Collected Warhammer Volumes part 8: Step through binding part 4- Fully ReCovered

 

Well it's been a few years in the pipeline and a good while since the last instalment of this series, but the Encyclopaedia Warhammica is finally all bound up! As you can see (squeezed in between my undead army and glacial lake- projects which I started in November and almost beat the Encyclopaedia to completion!) the 15 volumes look rather splendid in their various shades of leather. In the weeks to come I'll be taking a good look through the pages and charting the progress of Warhammer from 1st through to 8th edition, but first let's finish what we started and complete the rough guide to binding these mighty tomes.

 

When we left off last time the book was in the 'press' after having its boards glued on. Now, the last stage requires quite a lot of hands-on action, so not a lot of time to pause for photography and I'm afraid I will just have to try to explain the processes as best I can. 

 

Fixing the leather spine in place is the next point, and the place where it really begins looking like a book. Measure the height and width of your card spine and add about two inches to the width and 20-30cms to the height. This is to give you a good wide surface to stick to the boards. The leather you choose is quite important, it's going to form the hinge of the book so the thicker the book the thicker (stronger) the leather will need to be. Too stiff though and it will be hard to get it into shape. I got my leather from a local scrap store so couldn't be too choosy. Some of it was pretty hard to work with and I had to use bulldog clips to hold it while the glued dried. I don't recommend doing this as it marks the surface. The tan leather in the picture was a bit too soft on the other hand and loses its shape a little because of it.

The technique is to glue one edge of the leather onto a board. I choose the front one because this line you'll know will be even and it's more important for the front to look good. I think anyway. Once this is relatively set glue the spine of the book and the underside of the leather strip and start working the leather onto the spine. IMPORTANT BIT!: Make sure you pull the board away from the spine a bit and get the leather to stick to the edge of it and across a few millimetres of the fabric before it reaches the spine. Otherwise you'll find the board has to crease to open and it will wreck the cover and make using the book pretty hard. Working the leather over the spine pull fairly tight and keep rubbing down as you go. Once you've reached the other board repeat the process as with the front cover. Then use a curved clay shaper or rounded dowel to work the leather down into the corners and ridges, you don't want any voids underneath and the thick strips of leather underneath should be clearly defined. At this point I usually put the book back into a stack to keep it pressed down and wait a few hours for the glue to start going off. If you're feeling brave you can go straight onto the next step...

You should have a few centimetres of leather extending from the top and bottom of the book. This bit is a little fiddly, but persevere with it and don't be afraid to be a bit rough with the leather, it can take it! What you're looking to do is fold over the excess leather so that it lies over the underside of the boards but tucks inside itself on the outside of the spine. This is why it's best not to have the fabric hinge extend right to the edge of the spine, the leather needs some space to tuck through. You might have to prise back the leather from the top of the spine, that's ok, make sure you put a lot of glue down into the gap before tucking the excess in to it.

Return the book to the stack/press and wait for the glue to cure. Now your book is finished. But of course you'll want to make it prettier so we need to add covers, corners and endpages. I used wallpaper with images printed on and a glaze applied to seal as my covers, but you can use fabric, more leather, a poster, whatever you like really. It's just a case of gluing it in place and wrapping the edges around the boards onto the underside. You can use strips of card with a torn edge to blend your cover up to the thickness of the leather for a nice, flush look. I didn't in most cases because the leather I was using was so thick it would have looked sillier having the cover slope up to it than it did having the edge of the leather exposed.

To make the corners slice across the cover at the angle you want the corner to sit on. Don't cut the whole corner away, just remove whatever you covered it with and the top layer or two of the board to help the leather sit flush. Then cut four squares of leather with each side about 2cm wider than the hypotenuse of the corner. Glue these in place and allow the glue to set.

This bit is tricky to get neat. Make two cuts in the leather square so you have a strip which begins about 6-8mm wide at the corner of the board and ends about 20mm at the edge parallel to the hypotenuse. Fold this strip over and glue it to the board, pulling it pretty tight. Then fold each of the side flaps around the board and trim off the excess where they meet the strip you just glued down. Pull these in tight and glue them down, you should have something like this:

 

 

With a bit of glue and manipulation you can make the corner less square, it works best with soft, stretchy leather. Allow it to dry fully and trim the inside of the corner to a nice straight line, but allow at least a cm border from the edge of the board before you trim.

