Cloth Onlays

At my place of employment we have several record books, the inexpensive kind that are meant for unimportant information that can be disposed of when you are finished. One of those books are the cycle registration for the students.  It is now ten years old and the cover is held on by various types of tape and a few of the pages in the first signature have fallen out.

I figured it would be good practice to rebind the entire thing.  I had intended to take more pictures than this but sometimes once I get stuck in I lose track of time and the fact that I wanted to document some of the steps.

good old Red & Black notebook

removing the sellotape 

I have more pictures of the dismantling of the book but I am a stickler for privacy and I don't have the means to blur the names out on the pages.  The Red & Black notebook has a different type of hot melt adhesive on the spine then I have seen on other mass produced notebooks. This was almost a type of foam rubber. The notebooks is half way through being used and the half being used the spine was in bad shape and easy to peel off the backing, the unused portion was in perfect condition and I couldn't remove it without damaging the paper.  So I had to dismantle the entire book and resew it.  If I do this again I will try using a heat gun on the spine to loosen up the material.

St. Edmund Hall crest
Established c. 1278

 I made a few small mistakes on the case and I will endeavour to correct those errors on the next book I make.

I choose a Library Buckram, yellow in colour, to match the Hall's crest.  I choose the Library Buckram as it is extremely hardy and washable. I then produced something to make the debossed image in the cover.  I had originally intended to leave it at that and call it mission accomplished when I thought that maybe since I just got an order of black and maroon Edinburgh Book Cloth from J Hewit & Sons Ltd.  I could attempt to do a cloth onlay into the recessed image.  HOURS it took me and a lot of destroyed cloth until I had and idea and took the time to make a tracing template for the surgical scalpel to trace. The Library Buckram had to be distressed in the recessed areas because of it's coating you really can't glue things to it. So I used my dremel and a polishing tool and removed the top surface off those areas so the glue could soak into the cloth and adhere the onlays.

Then I glued and attached the parts, took the raised item I used to make the debossed impression and tried to get it on as close as I could to the original impression and placed it back into the press for a few hours.  This was done partially blind so I didn't match it 100% but as my first attempt I'm really pleased with the results.  It took me ten hours and eighteen minutes to make the book.  That includes press time so it is not like I was working on it a full ten hours.  

Next I plan to make an A5 Parcel Registration book for work using the same process for the cover.  However the next two weeks are City and Guild courses so I won't get to it until the end of October.