Hard covered books are usually covered in one of three different materials. The most traditional method is using leather, but leather expensive and requires some special techniques and tools that I know little about so I won't be talking about how to use it in this blog (well not unless I suddenly find a great deal of money and preferably a course to learn all the techniques at!). Other materials are fabric, which is much cheaper and easier to handle than leather although still a medium on the 'pain in the arse' scale in my book, and paper, which is the cheapest and easiest!
Now if you look at hard cover books, there are traditionally three different types of binding: full, half and quarter. In full binding, the whole book, front and back, is covered by a single piece of material. The biggest catch in using this method on a small hobby basis is finding a piece of material a suitable size- it needs to be long enough to cover both covers and the spine and have room to be neatly folded over and stuck down. If binding a A5 book (made from folded A4 pages) this means your cover material must be at least 5cm longer (and wider) than a piece of A4 paper. Particularly if you have your heart set on leather, that gets expensive fast!
An alternative to full binding is half and quarter binding. With these methods, traditionally the spine is covered in leather (for the strength, support and appearance), while the bulk of the covers are covered with something else- either paper or fabric. In half bound books the corners are also covered with leather to give them a little extra support from knocks, wear and tear.
In this tutorial, I'm going to talk about making a quarter (or half) bound book. I'm using a paper backed fabric for my spine, and coloured paper for the covers. The advantage of this is that the fabric should be a bit more durable than paper, while the paper I use for the covers doesn't need to be large. This meant I could get silly crafty with some plain A4 paper and a cardmaking mother's stash of cool supplies.
First your covers. I use mounting board from my local art supply store. The card is about 2 mm thick and should be difficult to bend. Books have also been made using wooden boards and even molded paper mache boards but if this is your first attempt at book binding, I suggest sticking with something simple. I don't recommend using corrugated card for something like this. While it tends to be strong in one direction, it bends very easily along the lines of the corrugations which means that it won't take long for your book to start picking up creases.
If you place your text block onto the cover with the text block spine flush with the left edge of the cover, it should stick out about 3mm on the top and bottom of the cover and 3mm on the right. For my A5 text block, I cut my covers to be 21.5 cm by 15.2 cm. The spine of the book should be the same size as the cover and should be cut to be the width of the text block plus your two covers. My spine is 1.2mm (which is actually a mm or two too small than these instructions but should be close enough to be fine). I chose to keep it thicker because I know I'll be sticking quite a few things into the book when it's done which will expand it out a little.
Important safety tips cutting thick card. Use a good quality, sharp knife. The best way to cut yourself is to use a blunt knife- it can skip and slip when cutting, right into your finger. Use a metal ruler (never plastic or wood) and use lots of thin cuts rather than trying to cut through the card in one pass. And know where the band-aids are. Getting blood on your work is really annoying and messy.
Now for the spine material. This material should be the width of your card spine above plus at least 5 cm on each side. You can use paper if you wish, but on this book I'm going to use fabric backed with paper. One benefit is that you can print onto the paper to make a labelled spine, although it does mean you have to be very careful in part B when you glue your spine card to the spine paper lest you have wonky writing.
To use fabric, the first step is to back your fabric with some paper. Cut out a piece of paper the size of the fabric that you are going to back (and precut your fabric as well to save a bit of time). On a clean, flat surface, place your paper down and then evenly coat it with glue. I use pva glue thinned down a little with water and painted on with a thick paintbrush (but not too much water or the paper will wrinkle). You also don't want the glue to be too thick or watery because it will bleed through the fabric and leave a mark- pva when dry is permanent. I have heard that using a flour based glue can be better for task but I've not tried it myself.
When your paper is ready, gently place your fabric on top and smooth down with your hands (making sure you don't have glue on your fingers and you don't press too hard so the glue will bleed through). When flat and smooth, leave to dry and you then can trim the fabric paper to make the edges neat.
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| Fabric glued to paper- left is trimmed to make edges even. White marks are due to *%& glue seeping through |
- Two cover boards cut to size (and should be the same size and a bit bigger than your text block)
- A spine cut from the same material as the cover boards. This should be the same height as your cover boards and the same thickness as your text block
- Your spine material (paper or fabric backed paper) prepared and cut to size
- Your cover paper or material ready (as long as each is large enough to easily cover your cover boards the size is fine at this point- we'll trim it later as we work)
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