Twenty Years of Valentines Cards Made Into a Book

Lest I lose whatever skills acquired as a newbie bookbinder, I’ve been making a book every month or so. This being February, while figuring out this year’s Valentines card for DW, I was going through the cards we’ve given each other over the years and thought binding them into a book would make an appropriate project for this month.

Also, to keep things interesting, trying something new every book. Earlier this year, I saw some books using wood covers on Reddit. Being a woodworker, it’s natural to want to combine the two crafts. Reading up on it, aside from a Persian bookbinder, there was not much on combining leather and wood for a cover. Even though it was pointed out that, before cardboard, book covers were made of wood. My initial idea was to use a solid hardwood panel and make a thin rabbett to allow the leather thickness to match the wood edge. That would save me from paring the leather, time consuming chore that it continues to be. 

A visit to the Portland wood retailers led the realization that solid wood covers either needed to be either at least ¼” thick or completely covered on both sides as gluing the end pages would promptly lead to warping. Also looking at the veneers available opened up a whole new medium for book covers. A pack of poplar dyed red caught my eye as a good Valentines theme book color.

Baltic birch plywood is sufficiently stable that I could use 1/8th inch thickness for the covers as long as I veneered both sides. This was a much more appropriate thickness for the size of the book I had in mind.

Thus materials chosen and purchased and content decided, nothing to it but to do it.

As almost all our cards were in folded format and fairly heavy paper stock, grouping them into signatures was not an option, but single sheet signature would work; a concern was that would make for a thick spine. I hoped that rounding the back would solve that and that I would be up to the task. In doing this write-up after the fact, I found the tutorial for two-on and even three- on sewing which would have helped to address this issue and would have been more appropriate. Fortunately, as will be seen, it still turned out OK.

Up to now, I had used a punching cradle to make the holes needed for sewing the signatures. That was not an option here as the cards were of different heights. Plan B was to using a saw which worked out fine. 

Darren Schneider of DAS bookbinding had a nice tutorial on half bound books with leather corners which I used for the corners and the template shown was from his video.

The leather was nearly the same thickness as the veneer which helped to keep the assembly process from being too involved. Otherwise, both  the veneer and leather would have had to be pared to avoid a bulky abutment. That may still be something I do in the future, but then the veneer would have to be finished after the leather is applied which risks staining the leather. All things considered, I’d rather not have to deal with that.

I followed DS’s suggestion of making the corners a bit narrower than the spine, but wound up bit too small for my sense of proportions.

I blame that on the spine rounding and backing adding more to that area than was planned when I did the corners. A learning point- in the future I may leave making and fitting the corners after the spine is rounded and backed.       Another learning point was that leather when wet with glue has quite a bit of malleability and capacity for movement. I was counting on that to be able to abut the leather to the veneer in a gap free manner. But the lettering on the spine moved on me a bit. At first, it seemed quite pronounce which had me thinking very dark thoughts. But on settling under pressure, the alignment became much more acceptable.
      Both DW and I were very happy with the final result.

             And she already has another project in mind for me. Gleefully tells me it does not have to be perfect and as such will make for a great practice project. There is a reason why Wabi-Sabi holds such an attraction for me.