bookbinding
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bookbinding
Bibliography
See H. Lehmann-Haupt, ed., Bookbinding in America (1941, repr. 1967); B. C. Middleton, A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique (1978); D. Muir, Binding and Repairing Books by Hand (1978); E. Walker, The Art of Book-binding (1984).
Bookbinding
(also binding), the durable and usually stiff cover in which the pages of a book are pasted. Bookbindings may be made from cardboard, leather, cloth, paper, polymers, or other materials.
The first bookbindings date to the first century A.D., at which time manuscript books on parchment first appeared in Europe. By the 17th century, as a result of the use of paper and the development of printing, the quality of handmade bindings had significantly improved. The production of mass editions led to the mechanization of bookmaking and changes in the structure of the binding.
In the USSR, several types of bookbindings are used, which differ in the appearance of the cover, the method of fastening and reinforcing the unbacked book, and the method of attaching the book to the cover. Three types of bookcovers, or cases, are made. One type consists of one piece of material. Another type consists of two cardboard sides and a back made of strong paper, which are pasted together and covered with one piece of binding paper or fabric. A third type of case has a backbone covered with one type of material and cardboard sides covered with another. It and other sophisticated types of bookbindings are produced by casemakers. The material for the cover is fed to these machines in sheets or rolls.
Inscriptions or illustrations are applied on the covers by ink printing, by imprinting a textured design with a hot stamp, or by gold tooling.
One of the first steps in binding a book involves attaching the endpapers to the front and back signatures. After the signatures are sewn or pasted together, gauze or another backing material is pasted to the backbone. The three edges of each book are trimmed, and the turn-in is pasted to the edges of the backbone. The book is then pasted into its cover.
All bookbinding operations are carried out on assembly lines. As many as 2,000 to 3,000 books are bound per hour. The procedure requires six to eight persons. The production of books that have full bindings and that are not sewn requires half as many operations, and productivity reaches as high as 5,000 to 6,000 books per hour.
O. B. KUPTSOVA