How to bind your own Hardback Book

Step 10: Glue the cover board and spine in place

Using White glue or rubber solution glue, smear an even coating over the boards and place face down on the wrong side of the material (i.e. the side of the material that you don't normally see, which has the pattern the wrong way round etc etc).

Make sure you stick them neatly in a row so that they are aligned with each other and straight and that there is a gap of about 1 or two thicknesses of the card you are using between the spine and each of the cover boards.

Comments

[njenkins]

I recently made my own hardbound book without the help of this tutorial (I wish I had known about it!), and I found that using a spray glue for the cover, be it fabric or otherwise, works waaaay better and you don't have to worry about using too much and the covers looking wrinkled! The spray glue itself is pretty inexpensive, about $5 at my local craft store, and you can use it for tons of other projects too!

[KaptinScarlet]

Good call, spray glue or rubber cement (we call it copydex in the UK) would be good. Spray glue (or Spraymount) can be very messy though and the glue tends to get on the front of the book too, which is not good.

[tcarney57]

3M has some archival-quality spray adhesives, but rubber cement is well-know for leaching sulphurous compounds that eventually stain whatever it's used on--it completely ruins photographs! I actually like rubber cement because you can reposition things fairly easily, but I never use it on anything I want to keep for more than a few months. Again, I think the scrap-book folks might have plenty of good suggestions for archivally-safe adhesives.

[truthlikegold]

Depending on the material, you might want to use a very thin layer of the glue, as the fabric I used for my first book had bleed-through issues when I was too (unknowingly) liberal with the white glue.

[KaptinScarlet]

yes good point