Perfect Binding

Perfect binding was invented in the latter part of the 18th century as a quick, cheap way to bind books. It originally used rubber for the binding, and hence decayed fairly quickly. Nevertheless, the technique continues to be used today to bind cheap books such as paperbacks. Modern materials have led to an increase in the length of time before a perfect-bound book decays, putting it well past a single lifetime.

A single book takes between one half and one full hour to complete, depending on several factors including book size, materials used, and experience of the binder. The process itself is incredibly simple and requires no specialty tools.

NOTE: I am sorry for the lack of pictures; my camera is broken but should be repared in a week, at which point I will upload some. But this instructable is really incredibly simple, and I think that if you follow the instructions and your own common sense, even without the pictures you'll be fine. Please don't hesitate to comment or PM me with questions.

Step 1 Materials

You will need:

*The pages you want to bind

• Some sort of cover stock (thick paper works well, non-corrugated cardboard is also fine)
• PVA Glue (sold in art stores as PVA or Bookkbinding glue. Also commercially available in a non-archival quality as Elmer's White Glue.) [For the curious, it stands for polyvinylacetate]
• (optional) a paintbrush

Comments

[stormwa]

It would be interesting to try this with carpet tape. Iron it into position(from the paper side so it's not a total mess) on the pages, then glue on a cover as above. A little trickier perhaps to get it into all the pages, but should hold strong and be flexible.

[PM3D]

Great instructable, I really liked it. This is very useful for me to know since I'm writing a book right now, and afterwards I'd like to make a paperback of it for myself. Great work, pictures would've been nice, but I know how it feels to have a camera broken...I recently got a new one myself.

[ewilhelm]

Please republish when you have pictures. Thanks!