bookbinding is not that hard-- its a sometime family hobby here in the griffin household. mind you, we don't work on valuable volumes, but there are many books on bookbinding--it not to hard to get started on doing it at home. the supplies to start are rather simple. paper, cloth, needles, thread, --the hardest is the cover.. leather is the best, but expensive and hard to work with. Linen is good, but boring. leather trimmed linen is a good compromise.
blank pages are the easiest, but nowdays even printed books are easy, since many "publisher", "pagemaker" type software packages can help with the text and layout of the folios.
its fun to make a mini book-- if you make it very small, an inch and half square, you can even bind it leather.. old, un-mated leather gloves (get them end of season from the lost and found) yield just enough leather for a binding, and the leather is thin, soft and cheap enough to work with.. the technique is the same no matter how big the book, and many of the supplies, (like twill tape for the binding are actually easier to find in small sizes-- sewing--fabric stores can a large assortment.) and 4 by 6 notebooks are just the right size for folios made from 8.5 X 11 inch paper-- the best paper can be bought by the sheet, but a for practice, any old rag bond will do. Long leather gloves work for leather trim-- but you have to be very careful of book size.. its hard to get a nice 8 inch long piece of leather from a glove.
and aunts and uncles and grandparents are all suitible impressed when you hand them a book you made your self!
my daughter had (and still has) little interest in computers, but as soon as we had one, she wrote a book, printed it, photocopied, and then bound several copies. it impressed the hell out of her teachers, and she won a district wide award for her effort. what really surprized her, was almost none of her teachers knew anything about book binding, and her soft cover (cardstock) binding was as simple as you can get. since her mother, father and older brother all knew how, and had created books (of various quality, none noteworthy) she just thought every knew how to do it.
my son still makes books as gifts.. one helped turn a girlfriend into a spouse.
(somewhere on the web--I read it ages ago, there is recipe for neutralizing the acid in paper.. you dampen the paper with the solution, and then dry them rapidly, not good for book, but works fine for a newspaper clipping.. ..)
