Book Making

So what do you do on a Bank Holiday Monday, when the sun is shining and it is a lovely day to be outside?
    Do you? Well I have been inside making books.

     Actually this is a job I like to do either at the weekend or on a Bank Holiday, because it is a job that always takes longer than I expect it too, and during the week I feel under pressure to get on and deal with orders to get as many out as possible. There may only be one or two orders actually waiting for these books, and we can often send out the bulk of the order with just the odd book 'to follow'. But eventually the job has to be done, and today was it!

     I had printed out the pages and covers for the books during the week, double sided A4 sheets of paper, which have to then be cut in half to make a larger pile of A5 pages, with card covers, and of course the pages have to be in order too.

 We use a small, antiquated guillotine which I got from a Boot Sale years ago for the princely sum of £3.00

 


Here are all the book pages. Each little pile is a single book, but of course all the pages are currently loose .






These books are being comb bound, and the fab machine we use will first punch all the oblong holes down one edge of the pages. Of course you can only stick around 10 pages in at a time, so you have to be sure you are punching the holes in the right side of the pages, and that you lay them down correctly on top of the ones you have taken out, so that the pages stay in the right order.

Here is one book page set with the holes punched on the left side ready for the 'comb' to be inserted through the holes

Here the plastic 'comb' is being inserted through all the holes in one go. This can be fiddly to do, and you often find when you look at the back of the book that not all the ends of the 'prongs' of the comb have gone through all the pages.
This job needs both patience and attention to detail - and the ability to wriggle a recalcitrant prong through a hole only just big enough for it.

There we have the finished comb bound book.

And below the results of an hour's work, ten books nicely comb bound and ready for sale.