Can we talk about how everyone glues book cloth wrong?

I was at a bindery in Chicago last week and watched a guy spread PVA like peanut butter on a sandwich puffing bubbles everywhere. That cloth is $18 a yard and it warps terrible if you don't hit it with a bone folder right away. Anyone else see folks rushing this step and ruining their covers?

2 comments

2 Comments

ross.jessica5d ago

... and that's not even the worst part, people don't realize you gotta wet the bone folder a little first or it'll just drag the glue around instead of smoothing it out. I watched a guy at a workshop use a dry folder on wet PVA and it just peeled the whole corner up... total waste of material.

veraramirez5d ago

People get so focused on doing the right thing but they forget the tiny detail that makes it actually work. It's like how everyone knows you should strain pasta but nobody tells you to save a cup of the water first for the sauce. Or how people buy expensive knives but never learn to keep them sharp so they're basically just mashing tomatoes instead of slicing them. The whole world is full of those little steps that turn a mess into a smooth finish and nobody talks about them until you watch someone fail. We just assume everybody knows the wet bone folder trick until a corner peels up and a whole project is ruined. It makes you wonder how many other things we're all doing wrong just because nobody passed along the one weird detail.