Creating a Book from Scratch (Part 1)

The YouTube channel Four Keys Book Arts is fantastic for learning the art of bookbinding and book repair. When I saw that the latest videos were planning to actually print a book and bind it from scratch, I couldn’t resist giving it a go.

The chosen book is Bookbinding, and the Care of Books by Douglas Cockerell, originally published in 1901 as a technical manual for amateur bookbinders and librarians. It’s now available to download for free from the Project Gutenberg website.

Following the instructions, I managed to download an EPUB copy, transform it into a PDF, and then set about making the relevant changes to ensure the printed copy would be to my satisfaction. This involved correcting missing letters from the start of chapters, removing extraneous pages, and adding page numbers. I also updated the index so that the page numbers shown corresponded to the correct pages, and sharpened up most of the images so that they’d look better once printed.

Once I was happy with the new layout, I changed it back to a PDF file and headed to the suggested website, Bookbinder.js , to correctly format the book for printing. Thankfully my home printer has a duplex option, so printing all the pages was very straightforward.

The signatures were then put together, folded, and are now going to sit in the press overnight ready to be sewn together tomorrow.

Better watch his second video so I know what to do next…