What Is This Blog?

I recently made a major switch in hosts for this blog because I was looking for a more seamless way including videos within it and I wanted to start an account that was exclusively THB (The Harrington Bindery) related things. It brought up some of the questions that still linger for me about my motivations.

The basis of this blog is rooted within my frustrations of learning the craft of bookbinding without having a master to teach me. I started to teach myself over a decade prior as a means of making containers for the photographs I had taken, the ones that gave me a voice and I had become so attached to. When I was just beginning a friend of my older brother's had recently graduated from Pratt and come back to our home town. In her education she learned about the craft of bookbinding. We met and over many successive weeks she taught me the methods she knew and gave me my first book on bookbinding:  The Craft of Bookbinding by Manly Banister. And while we spent many hours giggling over his name; his book was solid, descriptive and easy to follow.


Through the years it hasn't been easy learning new styles and techniques, the most reliable source of information is still tied up in book form. I took classes where and when I could fit them in to my schedule and neither my undergrad or grad schools offered any classes in bookbinding. When I was able to take some classes I ended up with instructors that couldn't answer the questions I needed, they had knowledge of the craft but not necessary understanding. By default I developed a brute force bench learning technique, trying structures again and again modifying certain elements slowly to see how they effect the final book. I supplemented this when I could afford it with purchased books on bookbinding but for the most part my main source was (and still is) the Internet.
So what is this? Its my attempt to not complain about the lack of good book binding information on the Internet and instead do something about it. Its a journal of technique and craft, successes and major failures. Its about loving paper and books, and trying to start a small bindery in my free time.

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Why I Love the K-118 Binding Structure

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The K-118 binding structure is a hand bookbinding technique that I started experimenting with about a year ago. It promises reliable, easily opened books without 'Backing' the mechanical folding of sections of pages onto themselves at the spine. It uses oversized parchment spine liners that are glued, worked into the spine and subsequently interlaced with beveled cover boards. I find that at this point in the process (as shown) the book is very stable, the last picture above is an early example of this binding style I attempted, put aside, then promptly forgot about only to rediscover it last weekend - a year later. This is due in part to the fact that all of the structural components of the book are already in place. To say it a different way, the covering material is not counted on to be structural, though I have found that particularly thick leathers (4 oz+) will undoubtedly impede the opening slightly. Is it an exaggeration to love the K-118 style? For me, I don...
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Mid way through working on a commissioned set of books for a carpenter friend of mine I came across a binding style referred to as the K-118 by Bruce Levy who wrote about and bench tested the structure. The K-118 structure piqued my interest immediately due to its remarkable flexibility and full access to the gutter. I originally tested the structure on a collection of books, articles and transcribed lectures on bookbinding that I digitally compiled into a single document and printed in signatures. The basics of the structure are a text block sewn on velum strips, tapes or cords in a manor to keep swelling to a minimum. The block is rounded but not backed and covers are shaped on the spine edge to continue the arch of the round of the block. Covers are attached and the spine is lined with velum cut to fit in between the supports and three times longer than the width of the spine. The excess velum on ether side of the book is cut into thirds and the outer two sections are attached to ...
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