 

 

Now, endpages. The end of the process. I'm using posters but you can use marbled paper, plain coloured paper or anything else you like. First step is to cut the paper to a size a few centimetres larger than the width and height of your open book. Decide which half of the piece is going to glue to your board and cut this half to the size of the board minus about a cm border all the way around. Make sure you don't trim down the part of the endpages which will sit against the text block. Glue the endpages to the board, working it down into the crease between the board and the text block. Apply a thin strip of glue to the spine edge of the first page and rub the endpages down onto it. Press some waxed paper (or something else that is flat and won't stick to the endpages) into the crease between the board and text block and close the book. Now open it again and check there aren't any creases you need to press out. If everything's ok then close the book, press it and wait for the glue to set.

 

Once the glue is dry you will have a finished book with the edges of the endpages protruding from the sides of it. The last step is to turn the book so the text block is sitting on top of the endpages you need to trim and CAREFULLY run a scalpel around the edge of the text block to trim the endpages neatly to size. Use a sharp scalpel and place a cutting mat between the text block and the board to avoid cutting into your cover. Then, YOU'RE DONE.:)

 

Sorry it took a few years. Any questions (I may need to clarify a bit, it's hard without pictures) just comment and I'll do my best to explain. Rundown of each volume coming soon.



Collected Warhammer Volumes part 8: Step through binding part 4- Fully ReCovered

Collected Warhammer Volumes part 7: Step through binding part 3- Board yet?

Quick update with about as far as I'm likely to get before buzzing off to New Zealand.

This bit is optional, but to give the spine some interest I'm going to recreate the look of ancient bound books and put bars on the spine. This replicates the old practice of sewing gathers around thick twine which is then fixed into the boards.

The bars on my books are 5mm wide strips cut from some leftover thick hide I used to make some leather armour once.

These strips are glued at the desired intervals across the spine using PVA. Later on the title labels will fit between the strips.

Using a sharp scalpel the ends of the strips are tapered towards the edges of the spine...

...and the square edges are removed so that the leather that will be stretched over the top will have a nice curved contour.

Wrap clingfilm around the text block and secure with masking tape to make a kind of book condom. This will protect the text block from glue whilst you attach the boards.

The boards are 1000gsm recycled greyboard. Ideally I'd have gone for something a bit thicker, but these are OK and I struggled to find anything a bit chunkier without buying large quantities. For previous volumes I've got good covers from lever arch files and even recycling the boards from books I've dissected (like the WHFB3 and Armies boards).

Apply a liberal amount of glue to the fabric hinge, leaving a strip of 5-10mm between the board and spine so it can open freely. Apply glue to the same area of the board and press together. Use plenty of glue so that if (when!) you need to remove the board again because it's not straight or evenly spaced you will be able to.

Open the board and smooth down the fabric onto it. Then close it again, turn the book over and check you have an even amount of board all round the text block and it is sitting square to the spine. If not, peel it off and reapply. Keep the board pulled away from the spine, it's important the fabric doesn't stick to the edge of the board. Repeat with the other board, trying to keep it evenly aligned to the front one.

Once the boards are in places press the book firmly. I stack other books on top to keep it all pressed together. Remember to place something under the book you are binding and have the spine hanging over the end to prevent pressing it at an odd angle.

That's all for now. Hoepfully sometime soon into the new year I'll actually get the leather and covers on. Happy New Year!

Collected Warhammer Volumes part 7: Step through binding part 3- Board yet?

Collected Warhammer Volumes part 6: Step through binding part 2- Getting messy!

Here it is then! The next gallop through binding one of my volumes for the Encyclopaedia Warhammica! But before I pick up with the sewing, remember how I was unsure about what to do with the Heroquest rules last time? Well the solution pretty much made itself apparent when I held the gathered book together for the first time...

 



 

See that big lean off to one side? From left to right here we have the Advanced Heroquest rules (glued into gathers), Terror in the Dark (glued into gathers), Warhammer Quest rules and adventure books (as they come), roleplay book (glued into gathers), Orc Lord and Catacombs of Terror (glued into gathers) and Mordheim (as it comes). See how the block of Mordheim sits perfectly straight where it doesn't have the added width at the spine? That pushes all the glued pages off to one side. There's no way this book is going to have a neat, evenly curved spine when glued. I need to either put the Mordheim block in the middle to even the spread (putting it out of sensible, chronological order- no way) or find something that will sit square up against the left hand side of the text block...

Yup. That's Heroquest rules printed onto A3 in gathers that echo the construction of the Mordheim pages. Now, if I'm going to the effort of using high-quality PDFs to print out Heroquest stuff them I'm going to do EVERYTHING... so first up I've got the European rulebook and American rulebook. Then...

Quest books (Initial, Kellar's Keep and Witch Lord), printed with the European version on one side and the US version on the other. Now I know this lacks something in the design department. Personally I think the European version looks great whereas the US version with its orange and green tones looks a bit naff. However, the US versions are much more challenging quests and for ease of reference it made more sense to me to have them side by side than one after the other. I'll just cover the US page with furniture or a small rulebook until needed!

