Today I thought I’d reveal something about book binding. An ancient art – but also a modern one. And a subject that, really, authors need to know quite a bit about.
The basic principle of book binding hasn’t changed for centuries. The issue is simple enough; getting individual pages – which are often printed in multiples on large sheets of paper – to stack neatly and hold together. It has to be robust. The last thing a book-maker wants to have happen is an explosion of loose pages as the binding breaks. It also has to be cheap, the more so today in a competitive market where e-books are making sharp inroads.
Traditional printing methods usually print books on what are known as ‘forms’, multiple pages at a time. These are not in page order, but in what is known as ‘imposition’ . Because the form is folded and guillotined, the pages on it have to be arranged so that they produce the right order, AFTER folding. Exactly how the imposition is applied depends on the size of the book and the number of pages being printed per form, usually 4 or 8 but sometimes 16. That is why traditional print page numbers are always an even number, usually a multiple of 4, and why you sometimes see blank pages at the back. Digital printing is a little different, though not always.
There are three major ways in which books can be bound – each with their own costs, advantages and pitfalls.
Perfect Binding
Sometimes also called ‘burst’ binding or with a ‘drawn on’ cover. This is the way POD books are usually made. The pages are folded, assembled into the book, and the cover is wrapped around them (‘drawn on’ to the book) and glued along the spine. The book is then trimmed to size. Almost all books are produced by perfect binding these days, and it works well – even on large books such as my Illustrated History of New Zealand, which topped 400 pages and 1kg in weight.
Saddle stitching
Magazines and a lot of reports are made this way; the book is folded and staples (‘wire’) used to stitch the pages together at the spine. The advantgage is that it’s cheap and robust. The disadvantage is scale. It works well up to about 80-88 pages, but after that, the outer pages have to be stretched too far and the spine-side of the book tends to bulge.
Case binding
This is the traditional hardback. It’s the same, generally, as perfect binding except that often a webbing is glued to the back of the pages, which themselves are frequently stitched – with thread – into place. The cover itself is then attached. It’s extremely robust. Curiously, board games are made exactly the same way – the board is, in effect, technically identical to the cover of a hardback, only without the pages. Often a case-bound book will be finished in un-patterned linen. Sometimes they are given a gold-leaf pattern. Usually they are wrapped with a printed dust jacket that carries the cover design. The wrap-around flaps, traditionally, have been used for author photo, jacket blurb and other useful material. Sometimes, a perfect bound book will also be given flaps – these, in that case, form part of the cover and are known as French Flaps.
Useful? I hope so. I’m open to questions…ask away…
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2014
Matthew Wright 
Very interesting, Matt. I hadn’t thought much about that and never did know the names of the types.
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It’s a fascinating subject. For me the intriguing part is it’s all quite possible to do by hand-work, as was routine decades ago – though this is an art likely to be lost, I fear, as we further automate book-making. Here in Wellington there are just two people who are capable of hand-making a case-bound book. Curiously, although a lot of the print companies have perfect binding capability, I’m not aware of one (certainly not locally) that has a machine for case-binding. Most of the case-bound books published in New Zealand by New Zealand publishers are actually printed in China.
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Reblogged this on quirkywritingcorner and commented:
This is the kind of thing I love–a quirky subject. Who thinks of book binding?
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I do! 🙂
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