What is a “hand-built” book?

What do we mean when we say, “at High Class Booker we make hand-sewn and hand-built books”? It’s a series of steps that readily break down into four parts, and each is fun and challenging in its own way.

(I’ve omitted some of the process here in the interest of being less than totally boring.)

FIRST: dreaming
In a well-equipped shop, planning is a little like browsing in an ideal boutique, shopping for the custom book as imagined. We consider the future book’s function, the taste of its end-user, our available materials, and the whims of any eclectic motif we envision.

We choose the paper, not just for the covering material but for the pages and reduce that from parent-sheet to the size the pages will become (usually cut/tearing it with a bone folder).

NEXT: hand-sewing

Hand-sewing a textblock is generally relaxing, except it involves threading a needle with about a dozen feet of fine linen thread and not letting that tangle as we sew the gathering (or folios, or folded pages) together.

Generally, we sew journals using a French-linked stitch (white textblock pictured), and we often use a linked-stitch (ivory textblock pictured) to sew cased-in (or covered spine) sketchbooks.

After a textblock is sewn, we reinforce its spine with a thin coating of glue and let it rest (set up) in a press for a few hours.

THEN: case building

The case is the cover before it is attached to a textblock. It is made from book board, spine materials, and covering. If leather is involved, it must be skived, or thinned (removing the suede from the back) to make it mesh well with paper and to fold at the cover’s corners.

If ojets d’art are to be embedded in a cover, the bezel for those is hand-cut using scalpels, and when the boards are covered, that must be worked with a variety of tools to ensure a smooth receptacle for the treasure and a snug fit.

In the photo below, there is an object enclosure cut into the front board, so it is reinforced from behind with a layer of craft paper. You can also see the leather spine and covering paper as they wrap around to the inside of the case. The photo shows the inside or unseen parts of a case.

A completed case goes into a press to rest for a few hours.

FINALLY: casing-in

I once confessed to a master book binder that, when it comes to gluing the textblock I’ve sewn into the case, I rely a little on math and also on luck, but mostly on abject terror. To my surprise, she said, “yes. Abject terror is the key.”

A lot of glue is involved in setting a textblock into a case, and if everything is precisely square in every step up until the end, setting a textblock is reasonably sane. But it rarely goes that way because materials shrink and stretch and rulers, pencils, and razor blades each carry a margin of error, to say nothing of hands and eyes. Once the textblock is glued in, it’s all over but the crying, and we have a few seconds to admire or criticize our work before it goes into a press to set up for 24 hours.

From start to finish, it takes at least two days to complete each book. We usually have 2-3 in various stages on our bench at any given time.

The whole process of building a book is exhilarating. In a custom shop like ours, every book is a one-off, an unique design that is exciting to discover. As we build each book, we think about its end user. Our goal is to create a journal or sketchbook that each owner will treasure, but that is just the beginning—a place for you to elevate our craft to art with your observations, dreams, ideas, or to-do lists. We hope owning our books is just as creatively frustrating and rewarding as making them because that means it and we are all living, inventing, dreaming, aspiring. Let it be so.