Bookbinding
Bookbinding is the process of building a book, usually in codex format, from an ordered stack of paper sheets with one's hands and tools, or in modern publishing, by a series of automated processes. To bind a book, groups of pages are joined together, often by thread or adhesive but other options exist such as loose-leaf rings, binding posts, twin-loop spine coils, plastic spiral coils, and plastic spine combs. A cover to protect the contents, usually bearing publication information such as title and author, is generally attached; this can be as simple as a single sheet of paper or an elaborate construction of boards covered in cloth, leather, parchment, etc. with many types of decoration. Processes of making books vary significantly by time period and geography/culture. Mechanised bookbinding was introduced in the 19th century with the industrial revolution, alongside machine papermaking, faster methods of leather tanning, and other changes in manufacturing that affected the book.
The trade of bookbinding includes the binding of blank books and printed books. Blank books, or stationery bindings, are books planned to be written in. These include accounting ledgers, guestbooks, logbooks, notebooks, manifold books, day books, diaries, and sketchbooks. Printed books are produced through letterpress printing, offset lithography, or other printing techniques and their binding practices include fine binding, edition binding, publisher's bindings, and library binding.
Overview
Bookbinding is a skilled trade that requires measuring, cutting, and gluing. A finished book requires many steps to complete. This is usually determined by the materials needed and the layout of the book. Bookbinding combines skills from the trades of papermaking, textile and leather-working crafts, model making, and graphic design. The trade of bookbinding is both a craft done out of creativity and passion and a process happening in a factory. But each type of bookbinding always resolves three problems in making a book: how to bind the paper sheets into a book block; how to cover and protect the bound pages; and how to label and decorate the book covers that protect the pages.History
Origins of the book
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 wine rack. Court records and notes were written on wax tablets, while important documents were written on papyrus or parchment. The modern English word "book" comes from the Proto-Germanic *bokiz, referring to the beechwood on which early written works were recorded.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. Roman works were often longer, running to hundreds of pages. The Ancient Greek word for book was, meaning "to cut". The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a massive 200 pages long and was used in funerary services for the deceased. Torah scrolls, editions of first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Israelite Bible, were—and still are—also held in special holders when read.
Scrolls can be rolled in one of two ways. The first method is to wrap the scroll around a single core, similar to a modern roll of paper towels. While simple to construct, a single core scroll has a major disadvantage: in order to read text at the end of the scroll, the entire scroll must be unwound. This is partially overcome in the second method, which is to wrap the scroll around two cores, as in a Torah. With a double scroll, the text can be accessed from both beginning and end, and the portions of the scroll not being read can remain wound. This still leaves the scroll a sequential-access medium: to reach a given page, one generally has to unroll and re-roll many other pages.
Early book formats
In addition to the scroll, wax tablets were commonly used in Antiquity as a writing surface. Diptychs and later polyptych formats were often hinged together along one edge, analogous to the spine of modern books, as well as a folding concertina format. Such a set of simple wooden boards sewn together was called by the Romans a codex —from the Latin word caudex, meaning "the trunk" of a tree, around the first century AD. Two ancient polyptychs, a pentaptych and octoptych, excavated at Herculaneum employed a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on thongs or cords.At the turn of the first century, a kind of folded parchment notebook called pugillares membranei in Latin became commonly used for writing throughout the Roman Empire. This term was used by the Roman poet Martial. Martial used the term with reference to gifts of literature exchanged by Romans during the festival of Saturnalia. According to T. C. Skeat, "in at least three cases and probably in all, in the form of codices" and he theorized that this form of notebook was invented in Rome and then "must have spread rapidly to the Near East". In his discussion of one of the earliest pagan parchment codices to survive from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Eric Turner seems to challenge Skeat's notion when stating "its mere existence is evidence that this book form had a prehistory" and that "early experiments with this book form may well have taken place outside of Egypt".
Early intact codices were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Consisting of primarily Gnostic texts in Coptic, the books were mostly written on papyrus, and while many are single-quire, a few are multi-quire. Codices were a significant improvement over papyrus or vellum scrolls in that they were easier to handle. However, despite allowing writing on both sides of the leaves, they were still foliated—numbered on the leaves, like the Indian books. The idea spread quickly through the early churches, and the word "Bible" comes from the town where the Byzantine monks established their first scriptorium, Byblos, in modern Lebanon. The idea of numbering each side of the page—Latin pagina, "to fasten"—appeared when the text of the individual testaments of the Bible were combined and text had to be searched through more quickly. This book format became the preferred way of preserving manuscript or printed material.
