Update 1: Bookbinding

This past semester I took a senior seminar class that included writing a manifesto and binding it in my own book.  As part of the course, we learned how to bind books from basic materials--paper, glue, thread, chipboard, etc.  It was quite a learning experience!  I started out binding using some different techniques I used in class but ended up liking two of them the best.  These are displayed below:

 This type of book has a case binding.  That means that the book is sort of encased by its cover.  It's very a very traditional hardback book with a spine.

 A little bit about the text:  I wrote my manifesto in dialogue-form and really wanted to explore the idea of being a stay-at-home mom.  I know a lot of stay-at-home mothers and would really like to become one myself when the time comes.  Outside of my friends, though, I've gotten a lot of criticism for wanting this because I'm college-educated and have the ability to earn a salary (and why would I ever want to demean myself to simply staying at home and taking care of my kids when women have rights now?).  So I wrote these two dialogues in attempts to mimic the technique used by Plato in his writings called The Republic.

This technique used by Plato involves two characters for every scenario (one of which is usually Plato himself).  In the scenario, Plato tries to persuade the other by soliciting answers to thought-provoking questions.  The point is that Plato will convince his friend of the truth without ever actually forcing him to believe it (or coming right out and saying it), and the friend arrives at Plato's conclusion on his own accord.  The dialogue in my books is between a mother and her daughter (in volume one the daughter is six and in volume two she is seventeen).  The problem?  The daughter wants to be a stay-at-home mom, just the mother herself is (or was, in the case of the seventeen-year-old).  So, this being said, the daughter doesn't understand why she should go to college to get an education if she doesn't necessarily need one to be a mom.  The mother then attempts to persuade her daughter that it is actually a very wise decision to go to college before becoming a wife or mother because she could use her education to be a better parent.  In my books, the mother is a teacher and she and her daughter discuss how her decision to become such has made her a better-informed, more patient, and loving parent than she would have been without the degree.

 

I bound the two volumes together but wanted to make sure that everyone got the idea that they were supposed to be two separate books (and two separate conversations not necessarily between the same mother and daughter).  So I did what magazines do and bound them upside-down from each other!  I felt it was quite effective.  I didn't do as well on the project as I had hoped, but I was very proud of my work!

For my project, I used a program called InDesign to get the text on the inside so that when I folded my pages the text was in the appropriate order.  It's a lot easier to bind blank pages, though!  The other book pictured here is one that I did for my sister-in-law for Christmas.  It's a lot bigger than my miniature books for class and has room for her to paste 5'x7' pictures inside and write captions with them.  It's still a hardback book but the binding is exposed.  I threaded beads on the binding to make it a little prettier and to really showcase the NMU's school colors:

It only took me several hours to do this ;)

And the best thing of all?  She loved it!  I'm so glad.  Otherwise, I would have probably taken it back and kept it for myself!  Hopefully she'll have some fun scrapbooking in it!

I've done some other books, but they're not as good of quality because they were some of the first I've done, so I didn't post pics of those :)  But I'm teaching the Young Women on at Mutual next Wednesday how to bind books, so hopefully I'll get some more practice in before then!