This binding technique will be sewing through the fold, where the signatures of the book are folded and stitched through the fold. Then the signatures are sewn and glued together at the spine to form a text block. The final result should be as durable as that of a hardbound book, and you should be able to open the book completely flat, at least until you apply glue to the spine. Afterwards it wont stay flat open by its own weight. I always glue the spines (Step 5 of this howto) because the text block of a sewn through the fold book is not very secure and some signatures could come loose over time, especially when you make as little as three stitching rows.

First I’ll show a sketch of the steps to be taken. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it yet (I know I wouldn’t: drawing was never my forte) . Hopefully with some explanations and more photographs everything will be crystal clear. Click on the images to show a bigger version. You’ll be needing the extra detail.

Sketch number one shows what you should do with the thread to sew the first two booklets. Here the thread is represented as a black line. The upper half would be the part that runs through the inner side of one of the booklets. The bottom half would be the part running through the inner side of the other booklet. The little green squares indicate the points of entry, the holes on the fold of each booklet, used to get the thread from the inner to the outer side of a booklet and viceversa.

The cross indicates the point where you’ll be making a knot, and the little grayed-out areas -at both sides and in the middle- correspond to the area where the thread runs through the outer parts of the booklets on its way from one booklet to the other.
The green squares correspond to the pierced parts of the booklets, so the thread from the outer part of each one of them should be aligned and forming a straight column. Assuming you initially inserted the needle through the middle hole, it would run by the inner part of the booklet to a hole in one side. From there, it would get out and into the next booklet, then to the middle hole, out again and into the first one. There you would make the first knot, go to the one free hole left, get out of the booklet and into the next one. Make sure the thread is tight before you tie the knot because this is what will be keeping the booklets together and you don’t want them to wiggle. Also make sure it isn’t too tight, because you could easily tear the pages through the fold. This happens especially when your booklet is thinner than the standard five pages. You’ll get the hang of it as soon as you begin, so there’s no need to worry.

The next sketch shows nothing special. The thread was already running through the inner part of the second booklet, so you only have to get it out though the central hole and into the next booklet. There you tie the knot (marked in red) and you’ve already completed the basic process. The rest of the booklets will be appended to your growing book one by one.

The third and final sketch shows how to continue. The first part of the image remains untouched with its black thread. The second part will mark the thread in red, though you should remember it is the same and uncut piece. From the last knot you simply get the thread out through the middle hole, and then get it into another booklet from the central line again. The entry point to the third booklet is marked with a blue cross in the middle. The thread would go from there to one side, out of the third booklet and into the second, run for the whole length by the inner side to the opposite hole, back to the third booklet and there you would tie another knot right in the middle -again, the blue cross-. By now you should already know how to continue from here.

OK. Now that we’ve seen the theory, let’s look at some actual pictures of the process.

The Tools

The tools are nothing special: a straight needle and thread. I’ve tried using a curved needle to increase the speed but it turned out to be more of a hassle than anything else. The thread is a normal 100% polyester strong white thread. I haven’t tried Nylon or other materials, but I’ve read that some people even use metallic wires for specially heavy pages, normally for art books and so. The thread shouldn’t be too thick, as this will also determine the thickness of the spine you’re sewing. If you click on the image you’ll see that a single thread -not double- is used in the process. This is also to prevent the book from being excessively thick.

I normally cut a piece of about 1.5 meters, thread the needle and start sewing from there. Whenever I run out of thread I simply cut it and tie a new piece to my two fragments instead of threading the needle again. The resulting knots are hardly noticeable once you’re reading unless you’re actively looking for them, and it’s much faster this way.

Sketch 1

Sketch 2

Sketch 3

Click to enlarge any image. Each picture has a comment. Feel free to ask if there’s anything that isn’t clear yet.

Update: I’ve just noticed that I forgot to warn you about something important. You should allways remember to stitch a blank booklet at the beginning and at the end of your book. I normally use only two pages (four once folded) for each one of theese. You’ll be needing the extra booklets unless you had many disposable pages at the beginning and/or the end, because you will have to use some pages once you add the covers. I’ll tell you more about that in a future post, once we get to the final and seventh step: Covers

Update: Check out the complete bookbinding-howto series.

