Bookbinding

I watched a bunch of videos about bookbinding and decided to make a book. It's a bit time consuming but quite simple, you only require paper, cardboard, string, and cloth.

• Cut your paper into bifolia (2× the intended page size).
• Collect your bifolia into sections. I used 4 bifolia per section, yielding 8 leaves (a quaternion). 
• Punch holes through the sections.
• Cut some strips of cloth, stitch sections together.

• Clamp the book and glue the back.
• Glue the endpapers (not shown), glue the cloth strips on them. I made my endpapers with suminagashi, ie. adding soapy ink and soap water in turn carefully on a tray of water, then laying a piece of paper on it.
• Trim the edges with a guillotine or a crafts knife (I skipped this step with this book).
• Form the book so that the back has a slight curve. Clamp down, and gently hammer the back. This will make it easier to lie the book flat and accommodates for the thickness of the covers.

• Make and attach headbands (the red things). There are fancy ways of doing this, but I just rolled a piece of cloth, glued it to shape, and coloured it with a red marker.
• Cut the covers and the cover cloth. Use the book itself as a measure.

• Glue the cardboard to the cloth, glue a strip of paper on the inside of the back for reinforcement
• Glue the endpapers to the covers. Clamp down
• Enjoy your book! One of the more challenging things about the whole thing is actually using the book for anything...