I await the AS verdict with interest.

In the meantime, I was trained in bookbinding as part of my printing apprenticeship - we had a choice of an "extra" subject to study, and I thought it might be interesting, and it was. I've forgotten all of the terms and names of the tools, but the upshot was this:

The only way to bind a book properly is by hand. Machines simply can't do the job properly. You can use machinery as part of the hand-binding process, but you have to make choices which (as yet) machines simply can't replicate. Hand binding, with or without mechanical aids, is a time-consuming process and is therefore considerably more costly than "a few pennies", I'm afraid.

The guy who tutored us was the person who worked on book repairs for many New Zealand libraries (old books, not modern stuff), and his comment was that the hardbacked books produced today will not be around in one hundred years. They would have suffered an inevitable "biblioclasm". He also commented that the paper production processes used today add the pace of deterioration because of the amount of acids which remain in even the better quality paper.

He produced a book that was nearly 400 years old that he was repairing to show us how it should be done. It was really interesting!




The idiot also known as Capfka ...