This week I am making text blocks for my new batch of books. The text begins with pages, which come out of the printer looking like this:

 

I use a mediumweight drawing paper in A4 size, quartered, which makes a tall narrow book. The paper is exquisite, but my printer is not that great; it takes about two hours to print four copies of the entire text, a job that is both boring and requiring of intense concentration. After they’re printed, they need to be put in order.

Collating is probably the hardest part of the whole process. If you do it right, the book reads correctly. If one page gets out of order, the whole text doesn’t make sense. As a reader, I don’t really mind the occasional misplaced signature (I have a big art book on MC Escher, for instance, that has an upside-down section in the middle, so that you have to turn the book and read backwards for twelve pages, which I think it adds to the Escher experience.) However, as a bookmaker, I like everything in my books to be in order and right-side-up.

Here is a picture of some correctly collated signatures:

 

My favorite part of the process is the sewing. I punch holes with a corsage pin and do the stitching with quilting thread. This is what it looks like after the punching but before the sewing, a delicate point because the punched pages can’t be moved without disturbing the holes and causing a lot of confusion. This is also, coincidentally, the time when the baby usually wakes up and begins demanding a snack.

 

Then (after the baby has been fed) it’s time for the sewing, which is time-consuming, but satisfying. Here is what the spine looks like once it’s sewed up:

 

Pretty, huh? When I first started learning about making books, I was very enamored of this look. I decided I was going to make only stitched, glueless books, which would be beautiful and low-tech. But it turns out that unglued text blocks have a lot of play – the pages move around, and there are gaps between signatures, and it’s irritating to read, because the weight of the book moves around in your hand as you turn pages. Also, if you’re not very very good at keeping the proper tension on your thread, some sections are looser than others, which is also irritating.

So then there’s gluing, applying cloth to the spine, another layer of glue… a lot of sitting around, adding and taking away clips, and waiting for things to dry, which is not too interesting:

 

But once they’re dried, all you have to do is glue the text block into the cover (see Part 1), press it overnight, and you have a lovely fresh-smelling book to admire. Once this batch is done, I will add a fascinating and educational Part 3 to this series.