Bookmaking tutorial

[Christopher Colley]

Greetings!!

I know a lot of people like to see books of their photographs. There are online places to get books done for cheap. But, you can also make your own.

How you get the prints or pages of the book is up to you but I've started a series of tutorials on how I make a book.

Surely some people out there do it better than I do but This is how I do it..

Here is the first part of the tutorials. This one is about how I start to make a book cover and cover it with fabric.

http://www.depressing.org/2011/09/bookmaking-how-to-make-hard-cover-book.html

there will be more posted soon...

Hopefully this is of use to some out there.

edit: i can answer questions if needed..

 

[removed account4]

hi christopher

it is great you are publishing this !
i was going to make a book soon,and post
an article here on apug on how to do it
i make stab bindings ( kobi / japanese binding )
these days ...
are you sewing with tapes ?

great stuff !

john

 

[Christopher Colley]

are you sewing with tapes ?

thanks..

the one used in this example is basically a stab bound, ..no tape.. no signatures and nothing really fancy. Just quick easy way to have a book.. The tutorial is mostly focused on the basics of making a cover, hopefully getting people interested in some of the more involved binding methods.

edit:
i'd love to see your ideas on making books! i surely know very little and want to learn more..

 

[unicycletim]

Nice tutorial.
I've got into a little bit of bookbinding this year. I made a couple of notebooks, the first of which was really rough, but the second was much nicer since I knew what I was doing; I bought some leather for the cover, and some really cool textured paper for the endpapers and I used heavier paper for the pages and bought a punch to round the corners. I just followed the instructions from a book I got from the library, which also covered a variety of different book types, as well as things like embossing.

I was going to make a photo book from my trip to africa over (southern hemisphere) summer, but I never got around to it. Maybe I'll have to give it a go.

 

[ajmiller]

Great idea. I'm into making another book this winter. For my final University exam last year I presented my photographs as a handmade book. I used the Japanese Side Stitch for the binding. Only minor downside was the book doesn't open flat with this stitch but if you allow enough border on the left hand side between the photo and the binding it can work.
We had a book designer in for a couple of tutorials which was interesting.

 

[Christopher Colley]

I just posted part two of this tutorial...

http://www.depressing.org/2011/09/bookmaking-how-to-make-hard-cover-book_27.html

at this point this should be enough for most adventurous people to figure out their own method, or research an established one, to bind and attach their content to the cover..

I will post the final part to this, showing how i've done it in this example, in a bit once i get it all finished shortly...