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Scrolls can be rolled in one of two ways. Torah scrolls, editions of the Jewish holy book, were-and still are-also held in special holders when read. The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a massive 200 pages long and was used in funerary services for the deceased.
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The Ancient Greek word for book was tome, meaning "to cut". Roman works were often longer, running to hundreds of pages. The book was not needed in ancient times, as many early Greek texts-scrolls-were 30 pages long, which were customarily folded accordion-fashion to fit into the hand. The modern English word "book" comes from the Proto-Germanic *bokiz, referring to the beechwood on which early written works were recorded. Court records and notes were written on wax tablets, while important documents were written on papyrus or parchment. Writers in the Hellenistic-Roman culture wrote longer texts as scrolls these were stored in boxes or shelving with small cubbyholes, similar to a modern winerack.
LEATHER BINDER HOW TO
The first problem is still how to hold together the pages of a book secondly is how to cover and protect the gathering of pages once they are held together and thirdly, how to label and decorate the protective cover. A book craftsman needs a minimum set of hand tools but with experience will find an extensive collection of secondary hand tools and even items of heavy equipment that are valuable for greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency.īookbinding straddles the line between an artistic craft of considerable antiquity and a highly mechanized industry, with the two sharing considerable similarities in the main problems faced. A working knowledge of the materials involved is required.
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It requires knowledge about numerous varieties of book structures along with all the internal and external details of assembly. Bookbinding combines skills from other trades such as paper and fabric crafts, leather work, model making, and graphic arts. A finished book might need dozens of operations to complete, according to the specific style and materials. For the largest numbers of copies, commercial binding is effected by production runs of ten thousand copies or more in a factory.īookbinding is a specialized trade that relies on basic operations of measuring, cutting, and gluing. There are cases where the printing and binding jobs are combined in one shop. The size and complexity of a bindery shop varies with job types, for example, from one-of-a-kind custom jobs, to repair/restoration work, to library rebinding, to preservation binding, to small edition binding, to extra binding, and finally to large-run publisher's binding. There is a broad grey area between the two divisions. Today, modern bookbinding is divided between hand binding by individual craftsmen working in a shop and commercial bindings mass-produced by high-speed machines in a factory. A third division deals with the repair, restoration, and conservation of old used bindings. Second was letterpress binding which deals with making books intended for reading, including library binding, fine binding, edition binding, and publisher's bindings. Computers have now replaced the pen and paper based accounting that constituted most of the stationery binding industry.
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First, there was stationery binding (known as vellum binding in the trade) that deals with books intended for handwritten entries such as accounting ledgers, business journals, blank books, and guest log books, along with other general office stationery such as notebooks, manifold books, day books, diaries and portfolios. Book artists or specialists in book decoration can also greatly enhance a book's content by creating book-like objects with artistic merit of exceptional quality.īefore the computer age, the bookbinding trade involved two divisions. Finally, an attractive cover is adhered to the boards, including identifying information and decoration. For protection, the bound stack is either wrapped in a flexible cover or attached to stiff boards. Alternative methods of binding that are cheaper but less permanent include loose-leaf rings, individual screw posts or binding posts, twin loop spine coils, plastic spiral coils, and plastic spine combs. Several signatures are then bound together along one edge with a thick needle and sturdy thread. Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book of codex format from an ordered stack of paper sheets that are folded together into sections called signatures or sometimes left as a stack of individual sheets.
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