Bind a book which you have printed at home yourself

1. 1. Hello and welcome to this course: But Hello, everyone. My name is Vida. I'm an artist from Lithuania based in Spain. I'm a professional bookbinder teacher in Waldorf School, and the founder of Book Bindersbody Web Application. Welcome to my Home Studio. Today, we are going to make a book with a text inside. I chose Hamlet by William Shakespeare, but you can choose any other book you like. You just need to have a text file on your computer. The end result and the main task of your course will be a book which you have printed yourself at home with your regular cheap one side printer. You bond it yourself. You designed the cover, and who knows maybe even written yourself. Also, I have to mention that the content of a book may not necessarily be text. It also can be illustrations, photographs, a little bit of everything or any other content you like. This course is for everyone who is interested in from the very beginner to a professional bookbinder, everyone will found something useful. And even if you are going to stay away from expensive tools and materials in order to make it possible for everyone, professional bookbinder still learn how to use book Binders by the web application and how to print a text for a book at home. Also, this course is excellent for teachers because all the materials are affordable and steps are easy enough to be repeated at school with your students. So let's dive into this project and can't wait to see a final result. 2. 2. About the project: I'm very happy that you chose my course. Welcome to extraordinary world of bookmaking. And I hope from the bottom of my heart, you will stick to this for many, many years. So let's begin. This course contains two main parts. Part one is the hard one technology. Part two is the fun one making an actual book. For the first part, you will need your computer, home printer, access to bookbinders but the web publication, copy paper, and content for your book. You also can use the same dextop Hamlet I'm using here today. For the second part, you will need regular things for bookbinders. Oval ruler, bone folder, needle and thread, glue, clamps, cardboard, cutter, and some pretty material for a cover. It might be a fabric or even a thick paper, but I'm going to use synthetic leather. This synthetic leather is called echo leather, and I don't know why I think there are nothing echo about this synthetic product. However, this product is very useful, very flexible. It goes in many different colors and textures, very easy to work with and never let the glue bleed out to the surface of the cover, which is very opposite to fabric or paper. I recommend you to choose synthetic leather for a book cover of this project. So what exactly you are going to learn here today? In short, you are going to learn how to make a book with text inside, but the real answer is much more complicated. You have to fully understand the problem. To make a book with empty pages inside like a sketchbook or notebook or journal is easy, but it is not easy to make a book with a content inside. You have to find a way to lay out pages in correct order for printing at home, which is hard work. If you have two or 300 pages or more text, it is very likely you will make lots of mistakes and won't notice that. Also, that will take you forever. So we will use Book Binders by the web publication, which will lay out pages for us in correct order, and we just need to print it at home. Our cheap, regular one side printers and bind the book. Let me show you an example. Imagine you have four sheets of paper, fold it in half, and you'll have 16 pages of a book. Let's say this is your first signature. Now we are going to number these pages. Numbers will represent content of our book. So we have 16 pages with a content which is going in correct order 1-16. Now we are going to unfold these pages, and what do we see? 16 and one, 14 and three, 12 and five, ten and seven. On the other side of these pages, we have two and 15, four and 13, six and 11 and eight and nine. This is the order in which your text content should be arranged so that the pages are in order when printed. Now your task is this, find a content for your book you like. Prepare PDF file for bookbinders by the web application, which I'm going to show you how. Use application for proper layout, print your content with your home printer. And bind the book. One more important thing to remember, in order not to violate copyright, I recommend you to choose a content which is under free public domain. Free public domain means that the copyrights already expired. The content is not under copyright anymore, most likely because the author died 100 years ago or more, and public can use this content for any purpose they want, even commercial purpose. You can choose anything from William Shakespeare, like I chose, but you cannot choose books of Harry Potter. There are tens of thousands if not millions books available as free public domain. All classic literature is waiting for you. So now I'm inviting you to start the lessons and put some effort not only to learn how to make a pretty book, but also to level up your skills with the knowledge how this new web application works and combine the beauty of literature with an amazing, ancient craft. Good luck and see you in the next lesson. 3. 3. LESSON 1: Prepair your PDF file properly: Lesson one, prepare your PDF file properly. I believe there are many places online where you can get your text file of your desired book. So now you need to get it and we will work together to turn this file into a proper PDF file. At this point, you should have your PDF file with the content of your future book. If you don't have any, use the same content I'm using today, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and you will be perfectly fine. Now, it is important to make sure that the size of your pages of PDF file is A five, which is half of A four, which is regular size for copy paper. Keep in mind that when you open your book, the first thing you want to see is the page with a title and author. So make sure that your PDF file is like that. The first page is the title and author of the book. The next page is usually blank or contains the publisher's information. Since you are the publisher in this case, you can leave it like this or you can write handmade by you. And make sure this is the second page on your PDF file. If you want to dedicate this book to someone or if you want to give it as a present to someone you love and want a personal greeting to appear in this book, the greeting should appear on the third page of your PDF file. If you're doing this greeting page, then the fourth page on your PDF file should be blank. If you are not doing this greeting page, then the content of a book should start on page three. You always want to start your content, not on the left side of the book, but on the right side of the book. Reminder, all the pages on your PDF file should be unnumbered. We will number pages later when we will use web application. Awesome. Now your PDF file is ready for the web application and we can move on to the next lesson. See you there. I 4. 