![]() ![]() Once we had to give up on using actual boards for the cover, I gave up on boring holes into it. We ended up using the same type of poster board used for presentations, which I glued double- thick so it would have a good weight to it. No craft stores in our area had good boards to work with, or really anything good at all for making a hardcover book. Figure 4: A line of coptic stitchingĪfter all the quires were sewn together, I had to attach them to the cover. The book tape hangs out of the edges of the quires so it can be glued to the cover. They also leave thread outside the “spine” of each quire that you can thread book tape through (See Figure 5). The row of coptic stitches secure the quires to each other, while the other stitches secure the pages of the quire to each other. The result of her method leaves lines of stitches resembling coptic stiching at the top and bottom of the quires (see Figure 4), where a full coptic stitching would have, with this book, five rows. I took the coptic binding workshop at the International Congress of Medeival Studies in Kalamazoo, MI last year, but couldn’t remember exactly how it worked. T he tutorials from Crafty Loops proved to be very useful in sewing the quires (here, signatures) together. I’m getting ahead of myself let me explain sewing the quires together. That meant that I also did not sew the quires directly to the tape, but instead threaded the tape through the sewing. At this point, I had given up on trying to find any sort of “authentic” sewing supports, so bought some book tape. Next, I had to sew all the quires together. I also accidentally flipped one of the pages. The result was not perfect at all, but got the job done. The process is similar to how you would reattach pages of a paperback text block. I had to improvise, by gluing the individual, cut pages onto a piece of thick paper, which I then used as my sewing support. As you can see in Figure 1, I needed a fold to keep all the pages of the quire together, as well as to sew them to the next one. It looked really cool, but there was no way to sew it to the other quires. Instead of keeping the pages as a booklet of folded pages, they cut them in half and sewed them together down the left side. The first challenge arose from one of the undergrad group’s quire. I also went with a modern sewing style, though I believe it is fairly similar to medieval versions. I still have no idea how the spines were constructed, so went with the modern version. That is not what happened, but I feel pretty confident that had scribes had access to strong enough glue, they would have gone with my method. ![]() As I said, building a book from scratch is hard.Īt first, I was planning on doing an all-the-way medieval binding: actual wood for boards, drilling holes in them for the supports, figuring out how to construct a spine. The guide will likely be about twenty+ pages long. ![]() This post is not a step by step guide to binding a book, but simply the basic and a few reflections on it. There are only two graduate students, so I did the hands on part while Lainie Pomerleau documented it. As a result, I was perhaps too confident going into this project. We rarely did a complete tear down of a book, to where we only had the text block and build the rest of the binding around it, but I had done a few. Receiving and shelving periodicals, but because I was interested in book production, I was also taught basics of book repair. I worked in the cataloguing department at University of New Orleans’ Earl K. Figure 2: I arranged the cut pages of the quire to where a small edge of each was showing, then glued those to thicker, folded paper. Figure 3: Makeshift fold for sewing purposes. Figure 1: You can see the brown thread in the center of the fold. One needs a lot of patience, and also a willingness to let something be not perfect, or you will never finish. As an experiential learning exercise, I did learn a lot, though the main takeaway is that building a book from scratch is HARD. In our class, the groups of the undergraduate students made their own quires, and it was the graduate students’ job to bind them together. As Bridget Ruth Whearty’s “Making a Digital Medieval Manuscript” blog post tells us, “Medieval manuscript scholars are increasingly interested in experiencing how medieval books were made.” As such, Stanford Libraries have their students craft books, “medieval-scribe-style,” for the sake of experiential learning. ![]()
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