You can devise whatever method you come up with, but I think the easiest way to do these holes is making a pile of paper, clamping it and using a knife to cut through until you reach the center of the folds. These are the tools of the trade: a couple of clamps, some rubber bands and a pair of strips of whatever material you find that can be used to hold the paper firmly. In my case I use two metal pieces that were left over from one of the shelves I have in my junk room.

You could build some kind of wooden structure to do the same thing that would be more handy, but this works for me. At least for now.

So, the process is fairly simple: stack the booklets making sure you don’t have any of them upside down and place the strips so that approximately 5mm are left at the side of the folds.

Then use the rubber bands to hold things together. They should be tight, but some leverage should be left to make the final adjustments.

That is the knife I use, by the way. Nothing special. Just a long bread knife. Once you have the rubber bands on you can gently align the booklets one more time. It’s your last chance to shape the book, so you should be thorough. I use whatever I’ve got at hand to flick the booklets into their final position: a wooden stripe, a notebook and even the knife you see in the photo. You should be gentle and neither bend the booklets nor leave marks during the process. Once you’re done you can use the clamps to keep everything in position during the next phase.

Finally make the cuts in one or two moves of the knife. The more you make, the better your book will be in the end. The problem is it also takes time to sew through every line of holes. Two cuts isn’t enough unless your making a really small book. For an A5 book such as these, 3 cuts is the absolute minimum if you don’t want it to be extremely fragile. I’ve tried with 4 and 5 lines of holes, but the extra time used to sew the book gets longer and longer. I don’t really think it is worth the effort.

Normally I make one of the cuts right in the middle, and the other two at the opposite sides, more or less at 1 cm of the border. I usually don’t align the outer cuts at precisely the same distance as a security measure. If by any chance one of the booklets gets flipped upside down while I’m sewing them together, the asymmetry of the cuts is a good visual warning.

Once you are done, you can remove the clamps and you should be left with something like this. A nice stack of booklets ready to be sewn. You can see the three lines of holes made after the cuts.

Update: Check out the complete bookbinding-howto series.

Once you’ve reached this step you should already have everything printed in a pile of 5-page subgroups correctly arranged for folding. You only need to be careful when selecting the pages that should go in each booklet.

I do the folding manually. Just take the pages, align them properly so that none shows over the others and fold them carefully. You’ll need the best possible alignment you can get since the final look of the book depends on it. I usually take the group and have the opposing shorter sides of the sheets make contact before applying any pressure. If you’ve ever done Origami you’ll know that otherwise you’ll end up with misaligned borders.

It has no complication at all, but you have to be extremely careful each time you fold a booklet or the sides of your book will end up being irregular. My folding is never perfect, but it gets close. Anyway the side opposing the spine of the book will inevitably have an irregular aspect since the innermost pages of a booklet will protrude over those at the outer part. Don’t worry about these triangle-like alignments. We’ll take care of them when we get to the trimming part. For now you have to make sure the lower and upper sides of your book are as aligned as possible.

Once the booklet is folded I usually press harder over the fold so that the paper gets as tight as possible. Otherwise once you start piling booklets you’ll notice they don’t keep an horizontal position and eventually slip and fall from the stack. This is also a problem once you finish the book and add the covers, because a bad folding technique results in books significantly thicker at the spines than any other side. To make tight booklets I simply apply pressure with anything at hand along the fold: a pen, a piece of plastic or whatever I can get my hands on. You simply have to be careful not to rip or damage the paper in the process.

Only a couple of tips for this otherwise uninteresting process:

1. Count: be sure to take only the required pages for each booklet following the appropriate arrangement or once you’ve folded the page disposition won’t make any sense.
2. Check, check and check: it seems stupid, but you wouldn’t be the first to have several of the pages upside down. Is it obvious that this issue bit me? More than once?
3. Did I say check? OK. Then re-check: while you go on piling the booklets, make sure again that every single one of them is in the right direction. Having one page upside down is bad, but having a whole booklet upside down can be even worse. You’ll eventually notice while you sew the booklets to each other, but then you will already have the booklet pierced and making a new set of holes definitely damages the booklet.

