When I started this project, I knew nothing about bookbinding. I just thought making a scroll into a book would be very cool! Very few people in the SCA professed any knowledge of this subject, and there was no one local who could teach me, so I bought my first book on bookbinding (Manley Banister’s The Craft of Bookbinding) and set about teaching myself the process from his descriptions (and by “the process,” I mean a style of bookbinding that could loosely be described as pseudo-medieval). I used almost entirely modern materials, with the exception of linen bookbinding thread and hemp cord. Including illumination, the process took about two to three months.

At this point, I had not discovered either the Bookbinding mailing list or the SCA-Binders mailing list, both of which later proved to be very useful.

The first step to making an illuminated book is to do the calligraphy and illumination. I used Bienfang Calligraphic Parchment Paper and unfortunately was ignorant of the importance of paper grain. (Paper grain should always run parallel to the spine.) Unless you know what to look for, you would likely never know that the paper grain in this book runs the wrong way, but it creates a “porcupine effect” in which the pages stand straight up when the book is open instead of lying nicely. Photographs of the miniatures (not every page in the book) are here.

I didn’t take any photos of the sewing process itself, but this shows the quires (page groups) sewn onto cords. I forget precisely how many quires I used, but there were roughly 80 pages total.

The next step was rounding and backing the book. These are both late-period techniques (sixteenth century) that involve shaping the spine so that it has a nice mushroom shape. On thicker books, the spine appears more curved; because this one is so small, there isn’t much curvature. You can see that I used children’s wood blocks inside a vise to grip the book while it was hammered. HINT: Insert sheets of waxed paper between your pages so your pigments don’t stick to the opposite page! This was learned the very hard way.

I used modern binder’s board, which is just really dense cardboard, for the cover boards. Here I have laced the cords through the cover and used PVA adhesive to glue them down. The book is pressed under weight while the adhesive dries. The gap between the cover and the pages is very important so that the book covers close properly.

After the boards were laced on, I used modern binder’s tape—a cloth tape with an adhesive backing—to reinforce the joint between the pages and the boards.

Here is the closed book before covering. Note the black and yellow endbands. I made these from small rolls of cotton fabric covered with embroidery thread, which were then glued to the spine. Gluing the endbands to the spine was actually done in very late period after pasteboards came into use. Previously, when wood boards were used for covers, endbands were integral to the binding process—cords were sewn to the quires at the top and bottom edges of the spine and attached to the wood covers, and then later covered with decorative thread. I also glued a ribbon to the spine to serve as a page marker.

I covered the book with black velvet cloth and then “tied up” the book while the adhesive dried. The cords wrapped around the book forced the fabric to adhere to the sides of the cords on the spine and to the spine in between the cords. Otherwise, the covering would stick to only the outside edges of the cords on the spine. Unfortunately, cloth doesn’t stretch well over the cords on the spine, and I ended up with wrinkles in the fabric between them. Leather is much better for covering because it does stretch.

After covering, I glued the first and last page of the book to the insides of the covers (“pastedowns”), then I glued decorative paper on top of those sheets.

For decoration, I painted our local group’s device on the outside of the cover. I had initially tried to applique the design on the cloth before gluing the cloth to the cover, but this was a disaster—there was no way to center the applique on the front cover to my satisfaction. I had to remove all the stitches—after the cover had been glued on—and remove the appliquéd fabric. Luckily, the paint covers up most signs of this.