I work in a small print shop, where we try to help people create their own books, like this. I’m used to doing runs of 200-1000 of one book at a time. Therefore, I wanted to mention that when we do perfect binding, we glue a whole stack of books at a time, then take them apart to add the covers individually.

What we do is use two tall boards, nailed together to create a tall corner to flush up a stack of books. We stack our books with a slipsheet between each book (like a waxpaper or vellum cut to the same size as all the other sheets). Then, we flush them up against the corner, using a flat board on the third side and weight them down on the top. Then, you can brush your glue against the whole stack until you are ready to add your covers. Then, you unweight the stack, and slit each book apart with a blunted knife on either side of each slipsheet. Then, you can add your covers.

Also a not on printers. For those who want to do a few hundred in a run of single color ink printing, I would recommend you look into finding a used duplicator machine, like a risograph. There are often churches and community groups selling ones in decent shape (prices vary by models). Again, this isnt for those making small quantities of books but for those who want a better way to get their words out there.

Just food for thought. Im glad to see so many people doing this.

Which is best? I don’t know. I’ve never owned a Phaser, but I’d assume they’re expensive to run. I did own a second-hand colour laser printer at one point, and found it consumed a lot of pricey toner cartridges, and the images it printed had a shiny finish to them I didn’t like.

Ultimately, I went back to using an inkjet printer for my covers and an entry-level (grayscale) laser printer for my inside pages, and I’m perfectly happy with that result. For Christmas, my mum got a colour inkjet that even duplexes, which I wish mine did, and it’s just a basic consumer model.

I don’t know anything about the kind of job you’re doing or what size of a print run you’re looking at, but unless you’re setting up a full-scale publishing house, I’d suggest starting simple rather than breaking the bank on “ideal” equipment that’ll probably be overkill.

In the past, I tried adjusting the paper tray of my laser printer to A5 and selected that as the paper size to print to, and it did sort of work, but the paper jammed far too frequently on the small sheets, so I went back to imposing my pages four-up on a sheet and cutting the sheet in half, as I described above.

I hope that helps!

I hear you about combining methods, too: a lot of the instructions out there demonstrate “classical” bookbinding techniques, which have a lot of extraneous, fiddly steps. My interest from the get-go has always been to achieve a practical result — a medium for transferring content or capturing ideas, rather than making show-pieces to sit in a display case somewhere.

Of course, it’s great when you can do what you’ve done, and make a book that’s both practical and beautiful.

Good luck!

How could i make a book binding without folding? like a stack of fulls pages? if i punched the end wand sew it would i hold then? thanks for your inputs. bb

I saw that I had left out the URL but didn’t see any way of editing my post, so thanks for putting the link in your one.

I must say that most of my learning came from
a) wanting to make something special for my girlfriend’s birthday (and what better way than to write a 40 verse poem and then bind it into a book!)
b) the people who created web sites to show others how to do this.

What I posted just about covers every resource that I used myself.

Your site is another one that I will be using and referring to again.

I am going to be starting a new project and have a few thoughts on radically changing how I will make my book (as there are so many techniques out there, I have thought of bringing some modern materials into the mix) so that it’s quicker, cheaper and easier to make (time constriants again!!). I will take pics and post them and then put a link here.

Happily, you included a link in your comment attribution:
http://matrixfiles.com/book/book2.html

I have to say, that’s really lovely work! Your book is a thing of beauty.