Update: Check out the complete bookbinding-howto series.

Typically you’ll be working with a PDF or a PostScript file. I will not discuss Windows programs to print booklets because I don’t use any. I’ve heard of a pseudo-printer driver called FinePrint that manages precisely the booklet printing process, but I haven’t used it and it’s not free, so if you are not willing to use the Linux/*nix programs mentioned bellow you should do some investigation on your own.

Some of the commands discussed here can manage only PDF or PS file, but not both. The ones for PDF are usually front ends for the pdfLatex suite. In any case, you can allways convert from PS to PDF and from PDF to PS, so this shouldn’t be a problem. Be advised though: some conversions from one format to the other can involve a sever loss in legibility, so if there’s a command available for your specific filetype you should stick with that. Another useful thing to have into account is that you can always obtain a PDF file of anything. If you are using Cups you’ve got a really nice pseudo-printer to make PDFs out of anything, so use it!

The margins

I you are using A4 paper-size you are going to end up with an A5-sized book. That is 148 mm × 210 mm, which is fine for a paperback book but you should be careful with the margins in the PDF. Too much wasted space will result in extremely small font-sizes, and even with a perfect eyesight reading such a book can be tiresome.

If your PDF wastes too much space you should trim the pages before you print them. There’s a tool included in pdfjam called pdfjoin. Besides joining pages it can do the trimming part. There’s also a command called pdftrim, but it takes a lot longer to run. I think the reason is that it does some actual resizing.

Normally the margins you should trim will vary and you’ll have to find them out by trial and error. I usually make a smaller PDF to make each test faster. I use pdfnup for this. For example, to make a subset called oud.pdf from a source called in.pdf with pages 40 to 50, I would use:

pdfnup in.pdf --nup 1x1 --pages 40-50 --outfile out.pdf

I tend to get central pages of the book, with some chapter beginning right in the middle of the subset. Normally margins change in those pages, and we don’t want to trim off any written text, do we?

Once you have the correct margins to apply, you just have to use pdfjoin. For example, if you wanted to trim 1cm from the left, 1.3cm from the right, 3.5cm from the top and 4 from the bottom of each page, you would simply use:

pdfjoin in.pdf --trim "1cm 4cm 1.3cm 3.5cm" --outfile out.pdf

The booklets

The booklet would be a group of pages properly aligned for folding. In case you had 1-page booklets, you would have printed pages (4,1) in one side and pages (2,3) in the other. For 2-page booklets that would be, from left to right and front to bottom, [(8,1),(2,7)] on one page and [(6,3) ,(4,5)] on the other. For 3-page booklets….well, you know the drill.

I don’t usually use any tools. My laser printer supports directly printing to booklet format, so I don’t have to rearrange anything. The only thing I have to do is specify how many sheets I want per booklet. Since it’s a cheap printer I have to manually reinsert the pile of sheets once it has finished printing the first side. But that’s about it. Normally I fold groups of five, each with 4 pages printed on them, so my booklets have 20 book-pages each. Take a look at your driver’s options. If it’s a laser printer chances are you’ll be able to do this step directly.

If not, you can always use the psbook command bundled with pstools. You’ll have to convert the file to PostScript first (use pdf2ps). There’s probably a way to do this with pdflatex without taking the intermediate step, but I haven’t had the need to look into it yet. If you need a hand with this just ask.

pstools is an extremely handy collection of tools. There’s also a frontend for these called page-crunch, but I usually stick to the command line.

The result

This step will require advances technical skills: press the print button. ;)

And that would be all. In some cases you’ll have to complete both steps before printing, but if you’re fortunate enough your margins will be fine and your printer will be able to do everything for you automagically. Once you’re done with this step you should end up with a nice stack of sheets ready to fold such as this one.

Update: Check out the complete bookbinding-howto series.

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.