4. LESSON 2: Use BUDDY app like a PRO: Lesson two, use body a like a pro. In this lesson, we are going to use Book Binders body web application and become a professionals on that. Sounds great, but actually it is very easy to become a pro here because this app has only a few buttons and is very easy to use. Okay, now you have your PDF file. So now you need to sign in to the web application book unders body, and this is how the application looks like. At the first step, we should choose our book file. In my case, it is Hamlet, A five size PDF file. At the second step, we need to choose paper size. In our case, it is a four because this is the size of paper for my printer I have, and most likely it is the same size for your printer as well. Now we will go to Advanced Options, and here we have to choose if you want to apply sheet Marden, which I don't want. I recommend to use this if you want to make a tiny book with a text, but for books which you need just to fold paper sheets in half, you don't need this option. Unless you want to play around, of course. I also don't want to add cutting lines because I'm not going to cut my sheets of paper after printing. I'm going to fold it in half, and that's it. But if I would do a tiny book with text inside, I would add cutting lines. Page numbering here is where we will add our page numbers, not for every page, only for the pages we want. In this section, we can choose which page we do not want to be numbered. For sure, it will be first and second pages. But if you have a dedication page, you also shouldn't number third and fourth pages. We have to start numbering pages from the page where the content of our book begins. Since I don't have dedication page and my content of a book starts at page three, I don't want to number first and second pages only. Here you have to choose font size for page numbers. I recommend you to choose slightly smaller font size than your text size, but that is totally up to you. Since my text size is 12, I chose ten for the size of my numbers. The last thing in this section is bottom margin. You need to leave a little bit space at the bottom under the page numbers, or the page numbers just won't look nice. Here you can choose what you prefer centimeters or inches. I prefer centimeters because here in Europe, we have no idea what inches are. Let's click on Preview. The application generated a preview of all the content we uploaded. We can see we have 12 signatures in total, and we can preview all of them if you want to. At this point, you should take a look if you like everything you see, like the size of page numbers and all the details on your PDF file, if you don't like something on your PDF file or font size of the numbers, it is time to go back and change it now. On the left side, you can see all the pages which will be printed on one side of a paper sheets, and on the right side, you can see all the pages which will be printed on the other side of the same paper sheets. This will become more clear later. If you want to, you can take a look at other signatures too. And submit. When you click on the Submit button, your existing page credits will be deducted for this book. When you click on Submit button, zip file should come to your computer. I believe you know how to extract zip files. After extracting the Z files, you will find free documents inside. Side one, side two, and folding instructions. Folding instructions contains all the information about your signatures. This is the list of signatures with pages range from which page to which page a certain signature goes. If you get lost between the pages, folding instructions will be very useful. Now side one and side two contains the content of your book. On side one, all the content goes from the beginning to the end. On side two, all the content goes from the end to the beginning. This is required for printed purposes and is suitable for most home printers. Okay, we did it. We went through all the possible steps in book binders by the web application, and finally, we have PDA file ready to print. Well done, guys. Now let's go to the next lesson where we will see what the real magic of bookmaking is. 5. 5. LESSON 3: TECHNOLOGY or get to know your printer better: Lesson free technology or get to know your printer better. Then I mentioned at the beginning that the hardest part of this process is technology. I was talking about what we are going to do now, printing pages for our book. Let me introduce you my old cheap one side home printer. Now imagine I'm printing four sheets of paper. All four sheets are overlaid on each other from the first to the fourth. So now my first page is at the bottom and my last page at the top. This is my side one. That's why side two goes from the last page to the first. I just take these printed sheets and put them here for printing the other side from fourth to first. Et's try this with the first signature of Hamlet. Text is at the bottom. Now I simply move sheets here, and then I'll print side too. That's it. We have fully prepared first signature. Your printer might be different than mine, and it might work differently than mine. That means you might need to flip over your paper sheets or to rotate your paper sheets before printing side two. So that's why you need to know how your printer works in order to put your paper correctly for a side too. Very likely you will damage few sheets of paper. At first, you play around only with the first signature. It is four first pages on side one and four last pages on side two. Then you have all four sheets paper with a text correctly in order. That means you find the right configuration for your printer and you can print the rest of the text you have. In the end, this is the process of trying, making mistakes and learning. I'm here to help you. And if you really stuck at this point, please contact me. I'll try to do my best to find a solution for you, and we will work together. Now, once this step is over, lots of meditation are waiting for us, and so do I in the next lesson, see you there. 