks). The edges of the planks define the plane along which you will trim the book. Once you have the book squared up, with the squared edge protruding the right distance from the clamps, tighten the clamps down hard, being careful not to disturb the squareness of the assembly. Now, you're ready to plow off the rough edges with your chisel, except that you need a jig to help hold the flat of the chisel exactly in the plane of the faces of your plank clamps. Here's my jig: __________________________________________ | Hardwood Jig | __________ | _______________ | | chisel |__| |__ | | | handle |__|____________|__\/\/\/\/\/\|_|_____________| |__________| ^ | |||||||||||| | | | jaw |||||||||||| jaw | flat of chisel | of ||| book ||| of |<-- In retrospect, I is held exactly |clamp||| |||clamp| think that this in plane of base | || || | jaw should have of jig. | | | | been thicker! I held the chisel into my plowing jig with a pair of countersunk wood screws that grasped the shank of the blade between the handle and flat. As shown in the above picture, the chisel looks a bit blunt and it's just starting to cut into the pages on the left edge of the book. To cut with this plow, hold the jig at a slight incline and stroke the sharp edge of the blade gently against the edge of the book, working along the full length of the book with each stroke. Better to go too slow than too fast! If you try to cut quickly, you'll gouge your pages. It is crucial that your chisel be very sharp, and there must be no bevel at all on the flat side of the blade! Careless sharpening will frequently put a slight bevel on the flat side, and this will make your plowing ride up as you work across the book instead of allowing you to hold to one plane. MAKING DUST JACKETS Your cardboard cover has threads that show on the outside, and it has no title or cover art! You can solve both of these problems with a paper dust cover. I used 11 by 17 (double the size of the typing paper on which the book was copied) paper as a dust jacket. If you're lucky, you'll have an original cover that you can photocopy onto the dust jacket for cover art, but by the time a book has reached the point where this kind of project is worth while, this is unlikely. I did some cut-and-paste work with photocopies of parts of the body of the book to reconstruct an approximation of the typography of the original cover, then photocopied this onto a colored paper dust jacket before cutting it to shape. Here's a plan for a good archival dust jacket: _ The line of this crease is _______ ___ _______ / critical -- start this fold / \ | | / \ | with the book closed; otherwise _________ /_________\|___|/_________\__________ the cover will tend | | | | | | to pull the book open. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |<-- fold the end over | | | | | | first. | | | | | | | | | | | | |_________|___________|___|___________|_________| \ /| |\ / \_______/ |___| \_______/ <-- fold these flaps over second, ^ and tape or glue to the folded | end flap. Flap to fold under (if you are jacketing an already jacketed book, carefully tuck it into the end of spine). this is the first step in folding the book cover onto the book. The 11 by 17 paper I used (the largest size the photocopying shop could handle) wasn't long enough to fully jacket the insides of the cardboard book covers, so I used photocopies of the insides of the original cover as "end papers", gluing them to the dust jacket (but not to the cardboard cover) with PVA cement after the dust jacket was folded on. You'll need to clamp the book shut to keep the paper flat while the glue dries, but this raises the risk of some glue leaking out and sticking to the rest of the book. To prevent this, insert sheets of wax paper between the sheet you are gluing and the page it shouldn't stick to. If you intend to use the book much, I recommend wrapping the paper dust jacket in a mylar jacket -- mylar drafting film is the ideal stuff. Use "magic transparent tape" to hold the mylar dust jacket on (it's also made of mylar), taping the jacket to itself, not to the book. DO NOT USE VINYL DUST JACKETS! Vinyl sticks to xerographic copies, pulling the ink from the paper, and it is slightly acid, speeding the corrosion of the paper. Polyethylene is ok.