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The day a 1960s library rebind showed me I was folding signatures wrong
I was volunteering at a small library sale in Ann Arbor 6 months ago when an old binder handed me a rebound 1962 city directory and pointed at the gutter, where my signatures had been folding against the grain for who knows how long. He showed me how he lines up the grain on every sheet before sewing, which takes 10 extra minutes but keeps the spine from cracking. Do any of you check grain direction on every signature, or just the endpapers?
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baker.simon5d ago
Did you ever try folding a whole book the wrong way and wonder why the spine felt stiff when you opened it? I used to just fold everything the same way and never gave grain a second thought, mostly because nobody ever told me it mattered and the books I made still held together fine. Then I rebound an old paperback last year and the pages started fighting me at the gutter, curling up like they wanted to snap back shut. I finally checked the grain and sure enough half of them were running the wrong way, which explained the weird stiffness and the cracks that showed up a few weeks later. Now I line up every sheet before I sew, not just the endpapers, and yeah it adds time but the book opens flat and stays that way. That binder was right, it is worth the extra ten minutes every single time.
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