Books!
They’re like YouTube videos you can hold.
And while most books are built to be read a small handful of times and then retire to
your shelf to make you seem like an intellectual, there’s an elite fighting class of books
built different.
If you’ve ever gone to the part of the library where everything looks like a Google image
search result for “book,” you’ve seen it.
Yep, these guys.
They’re “library-bound,” built to last hundreds of years according to an exacting,
39-page-long technical standard, the name of which I’m putting on screen because if
I read it out loud, this video would be 45 minutes long.
Now, this is not to say that every book in every library is made to outlive you—lots
of them are just off-the-shelf Barnes & Normals that get used up until they fall apart.
But there is a good reason for keeping high-use reference books—and, frankly, as much of
the catalog as the library can afford—in this format.
Because think about your favorite book.
How many times have you or people you lent it to actually sat down and read it?
Assuming you didn’t pick a picture book—which I’m realizing now is unlikely—I’d guess
that number is in the single-digits.
Library books, on the other hand, get checked out, flipped through, bent back, photocopied,
spilled on, and who-knows-what-else by unknown numbers of people for as long as they can
take it.
By one estimate, a commercially bound book could survive about ten library circulations
before it started taking on meaningful damage, which is cool, but the goal for a library
book is to handle over a hundred.
So libraries have a choice: watch commercially bound ones deteriorate until it’s time to
repair or recycle, or invest in ones that can take decades, or even centuries, of beatings.
That’s what library binding is for.
The Standard dates back to 1923, and a group of school librarians who were sick of watching
their books fall apart.
They established the first standard, and in the century since, it’s evolved with changing
technology and priorities.
This is the current version, adopted in 2000: “The,” capital-S, “Standard” because
again, I’m not saying all that.
But here’s what it means.
The Standard, as written, is 39 pages long.
Page fourteen is blank, all these pages are just names, but the rest are an incredibly
detailed accounting of what materials to use and how exactly to use them to make a book
strong enough to withstand the general public.
But we don’t just wanna tell you about what’s in there, we wanna show you.
That’s why I sent my Outside Correspondent Amy outside to find someone who could show
her how to library-bind a book.
Familiar with the long-standing company policy that bad outside correspondents don’t get
health insurance, she contacted tons of bookbinders, including a guy named Bookbinder, but he never
responded.
Luckily, a friendly but camera-shy New York City bookbinder let her visit his shop and
its many piles of materials.
These things are the backbone—pardon me, the spine—of the entire operation: the materials
themselves provide a lot of a library bind’s strength.
That’s why there are written rules for everything from the paper, to the cover fabric, to the
boards in the covers, to the ink, the glue, the foil, and the thread sewing the pages.
The glue alone takes up a page and a half.
Every material approved in the Standard has stood up to rigorous testing.
So Grade F Buckram, probably the strongest option for a book cover, has proven to be
resistant to abrasion, breakage, color loss, oil stains, mildew, water, and stank.
Papers are beholden to standards of weight, tear resistance, and bursting strength—whatever
that is—and lettering foil has to prove it won’t visibly change at all if left at
a 158-degree-Fahrenheit or 70-degree-Celsius dry heat for ten days.
Which is crazy, because if you spent ten days at 158 degrees, not only would you lose some
of your shine or whatever, you would die.
So if you’re looking at a career in being foil lettering on a library book, sorry kid,
you don’t cut it.
Amy’s new bookbinder friend inexplicably kept handing her scrap materials to take home,
which meant she got to give a go to the fun part: binding.
There are four acceptable methods of assembling pages together.
“Sewing through the fold” is pretty self-explanatory.
The book consists of stacks of paper, folded in half.
You pop holes through the crease of that fold, between a quarter of an inch and one and a
half inches apart, then sew through the folded stacks one at a time, attaching each one to
the previous one at the end.
You can do this by hand or by machine, and if you do it by machine, you need to use,
“as many needles as possible.”
Then there’s “oversewing,” which is similar, but instead of going through folded
pages, you’re going through piles of loose-leaf.
So you sew mini-stacks to themselves, and then to each other, and your thread should
be covered with glue.
You can do this by hand, or ask this machine to do it… and we’d love to show you that
thing at work, but when Amy asked the bookbinder about it, he said that machine was “having
a bad week.”
Your next two options are only allowed if you’re making a smaller book.
For one less than two inches thick, you can do “double-fan adhesive binding,” where
you clamp a stack of pages, notch them, and load them up with glue in a very specific
way.
Also, you have to let it air dry, because patience is a virtue.
If you have an even pee-wee-er book, less than half an inch thick, you can just sew
the whole book through the side in a single pass.
There are still rules, of course, you have to use a particular type of stitch, and the
stitches have to be half an inch—or 13 millimeters—long.
Amy did, um, her best at sewing through the fold, and it looks… yeah, like she did her
best.
Once your pages are assembled, it’s time to trim all the edges so they’re smooth
and square, glue on the spine, build the front and back covers, attach them to the pages,
and stamp in the title, perhaps with one of these.
Or, if you have gold foil but no that, you can try cheating and hope nobody notices.
Each of those processes comes with, of course, extremely specific guidelines, down to how
you’re supposed to fold the cover fabric around the edges.
And at the end of it all: voila!
Book!
Way more time and money than a normal book, but this thing is going to handle just about
anything life—or the general population—throws at it.
Now look, I like books as much as the next guy, and sturdily bound ones as much as the
guy next to him.
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things, I can never seem to do it from a book.
I could barely even do it in school.
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