Obviously I need to have these two ridiculously unobtainable quest books in there!

This one I used to have for real... sadly it went along with my original copy of Heroquest when I decided I no longer needed to play it. Boo.

Some bits from magazines...

And there was space for a lush double-page Les Edwards print!

OK, so with the addition of these pages (actually a bit too many, but that's ok) that's evened up the spread of the spine. So on to...

Making holes for sewing. I've left out the Mordheim pages from this block as they already have holes for thread from where they were sewn before. The remainder of the block goes in between two chunks of MDF and clamps. This is my Book Press- cheap and cheerful!

Yup, that is a saw. Now Stephen gave me a massive Jack saw to slice into the volume I bound with him. It worked great, surprisingly, but since I am a modelmaker I like to work a bit finer and am using a razor saw to slice thin slits for the thread.

It's surprising how deep you have to cut to reach the centre of gathers!

Sewing is pretty simple. Start off on the outside and go in, out, in, out down the length of the gather.

 



 When you get to the end of the gather jump across to the end of the next and repeat, in, out, down to the other end.

At the other end go back to the gather you started on, catching the needle through the first loop before going on to the third gather. Repeat this process throughout the book, making sure that any joins in the thread are on the outside of the spine.

 

Now, this is important. The gap you want between gathers is a couple of millimetres. You need to be able to shape the book by sliding the gathers past each other, but you don't want it floppy as this will make the spine weak.

 

OK, sewn. Took a couple of hours to put this lot together. You can see the threads are not entirely even as in some places the thread tore through the paper so I had to skip holes and the Mordheim block has slightly different hole positions. This doesn't matter so long as the resulting block is tight.

Back in the Book Press for gluing. Now this is the bit that takes a while, trying to get the block so that the top end is neat and level (as this is the side that will be most seen) and the curve of the spine is even and pleasing. This volume was actually very hard to get right since the paper I'd printed the Heroquest rules onto, nicely as it took colour, was very slippery and prone to shifting and messing up the curve. I had to compromise a bit more than I'd like at this stage just to get everything glued so I will try and coax the curve to be a bit more even once the glue is set and I'm putting the leather on.

Lots of glue is applied with a  brush, making sure that I fan the pages as I go and stipple glue down between the gathers. The Book Press should be holding the block really tight, but there'll be enough flexibility to get a couple of millimetres in with the brush.

Now a section of shirt fabric is glued across to form the hinge. The fabric needs to be a bit wider than the spine to allow the boards for the cover to be glued on and a bit narrower than the length of the spine so the headbands can be glued on. The stripes on the shirt fabric are a good guide for getting the spine straight and the fabric needs to be pulled nice and tight across the spine and pressed down thoroughly with fingers and a wooden mixing stick or clean clay tool.

 

To neaten up the spine and reinforce the hinge a strip of card is glued across. Stephen uses cereal box card with the shiny side sanded so the glue will take. I am using matt Ivory Card which is about the same weight but takes glue easier both sides. The card is rolled gently before gluing down so it takes to the curve of the spine nicely. Rub this down thoroughly but be careful you don't slice your fingers!

Elastic bands go on to hold everything firm whilst it dries. Then let everything set nice and solid. Once it's dry you can unclamp everything and you should have a recognisable book just lacking covers! Which is where we'll be going next, but I'm still waiting for this to dry so it may be next week... If it's not net week it'll be upon my return from Australia in January!

:)

Collected Warhammer Volumes part 6: Step through binding part 2- Getting messy!

Collected Warhammer Volumes part 5: Step through binding part 1- The Gathering

A while back now I promised some people I'd do a step-by-step of how I'm binding together my Encyclopaedia Warhammica. I decided to pick the first Appendix for the task, not because I've got that far (nowhere close yet) but because it includes all three of the types of binding used by GW's publications. Since there's a lot of steps and pictures this will probably take two or three parts, but rather than delay further I thought I'd make a start and post up to as far as I've got with this volume.

