That moment I realized I was glueing my spines all wrong for like 15 years

I was at a workshop in Portland last spring and this older binder watched me do a spine, then just goes "you know you're supposed to brush away from the grain, not with it right?" I felt so dumb lol. I'd been doing it the opposite way since I started in 2008. My spines always had this tiny ripple thing and I thought it was just the paper I was using. Anyone else have a basic technique they got backwards for way too long?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_piper1mo agoTop Commenter

Huh, "trimming signatures backwards" - that one's new to me. I don't even want to think about what that would do to the final book. In my experience, the spine glue thing was bad enough. I spent years wondering why my spines had these tiny waves near the hinges, like the paper was fighting me. Turns out I was just brushing in the wrong direction the whole time, which apparently pushes air bubbles in instead of out. Your trimming thing probably caused way bigger issues than a little ripple though.

pat_moore1mo ago

Read an old bookbinder's memoir where he mentioned something similar about trimming backwards. He said it shifts the grain direction and makes the fore-edge curl when the humidity changes. Never really understood what that meant until I saw a book where every page had this weird little wave at the edge, like it was trying to turn into a spiral. Yours with the spine glue sounds like a cleaner fix at least. At least you can brush the other way and solve it. Trimming backwards means you basically have to cut the whole book down a second time to square it up.

max_hernandez271mo ago

Blew my mind too when I figured out I'd been trimming signatures backwards for a decade.