Roll storage

It doesn’t do any good to have materials if you can’t store them correctly. Damaged goods are pretty useless. Wrinkled paper, even kinks in paper, make it useless for anything other than waste paper. And that can make some pretty expensive waste paper.

Book cloth is another item that can be ruined by improper storage. Sometimes it can be kept on the tube it came on, like the blue cloth roll in this picture, but that can waste space as well. No one has enough space and every inch can be important. But sometimes cloth isn’t in any shape conducive to being stored with other cloth on a shelf, though a bunch of unsupported rolls of cloth can be fine together.

It seems the answers to most of life’s problems can be found at Home Depot or IKEA. Well, sometimes the answers are duct tape and WD-40. I guess for bookbinding, it’s mainly the first two. For stuff around the house, it’s the tape and lubricant. Confusing, I know. What if the bindery is in a house? How do you decide? I’m getting dizzy here.

I went to Home Depot several years ago and bought a 4” PVC pipe, shown on the left below. It didn’t work because it was too flexible and distorted under the weight of stuff placed above it.

Next I tried a thicker, stronger tube. It was better but the tube only came in 3 inches and that was too narrow.

A few years after my search, I was in an Ace Hardware and saw these tubes. They are 4 inches and are sort of corrugated so they have plenty of strength. They come in 10 foot lengths, so I chopped them in half. I need to put caps on the back ends, because things are so dusty here in the boonies where there is no grass to hold the dust down.

Some materials are too large for a tube. For those I try to keep them in the box they were shipped in. 

It’s a particularly good system for small rolls of material. They’d get crushed and destroyed otherwise. And you’d never be able to find them.

No doubt there are tons of solutions for this problem, but this works well for me. Not only does it protect the cloth but makes it easy to keep it organized as well. And if you can’t find stuff, you might as well not even have it. If only I had room for more. . . .

Is this a thing?

I had some students who wanted to make good corners without having to freehand the cuts.  Now, normally I want to only teach the "right" way of doing things because you never know.  Maybe someone will end up doing this work forever, and it will be their life, but if they started out with jigs and shortcuts I wonder if they'll ever rise above that.  Learn to do it right, then pull out the jigs if there's a reason.

It seems to me that people cling to what they first learned and often have a hard time understanding that what they were shown in the most basic of classes may not really be the best way to approach all their projects as their work approaches greater and greater heights.  It sort of reminds me of birds imprinting people as their mother.  They need to move beyond that but they can't.

I had some pieces of aluminum around and a few minutes to kill while I was waiting for stuff to dry.  So I put an end mill into the milling machine, drew some lines on the aluminum and went to town.  I ended up with this:

What mattered was the angle, obviously, and then the distance between the top of the triangle and the opposing edge of the metal. It should be around 1.5 board thicknesses.  This is pretty close to 1.5 of a 98 point board.  Between setting things up and doing the milling it probably took 5 minutes, with three of those minutes being spend on drawing the cut lines.  

The idea is that the notch sets on the corner of the board:

It gets pulled down to the corner and then I cut the edge:

In the end you get this:

One thing to add is that I wanted the length of the piece to be longer than the covering material would be, but it was even more important that my hands be able to grab the ends with two fingers so that I can use it quickly.  My hands are pretty large - I could palm a basketball in the 8th grade, my only real basketball skill by the way.  Perhaps it might be better if it was shorter for those with smaller hands.   Does Trump do bookbinding?  I'll make a shorter one for him. 

I wanted to be able to hold handle it like this:

Today, even though it's a holiday, I put material on ten covers. I decided to use this for the fun of it (did I mention it's a holiday, I should have some fun!) so ended up cutting 40 corners.  It took me around 8 seconds to cut the four corners on one cover.  I think it worked.

But I wonder if it's a thing that I haven't seen before.  Or maybe I've seen it and forgotten about it.  In any event I think it'll be a thing for me at times and for some of my classes.  

But if it is a new thing it might be just to ticket to get that Nobel Prize so that I can shake the King's hand and make up for blowing that opportunity in a windy hanger at SeaTac in 1975.  Some day I'll get over it, I'm sure.  I know.  I hope.

Fake or an homage?

I grew up with these kinds of library bindings.  Liked them back then and still do.  They are printed book cloth, using heavy library buckram.  Which means the cloth is very heavy and durable.

Basically what they did was this:  they'd print a design on a roll of book cloth leaving an unprinted strip between the designs.  That unprinted area could be the spine of the book.

These books were done in the 1960s for the King County Library and Seattle Public Libraries.  I bought them at a Friends book sale because I was so charmed by them.

Eventually they stopped using this type of cloth because it was easier to do them on non printed cloth.  Probably cheaper too.

But what I like about them is that the printing on them is to replicate quarter cloth bindings.  What???  How about a definition.  Quarter bindings have book cloth on the spine but not the corners.

Here is a quarter cloth binding I did of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary.  If you haven't read it you should, but that's not the point here.  But really, you should read it.  The black in this picture is cloth and the reddish part is decorated paper.

Compare that with this and you can see what they were doing.  Clicking on the pictures enlarges them, which may help you see this better.

Half bindings have cloth or leather on the spine and corners with a decorated paper cover the rest of the cover boards.  You've all seen hundreds of them. Here is a half leather binding of a blank book, which I did at school as an example, thus no title on the spine. 

Obviously it would be impossible to do a half binding style on these library books because the size of the boards on books are always different so the corners would never line up correctly.  Why? Because the corners would have to be pre-printed on the roll of cloth and to do that would require all books be the same size.  Which they aren't.

That makes me wonder how wide the book cloth was for these because both usually comes about a yard wide.  Were there two sets of patterns side by side on the cloth or were they just one really wide design?  

Here is another style.  It is more like a design binding!  There is no decoration on the back.  But notice the decorative line across the top and bottom of the spine.  Reminds me of when if something cost a bit more in time, effort, or money it was ok if it make it better or more attractive.  Or more fun.

I should also admit that I like how they feel in my hands, how the paper feels, how they smell.  Everything.  I can't hold one without thinking about walking down the hill to the Green Lake Library, a beautiful Carnegie library that smelled like knowledge.