6. 6. LESSON 4: Pages to signatures: Lesson four pages to signatures. If you are here, congratulations. You made it. This lesson is intended to prepare your signatures for sewing. We will start by folding all the pages in half. This process is slow and time consuming. You have to fold each sheet of paper one by one in the middle as accurately as possible so that the pages of your future book line up nicely. Form signatures right away. Each signature is made up of four sheets of paper, which is 16 pages of your book. So form a separate group every four sheets. If you get confused, check my folding instructions. And make sure you put all the pages in the right order by keeping track of the page numbers. Mm hmm. This is where meditation begins. During this process, I recommend you do not watch any movie. Even if the task is really simple and may even seem boring at first, it is still possible to make mistakes and mix up the order of the pages. I suggest you remain attentive and keep your mind in here and now. And always check the order of the pages after each signature you make. Oh The last one or two signatures may be shorter depending on how many pages your book has in total. Sometimes the application adds extra blank pages if the content of your existing book doesn't completely fill the last signature. Follow the folding instructions. Now, when you have your future book in your hands, it is time to become a real book binder. We will start by making holes in each of the signatures. It is very important that the bending line is the same on every page and make holes with an all through all four sheets of paper at the same time at every 3 centimeters, at e, six, nine, 12, 15, and 18 centimeters. And, of course, repeat the process until all the signatures you have will be ready for the next step. At the end, you should see all the holes you have made nicely aligned. That's it. I hope you are more calm than nervous at the moment. Go and have coffee break, rest your eyes, and I'll see you in the next lesson. O 7. 7. LESSON 5: Time to stich your signatures: Lesson five, time to stitch your signatures. There are many different ways in which this could be done, but we will do the simplest way. This is one of the variations of French stitching. Now it is time to take care of the end pages. I chose two sheets of textured paper in a dark green color. I have folded them in half, punched holes in the same places as the signatures, and this will be my first and last pages of a book serving as separate signatures. What Wise sheets of paper were slightly larger than pages of my book, so I had to cut the edges a little bit. I should also mention here that the most book binders prefer gluing the end pages rather than sewing. But I have found that at school, it is easier for students to understand the process and technically complete the task by stitching the end pages together with all the signatures rather than gluing them separately. It also makes the work last longer in their hands. So now we have 14 signatures instead of 12. We need to calculate the length of the thread based on the number of signatures we have. The rule is like this. The thread length times the number of signatures. In this case is 14. I like to have a double thread always. You have one of your signatures hops. Then with a needle and thread, you go in back out in again, out again, in again, and out again. In the second signature, you do the same. Fine. Three, two, one. All open running hip. But then you get to this point, you hook the thread so that the first signature sticks to the second one. That's how we stitch. Always make a knot at the top and bottom and continue the process until all the signatures are sewn together. At first, it is difficult to work with a very long thread, but after a while, you get used to it and it's shorter with each signature, so you just have to be patient and keep going. Five, three, two, one. When I hold a bound book in my hands, which still has no cover yet, I believe this is the most beautiful state of the book because it's kind of the book shows you its own face and only book binders knows it. Now it is time to glue the spine of the brick. Left off on. It's one small step per man. But sales I use professional glue with arival properties, but you can use just ordinary white glue. So we add pieces of thick cardboard to the spine of a book to protect the end pages from glue. Clamp the book with strong clams and apply glue to the spine. It is important that all the threads are firmly glued and the pages do not move. Now, your book needs to rest at least 24 hours. During this time, we can prepare a cover, which we will do in the next lesson. 8. 8. LESSON 6: The most creative part of this project: Lesson six, the most creative part of this project. We are going to decorate our book cover. Now, it is important to understand this step is completely optional. Because even if you want to decorate your book cover a little bit, you don't need to do it the same way I did. You can do it your way. I'll tell you a story. Two years ago, in a second hand shop, I bought a box with a metal faces inside like a mask, and I have no idea what they are originally intended for, but I found them charming, and I love to apply those guys on the books covers. Like this one. At first, I have to prepare two pieces of thicker cardboard. The pieces of cardboard should be slightly larger than the dimensions of a block, about half a centimeter of a top, right, and bottom sides, or even less, and make sure your cardboard pieces are the same in size as much as possible. Mariano. I had two pieces of echo leather in these colors, grayish blue and sandy yellow. I was considering which of these colors would go better with my metal decoration, and I chose blue. Now it is time to cut echo leather. As the echo leather will be folded inwards on the three