Bookbinding HOWTO Step 0: Introduction

This isn’t going to be a technical post for once. Besides computers I do have more mundane hobbies you know. A couple of years back I started bookbinding as a remedy for a particularly stressful month. Manual tasks always seem to have a relaxing effect on me, so it seemed as good choice as any.

Eventually I’ll end up buying an eBook-reader and I guess that will be the end of my bookbinding hobby, but for the time being printing the good books doesn’t seem as a bad choice. I haven’t found a machine that suits my needs and is affordable yet. I recently considered buying the Sony PRS-505, but people on the net are not happy with the zooming options for PDF files. Excellent PDF support is a must, so I’ll just wait for better gadgets to come out.

As I was saying, I had recently downloaded an excellent book in PDF format, Dive into Python by Mark Pilgrim, so it was a good opportunity to get into this bookbinding thing. The book, by the way, is published under the FDL so verbatim copying is allowed. Take a look at the sites if you want to know more about the book. It’s around 300 pages and I really liked the no-nonsense, cut to the chase style. Totally recommended.

Since I like that style so much, let’s cut to the chase. Enough blabbing. The process is totally amateurish, of course, and far from perfect. But after some trial and error and several refinements over time, I believe the final result is quite satisfactory.

Here are the basic steps you should follow to end up with a nice printed book:

1. Print the book: ideally you would have some TeX sources and this step could be done in a completely professional way. In practice most of the time you’ll be working with PDF or PostScript files, or even books in DejaVue, HTML, CHM format or even worse. A TeX source will allow you to have a perfect copy. PDF & PS can achieve excellent results without too much hassle. DejaVue can be dealt with (it’s an excellent format to read, but not as good to print because not many tools exist to process the files). I’ve printed several books in one of the other formats, and the results vary a lot but they are never as good as the preferred TeX, PDF and PS formats. Period.
2. Fold the booklets with great love and care :)
3. Pierce holes in an orderly fashion in every single one of the booklets. In practice I just stack everything and make several cuts with a long knife. These holes will be used to sew the spine of the book.
4. Sewing process. The most time consuming step on the list. I usually multi-task and get this done while watching TV. Any other way makes me feel guilty about being wasting my time with TV. It’s not as if most of the shows were worth watching anyway.
5. Glue the sewn spine to make it more consistent.
6. Trim the pages. If I could get my hands on a paper cutter (as in trimming board, guillotine, etc) I would end up with perfect books. These are usually very expensive and I haven’t really seen any stores where I could get my books trimmed. I’ve seen several posts about this, but I haven’t found similar services nearby. In practice I use a cheap sander I bought for 10€. It should be used for wood, but paper is a lot easier to work through.
7. Finally, make the covers.

And that’s about everything. None of the steps is particularly complicated. Next post will be about step 1: printing process.

Update: Check out the complete bookbinding-howto series.