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. . . .

Trofast is Swedish for happiness!

I started binding at home just after I graduated from North Bennet Street School in 1992 and moved back to Seattle for a job at the University of Washington.  Twenty years ago today!

I started off with my bench, Kutrimmer, Kwikprint, combination press, and small book press crammed into my bedroom where I began to work through the curriculum from NBSS.  I wanted to do it all again just be sure I understood what I had been taught.  It was an incredibly helpful and productive time.

But I also began to get calls for book repair which was both a good way to continue to learn and grow but it also gave me the financial means to buy more tools and equipment.

One problem was that I needed a way to store all the pieces and parts of books I was working on.  Working in such a small space (the next year I moved to another apartment in that building which gave me a whole bedroom to use as a bindery!  What luxury!) made that an important issue.  Having no place to put things aside, or even much storage space at all, my only choice was to be very careful.

When I would pick up new eyeglasses I was drool a bit over the trays that the glasses and paperwork were stored in. The problem was that they were too small for books.

One day I was wandering around IKEA and I heard choirs singing and rays of sun pouring through windows.  Then I turned the corner to see why and saw these:

They are called Trofast and are a toy storage system.  You know, to store toys in!  They were the perfect size for books.  Not every book, of course, but 96.23% of books.  Maybe a bit more.

When I get a job I put the name of the client outside the box using blue tape.  I think it has to be blue tape, I tried brown and they caught fire.  (If you don't know that's a joke you probably should be reading something else.)  Then I put the book and the paperwork for the  project inside.  Then it gets slid into the rack.  There is a top to keep dust out, which is very helpful working in the desert.

When I'm working on that book the box comes out onto the bench and when I take it apart I put the pieces inside (sometimes inside an envelope if they're very small).  I've found how necessary that is, because sometimes clients will come into the bindery and not realize that little piece of book is extremely important and suddenly it gets brushed onto the floor, or pushed aside, or other bad things.

Fortunately I've never lost significant parts of book, but this makes it much easier to keep that  up.  They come in several colors and depths, but I've stuck with white because I'm boring.  Or traditional.  Well, boring.

I have a second rack for books I've finished and are waiting to be sent off or picked up.

Like all good things it makes life simpler and better.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/search/?query=trofast