edges of the cover, we need to cut the pieces so that the leather is approximately 3 centimeters longer on each of these three edges of our carbon. Now, I'll mark where my cardboard will have to be glued. As you can see, one piece of cardboard will be glued on the left side of the leather and the other on the right side of the leather. So with a metal face mask that looks like a skull a little bit, which is known as a symbol of hamlet, I felt that the stitches in the silk thread would intensify the opposition between good and bad, soft and sharp, alive and dead. Next, I made holes in the echo leather on the front cover to make it easier to sew later. Of course, I had a vision and a small sketch of what I wanted my cover to look like. It wasn't just a random sewing holes. First, I sewed the frame in which all the elements of my decoration will be placed. Nah. Then I glued the metal mask and sewed it as well for extra strength. Naya NaNa NaNa. And I filled the rest of a frame with sewing stitches. On the back cover, I attached five small metal decorated elements so that both front and back covers have harmonious conceptual link. T. That was my decision to decorate this book cover that way. You can decorate it the way you want. The easiest way is just to cut a small window in the front cover to glue a nice piece of paper underneath, and that's it. That would be a great solution, too. You also can soon an object to a book cover like I did. Of course, then the book won't be able to go into bookshelf with other books, but maybe that's not your goal at all. Let your imagination and creativity take over here. Don't be afraid of anything. Try until you will be happy with the result and see you in the next lesson. 9. 9. LESSON 7: The book cover and the spine: Lesson seven, the book cover, and the spine. In this lesson, we will fully complete our book. Now I need your attention. We will do our book cover and the spine a little bit differently from what other book binders normally do. I don't know if this method is very common or not, I believe not. But I like to use this method at school with my students because it is easier for them to work with the materials that way. Also this method allows me to use up all the Tinesecrabs and leftovers of eco leather which I have. Now we have to apply glue to the cardboard and then stick it to the places we have marked. Press well and cut the corners of echo leather, but don't cut right next to the cardboard, leave two or 3 centimeters untouched. Now, it is all very simple. We apply blue, we fold the leather and clam the corners with a clams, putting some thick scraps of paper or cardboard underneath to avoid leaving clams marks on the cover. And this is our front and back cover. Leave it for 24 hours or more. This is where we can use up our narrow scraps of echo leather. I had a pretty one with nice texture, and even if this time it wasn't a leftover, I decided to use it. I got a strip of 6 centimeters wide and 27 centimeters long. Let's have a pause here. I haven't mentioned yet one product I used, which is double sided, sticky tape. This product is not necessary if you are using professional bookbinding glue. But at school, we sometimes use plain white glue, which make sheets of paper a bit wrinkly. The double sided tape acts as a plastic protective layer, preventing the paper from wrinkling, which is happening because of the water in the glue. I also use it as a marker. Here I mark a distance of 2 centimeters from the edge of the cover. The the spine of the book will be glued. I do it on both covers. Here is our piece for a book spine. It needs to be divided into three parts. The left part is 2.2 centimeters wide and will be glued to the front cover. The middle part is 1.6 centimeters wide and will be the spine itself. No glue is applied to it. The right side is also 2.2 centimeters wide and will be glued to the back cover. And then I have to apply glue to the marked space of the cover, attach spine, fold over the remaining edges, glue it and clamp it with clams, and, of course, wait for 24 hours or more. H I should mention here that the spine dimensions depends on your text block you have. The thicker the block, the wider spine should be. This is where my double sided sticky tape shines. After 24 hours break, I cover the entire surface of the first and last page with this tape, apply the glue and stick it to the cover. I placed the book block as close to the middle part of the spine as possible. I press the covers, load up with lots of heavy thick books and encyclopedias and wait at least for 24 hours before I can open my wonderful book I made. And now we have reached the point where we can be proud of our work and ourselves. I believe that the future of humanity will be built not by robots, but by the crafters, human beings, which are capable to make beautiful, useful and high quality things like us today. 10. 10. Thank you for beeing here: This is the last video in this course. Thank you for being with me until the end. Now, let's take a brief look at what we have done. First, we chose and downloaded a file with the content of a book we wanted. When we prepared an A five size PDF file by adding blank pages and dedications where we want it. When we use book panders buddy.com the publication to number the pages of our book and printed it out at home. When we folded all the pages in half, put them in order and made signatures. We made holes, prepared and pages and stitched a block. We glued it together and left it to dry for a day. We cut off pieces of cardboard and echo leather for a cover, made a decoration and glued the cardboard pieces to the leather. We also pressed it with clums and left it to dry for a day. We cut a narrow strip of leather for the spine of a book and glued the front and back covers to it. After pressing with clams, we left it to dry for a day. With a good planning and a little bit of skill, all of this could be done in one day. The next day, we glued the book block to the cover. We pressed it with a heavy weight and left it to dry until the next day. I hope you have learned something in this course. Now, I would love to see your projects and project gallery, and also I would love to know all the problems you have faced during the process and especially while using Bookbinders body up application. Thank you for being here and hope to see you again.