Finally finished my first leather-bound journal after 3 false starts

I messed up the spine on two of them at that little bindery workshop in Asheville last fall. Third try I finally figured out the trick with the glue consistency. Anyone else have a project that took way more tries than you expected?

2 comments

2 Comments

margaretrivera24d ago

Picked up a vintage bookbinding manual from the 1920s and it talked about boiling the gelatin for 10 minutes longer than the recipe says. That single change turned my glue from a clumpy mess into something that actually holds the signatures tight without cracking. Three tries sounds frustrating but honestly that's about average for getting the hang of proper spine rounding. The other thing nobody mentions is that humidity in your workspace totally changes how the leather behaves. I had to move my setup from the basement to the upstairs room because the damp was messing with the drying time.

christopher_flores4624d ago

Did you try the thinner gum tragacanth for your leather too? That stuff is way more forgiving than the thick paste everyone starts with. Humidity killed my first two spines before I figured out to just work slower in summer.