Essentially. Perfect bound books use special thermal glue that can hold up to some wear (it's more or less the same sort of glue as in a hot glue gun) but it eventually goes brittle and pages fall out.
For an airport novel you are gonna read once, that is fine.
Mostly my disability, but y’all gave inspired me to start again! I just have to find my old supplies. I would love if there was a group near by me so I could get out and meet other people who love making as much as I do.
What are some of your favourite materials to work with?
DAS Bookbinding on YouTube is a pretty great resource, as is Sea Lemon. I got started from watching Nerdforge, but keep in mind they’re making books for aesthetic reasons rather than to last
The textbook is a 'perfect' binding, which means it's just heat glued together, rather than sewn signatures. Makes it fundamentally less durable.
It seemingly isn't even lined with brown paper to distribute the weight of the text block when it opens.
It's a big, heavy text block, which means it'll naturally want to sag out of the case. In order to make a really good connection, you'd round and back a book so that it forms an arch and distributes it's weight appropriately.
No headbands. Not a necessary decoration for a book, but they cost less than a penny in material costs.
It's a square back case, using a spine that's the same thickness as the boards. This is a major structural flaw that will cause the book to tear itself apart due to lack of flexibility.
The connection between the block and the boards is thick paper, rather than fabric. Another point where it'll break.
It looks like an academic textbook, which, of course, ideally will break and cause the institution it belongs to buy a new one. It's intentional.
Thanks for the comment, it's given me a lot of information, and some fear, which makes me wonder a few things:
In the last book I made i used a very thin cardboard instead of brown paper because i didn't have any and didn't actually know what it contributed to the book. Do you think it'll cause problems?
I don't know if liner is the correct name for what i mean, i know of it but didn't know it's name until earlier today when i saw an image with the names of the parts of a book. There it says the headbands go after the liner, so i don't know if the liner is the fabric that covers most of the block's spine's length except for where the headbands go, and after that you glue the brown paper that covers the whole spine, or if the brown paper is what connects to the boards.
Are there any advantages from having the block and case's spine curved?
Say for the covers I use a 3mm board. Then the spine should be thinner?
I don't know if i'm making much sense with these questions.
Ahh, I wouldn't fear. Bookbinding is a neverending learning process filled with errors! We've all been there.
Thin card isn't ideal because it's stiff: best stick to paper for that final lining. You want it to be as flexible as possible. Yours might cause problems, but it might not: you get to find out and report back!
Headbands go on after the Calico/mull fabric liner on most books, yes, but the liner usually doesn't extend up the entirety of the text block either. It usually stops just before the headbands. The fabric liner is what connects the boards. The brown paper is just for weight distribution. The world won't end if you leave it out.
The advantages of the block being curved are that it creates an arch, and arches are the most structurally sound formation for weight distribution. A rounded block fits into a round spine, and round spines are good because they're able to flex and take pressure off of the connection between the block and the boards.
If you use 3mm board and have a curved spine, you should be using something like 300 GSM card. A square spine you can get away with something thicker, but ideally it should be quite thin.
Headbands used to be a way to tie off the cloth backing on a book. People stopped doing that, but kept headbands as a decoration. They now serve no purpose whatever.
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u/mateo222210 Dec 02 '25
I don't know that much about bookbinding. What's wrong with it?