by Jenna Wroblewski

Created on: January 18, 2009

Bookbinding is an accepted method we use today to hold papers together in books effectively.

But how did bookbinding come to be?

It all started with paper. The word paper comes from the word papyrus; the type of paper Egyptians made from reeds. Papyrus worked for the Egyptian society until its economic crisis, and eventually papyrus diminished two hundred years before BC.

5500 years ago the Sumerian's invented a type of writing that kept documents on damp clay tablets that dried after they wrote on them.

Other ways people recorded information were on long cloth tablets and parchment, and many different types of paper were created in different countries at different times.

After many primative breakthroughs in parchment paper, religious sects started using sheepskin vellum in volumes that marked the beginning of the bookbinding era. For 1,400 years after, religious monks in the west praticed the art of bookbinding. Entire libraries were copied by these monks.

What exactly is the art of bookbinding?

It's technically a craft ... but also the accepted way to hold a book together, put simply.

While comic books, magazines, and pamphlets are held together with staples on the middle page, called saddle-stitching, hard and soft-cover books are not. The Chinese used to call binding techniques stitched binding, in which the papers were folded, and leaves put in order. Then on standard, four holes would be punched 1 cm apart, whereas six holes would be punched to represent important books. Lastly, the book would be held together by a silk cord, knotted inside the spine.

Hardcover binding has rigid covers and appear very intricate. When opened in the middle of the book, the thread is visible. Oversewing is one method used in hardcover binding, where the signature pages of the book are clamped together. Then there's sewing through the fold, where the signatures of are are folded and stitched through the fold. Also, double hand adhesive binding has two signatures of loose pages that are rolled, "fanning" where a thick layer of glue is applied to the edge of each page.

Some other methods are the punch bind, which include wire binding, the velobind spiral and coil binding, and the Zipbind. Thermally activated binding is when a one piece cover is glued down the spine to quickly bind the book together.

Although there are other methods of book binding in other countries, these are the most common.

To find out about more history of book binding go to:

http://www.powis.com/resources/learn/binding_hist ory.php

And to find out more about methods of bookbinding go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookbinding

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