Take note – it’s easy to get between the sheets with bookbinding
Who doesn’t love a lovely notebook? Maybe it’s something to do with the right brain/left brain thing (creativity versus practicality). Despite tablets and organisers threatening to do away with paper and pen, a nice sheaf of well-bound pages is vital for your scribbles and doodles. How much more satisfying would it be to learn how to do it yourself?
Paul Barnes of Dublin’s Liberties Papers says you need very few tools and equipment to start making books. “Paper is the basic component. As you go on you’ll probably use a bone folder, awl, needle and thread, greyboard and some adhesive. The main types of bookbinding are hard or soft bound; stitched or glued, and there are thousands of variations after that.”
So books don’t grow in bookshops?
Éireann Lorsung, who teaches creative writing at UCD and bookbinding with Liberties, says: “it is easy to think that books are made far away, or even that they just ‘exist’.” Teaching bookbinding in writing classes “changes our preconceptions about who can make books”. Crucially, she says, it puts it “in our own hands. It changes how we can imagine, and how we understand what writing includes”.
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Cut fold, cut fold?
That’s a good start. Beginners bookbinding starts with folding the paper, and measuring and cutting the thread. Lorsung gets her classes to figure out the binding method by trial and error, and hey presto: “Ten minutes later, we have our own books. They didn’t exist, and now they do.”
Sounds rather gorgeous
It is.
“It epitomises what a creative education should be. It’s a reminder that we can reinvent everything, by hand, at human scale, sitting around a table together.” It also reaches into the philosophical. “With our handmade books in front of us, writing and making become one thing, and the world opens to us. We can make the things of the world and by extension, we can make a whole world.”
Anything goes
Sidella O’Brien, who also teaches bookbinding classes, says that while the earliest books go back to China, Korea and Japan; contemporary notions of them in this part of the world date to the Christian era with bound manuscripts. Then came the printing press and machine-made paper, and we were off. One of the loveliest things about bookbinding is that you can use almost (though not quite) anything to make one: “cereal boxes, paper bags, wrapping paper, all sorts of packing.” Get inspired on Pinterest, and find a step-by-step guide online at instructables.com
Let’s get technical
Even though bookbinding is an ancient craft, it is always evolving. O’Brien says it is open to interpretation and multidisciplinary, incorporating as much or as little illustration, calligraphy, photography, printmaking, needlecraft and collage as you fancy. “A book can be created from a single sheet of paper. A three-hole pamphlet stitched signature is a quick and easy way to make a book.” Signature is a technical term, meaning printed pages folded up to make a book. Start there to build your confidence and soon you’ll be weighing up the various merits of Japanese stab versus saddle stitches, or even taking a foray into the world of Coptic stitching to recover old tomes and create new ones.
Bookbinding classes at Liberties Papers start at €45
