A New Pocket Book

Over the past spring I designed this blank for a very close friend. Fitted around a mechanical engineers front shirt pocket this tiny volume needed to be exceptionally strong and as hard wearing as the owner. A 4 oz goat skin covering leather is minimally paired to provide the requested, slightly limited, flexibility, 10 x 10 1 inch grid custom designed and printed on Mohawk supper fine 25% cotton paper. End papers are custom printed turn of the century images of the city of Worcester MA.










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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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