The contents of this volume were probably some of the hardest and most costly to get hold of, so my thanks once again tot he wonderful Oldhammer community of the Oldhammer Forum and Facebook pages who were incredibly supportive and generous in supplying some scarce material. The table of contents runs as follows:

Advanced Heroquest
Advanced Heroques: Terror in the Dark
Warhammer Quest Rulebook, Roleplay Book, Adventure Book
Lair of the Orc Lord
Catacombs of Terror
Mordheim

The original plan was to have these games set in the Warhammer world spread throughout the core volumes (AHQ in the back of the 3rd volume with WFB3 and Armies for example) but the differences in page size and booklet construction meant that wasn't working well so I decided to collect them into two appendices, this one (Quest) and one with Mighty Empires, Warmaster, Man 'O War etc. (Campaign). I decided to stop rather than try to get hold of the collected Town Cryers and Empire in Flames as they're rather too expensive for my tastes, maybe as a further appendix later on if I win the lottery. I have been humming and hahing about including Heroquest with these, using PDFs of the quest books to turn them from A5 into A4 pages. I decided against this as the print-it-yourself paper never has quite the same look or feel. I may yet bind the HQ stuff together in an A5 volume, but am concerned that the loss of the inner margins that comes with hardback binding might mean that GMing with the result would be difficult. Anyway, enough about content, let's look at what to do with it...

Pretty much there are three types of binding you find in GW publications. Let's call them the good, the bad and the ugly!

The Good:

Mordheim, City of the Damned! Beneath that grimdark exterior lurks a thing of joy... Yes, the Mordheim book is collated in sewn gathers. In this instance that's four sheets of A3 folded in half to give a 'gather' of 8 leaves (16 pages). The next gather has the next 16 pages etc. etc. until the end of the book is reached. These are then punched down the middle and sewn together to form the book. Since what we want to end up with is exactly that then these are super-easy and quick to disassemble and prep for binding.

Remove the glued-round outer cover.

Cut the threads holding the gathers together and remove any remaining glue and thread bits from the pages. Job done!

Most GW books from 4th through to 6th are bound this way, so that section of my project has gone pretty quickly. The exception is the shorter booklets (we'll come to later), the US-bound General's compendium and the later 6th Armies books where they went back to the BAD method (despite bumping the prices up!)...

The bad:

Warhammer Quest Roleplay Book. Delightful content but...

A close look at the spine reveals that this book is cheaply bound- it consists of loose pages simply bundled together with a crap load of glue shoved onto them and then a cover pressed onto the outside.

Getting the glue off is no problem (cheap binding!) but now we have a lot of work and a few issues ahead of us. The pages need to be turned into gathers by gluing an additional strip of paper down the edges, but this means each page is essentially two pages' thickness- making the gathers thicker at the spine end than the page end. We'll look at overcoming this at a later point.

The first thing I do is to remove the very edge of the pages that were glued into the spine. Two reasons for this. 1) The perforations and glue on the edge would make the gathers lumpy. 2) When we glue the strip along the centre we need to give a 2mm or so gap between the pages to sew through and in a volume like this than consists of a mixture of Good and Bad previous bindings this extra width on the Bad gathers would mean an uneven page width across the whole volume.

Next sort the loose leaves into gathers. Since GW publications (I can't speak for others) use a gather size of 8 leaves (16 pages) I've kept to the same as much as I can. So this first gather consists of pages 1-16. These need to be glued into 4 double-page spreads as in the photo below:

The outer spread is pages 1,2,15 and 16. The next one in is 3,4,13 and 14, the next 5,6,11 and 12 and the innermost 7,8,9 and 10. Make sense? The next gather would then be pages 17-32 and so forth. The paper I've used is from an old Encyclopaedia Britannica, nice and thin to add minimal bulk to the spine but sturdy enough to stand sewing through. It's glued in place with standard PVA.

The ugly:

Terror in the Dark is magazine stapled, as are most of GW's thinner publications. This requires a hybrid of the previous two methods in preparation for binding. Some very slim magazine publications may be suitable for sewing in as a single gather, but anything over 10 leaves is going to be too thick, and this is well above that so is going to need to be taken apart and reassembled. With a piece of GW literature that was this hard to acquire and fairly costly I was a bit daunted by this one, but it actually went quite smoothly and took just under an hour.

Here's the good part. Once the staples are removed from the centre you can keep the inner 8 leaves (16 pages) and they'll form a ready-made gather.

Then, carefully, scalpel down the centre of the remaining booklet to slice it into loose leaves. These need to be collected together into gathers in the same way as with the Bad binding above.



This booklet doesn't divide neatly into gathers of 8 leaves (16 pages) so I've gathered it into three 8-leaf gathers (the outer two and the centre) and four 6-leaf gathers (two either side of the centre). It doesn't matter too much if you have inconsistent sized gathers but you want to try to be as consistent as possible as where the thickness at the spine lies will affect how the binding looks.

And, finished.

It looks pretty chunky, but once sewn, glued and pressed I reckon this lot will condense by about a third in width. It's amazing how much loose paper compresses during the binding process!

Ok. Next it's sewing and gluing time, but I'll save that for another post. :)

Collected Warhammer Volumes part 5: Step through binding part 1- The Gathering