Development
The codex-style book, using sheets of either papyrus or vellum, was invented in the Roman Empire during the 1st century AD. First described by the poet Martial from Roman Spain, it largely replaced earlier writing mediums such as wax tablets and scrolls by the year 300 AD. By the 6th century AD, the scroll and wax tablet had been completely replaced by the codex in the Western world.Western books from the fifth century onwards were bound between hard covers, with pages made from parchment folded and sewn onto strong cords or ligaments that were attached to wooden boards and covered with leather. Since early books were exclusively handwritten on handmade materials, sizes and styles varied considerably, and there was no standard of uniformity. Early and medieval codices were bound with flat spines, and it was not until the fifteenth century that books began to have the rounded spines associated with hardcovers today. Because the vellum of early books would react to humidity by swelling, causing the book to take on a characteristic wedge shape, the wooden covers of medieval books were often secured with straps or clasps. These straps, along with metal bosses on the book's covers to keep it raised off the surface that it rests on, are collectively known as furniture.
The earliest surviving European bookbinding is the St Cuthbert Gospel of about 700, in red goatskin, now in the British Library, whose decoration includes raised patterns and coloured tooled designs. Very grand manuscripts for liturgical rather than library use had covers in metalwork called treasure bindings, often studded with gems and incorporating ivory relief panels or enamel elements. Very few of these have survived intact, as they have been broken up for their precious materials, but a fair number of the ivory panels have survived, as they were hard to recycle; the divided panels from the Codex Aureus of Lorsch are among the most notable. The 8th century Vienna Coronation Gospels were given a new gold relief cover in about 1500, and the Lindau Gospels have their original cover from around 800.
Luxury medieval books for the library had leather covers decorated, often all over, with tooling, and often small metal embellishments such as bosses and corners called furniture. Medieval tooling showed animals and figures as well as the vegetal and geometric designs that would later dominate book cover decoration. Until the end of the period books were not usually stood up on shelves in the modern way. The most functional books were bound in plain white vellum over boards, and had a brief title hand-written on the spine. Techniques for gold tooling were imported from the Islamic world in the 15th century, and thereafter the gold-tooled leather binding has remained the conventional choice for high quality bindings for collectors, though cheaper bindings that only used gold for the title on the spine, or not at all, were always more common. Although the arrival of the printed book vastly increased the number of books produced in Europe, it did not in itself change the various styles of binding used, except that vellum became much less used.
Introduction of paper
Although early, coarse hempen paper had existed in China during the Western Han period, the Eastern-Han Chinese court eunuch Cai Lun introduced the first significant improvement and standardization of papermaking by adding essential new materials into its composition.Bookbinding in medieval China replaced traditional Chinese writing supports such as bamboo and wooden slips, as well as silk and paper scrolls. The evolution of the codex in China began with folded-leaf pamphlets in the 9th century AD, during the late Tang dynasty, improved by the 'butterfly' bindings of the Song dynasty, the wrapped back binding of the Yuan dynasty, the stitched binding of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and finally the adoption of Western-style bookbinding in the 20th century. The initial phase of this evolution, the accordion-folded palm-leaf-style book, most likely came from India and was introduced to China via Buddhist missionaries and scriptures.
With the arrival of rag paper manufacturing in Europe in the late Middle Ages and the use of the printing press beginning in the mid-15th century, bookbinding began to standardize somewhat, but page sizes still varied considerably.. Paper leaves also meant that heavy wooden boards and metal furniture were no longer necessary to keep books closed, allowing for much lighter pasteboard covers. The practice of rounding and backing the spines of books to create a solid, smooth surface and "shoulders" supporting the "text block" against its covers facilitated the upright storage of books and titling on spine. This became common practice by the close of the 16th century but was consistently practised in Rome as early as the 1520s.
In the early sixteenth century, the Italian printer Aldus Manutius realized that personal books would need to fit in saddle bags and thus produced books in the smaller formats of quartos and octavos.
Leipzig, a prominent center of the German book-trade, in 1739 had 20 bookshops, 15 printing establishments, 22 book-binders and three type-foundries in a population of 28,000 people.
In the German book-distribution system of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the end-user buyers of books "generally made separate arrangements with either the publisher or a bookbinder to have printed sheets bound according to their wishes and their budget".
The reduced cost of books facilitated cheap lightweight Bibles, made from tissue-thin oxford paper, with floppy covers, that resembled the early Arabic Qurans, enabling missionaries to take portable books with them around the world, and modern wood glues enabled the addition of paperback covers to simple glue bindings.