/Portfolio: Blog Book-safe

Written by Marenne on November 23rd, 2011  | Posted under /Coptic Binding.

I made this book to create the header of this blog. The font used is Palatino Black. The letters are actually the binding that holds the book together. It’s got 45 signatures, all with individual punch patterns that I had to make templates for.
I think this must be the longest I’ve ever worked on one book. I started this long before I made the little BoekBindBoetiek books! The sewing was fun but the rest seemed to just drag on. Also, A lot of things went wrong while making this book. Still, I’m happy that this happened with one book, instead of many. Now I know the solutions!

A lot went wrong while making this book safe. First: it turned out to be too high for my book cutter, so i took it to a local copyshop, but they applied too much pressure and tore the bottom papers up and cut it somewhat diagonally. Fortunately there was some space left so I altered my own cutter to allow me for more hight and recut the sides (kind of unevenly). Then I cut out the hole in the middle, but since I had never done this before, it turned out to be very ragged. I decided to smooth this out with a mix of sand and paint, which did a good job on the sides, but totally warped my covers. I fixed this with a make-shift press of stacks of paper. When I closed the book, there was some space between the top and bottom part, but I decided to ignore that. Also, one signature sheet broke at the spine.
This is a Coptic binding with faux-leather covers.