After finishing Edmund’s book, I decided to bind a blank book using more period materials and techniques. This book used the same paper (this time with the grain running in the same direction!), oak boards, and a leather cover.

This is an improvised sewing from made from a shadow box tipped on its side with nails driven in at the same distance apart as the cords. The cords hang down from the nails, which makes it easier to sew the quires (page sections) to them. A real sewing frame—that is, one to purchase—would run around $100, and frankly sewing the quires doesn’t take long enough to justify that investment. If I was really carpentry inclined, I could make one, but I’m not.

I backed and rounded this book, same as I did for Edmund’s. See how much more nicely the spine rounded, because the book was thicker? The more pages, the easier to round. The book is shown here gripped in a small book press that I bought. The metal edges overhang the wood slightly, focusing the pressing right below the spine during the backing process.

I wanted to try gilding the edges of this book. I didn’t own a plow at this time, so I used a belt sander to grind the page edges down. This seems to work well, but I discovered later (isn’t that always the way?) that the heat from the sander can fuse the sizing in the paper together, making the paper more resistant to water. Not a problem unless you intend to decorate the page edges!

The only description of the page-edge gilding process I had was one paragraph at the end of Banister’s book. The first step is to apply bole, a red clay pigment used as a base. You can see from this photo how blotchy the bole was—this was because of the sizing problem just mentioned. I didn’t realize what was causing this until later, when I bought an entire book dedicated to methods of edge finishing.

This is a great example of how not to apply gold leaf. The leaf should be flat and smooth, not crumbled like this. Unfortunately gold leaf is incredibly difficult to handle—one breath and it’s floating across the room. One touch of your finger, or oil from your finger on some other unwitting object, and the leaf sticks to it like a long-lost lover. I still haven’t made much improvement in the process, but hey, that’s what the future is for, right?

I used traditional glaire (egg whites and water) as adhesive on two edge of the book, with mixed success, and a modern adhesive on the third edge, with more success. I’m bent on using glaire going forward, and I now have better tools and a better information source, so hopefully future edge gilding will improve. Let me tell you, using gold leaf on scrolls is a walk in the park compared to edge gilding.

After the page edges were gilded, I sewed on the endbands. They are made of the same cord as the other sewing supports and are sewn to the quires using the same set of holes from the first sewing. These had to wait until after the edges had been treated, or they would have interfered in that process.

I used thin oak planks for the boards. These are available in the “hobby wood” section of Lowe’s or Home Depot. Here I am chiseling channels in the boards for the cords to fit into.

The finished boards. No, those hands aren’t mine—Baron Angus was my carpentry mentor and hand model for the photographs. The top board shows the inside face and the board underneath shows the outside face.

Cords are laced through the boards. They are secured in the channels by wooden pegs. While hammering one peg in place, the front board split along the grain. Luckily, modern woodworking adhesive came to the rescue and prevented me from having to make a replacement board.

Next, I lined the spine with the same leather I would use for the cover. I bought this leather off eBay as “craft” leather: it’s chrome-tanned pigskin. The pigskin part is great, but the chrome-tanned part is far less than ideal. The coating is water resistant, which also means adhesive resistant. This wasn’t a problem for the outside covering, where none of the outside surface needed to be glued to anything else, but for the lining—where strips of leather wrap around the outside of the spine and onto the inside face of the covers—it made things a bit more challenging. The lining acts as a hinge for the covers and also smoothes out the bumps from the quire edges on the spine.

To attach the cover, I used traditional wheat paste. This is just like old-fashioned wallpaper paste—thick and gooey. I spread it liberally over the inside of the leather, set that aside from awhile to soak in, then applied more paste and spread the leather over the covers. This photo shows the book “tied up” while the covers dried. This drying process took a few days.

Meanwhile, I was learning to made bosses and latches from brass strips. Luckily Master Aldred Blackwood lives locally and was willing to teach me how to do this. Here I am using a dapping block and punch to create the rounded bosses that are nailed to the four corners of each cover of the book.

This is me sawing the rounded edges on the bosses.

And here, finally, is the finished book. The design on the covers was created with a woodburning tool. Finishing—blind tooling, gold tooling, leather inlays and onlays, and so forth—is an area I definitely need to explore. The tools can be pricey, however, and leather is also pricey to experiment on. I’d really like to take a mundane class on leather finishing techniques if I can find one reasonably priced.