Bookbinding

Bookbinding is the process of building a book, usually in codex format, from an ordered stack of paper sheets with one's hands and tools, or in modern publishing, by a series of automated processes. Firstly, one binds the sheets of papers along an edge with a thick needle and strong thread. One can also use loose-leaf rings, binding posts, twin-loop spine coils, plastic spiral coils, and plastic spine combs, but they last for a shorter time. Next, one encloses the bound stack of paper in a cover. Finally, one places an attractive cover onto the boards, and features the publisher's information and artistic decorations.

The trade of bookbinding includes the binding of blank books and printed books. Blank books, or stationery bindings, are books planned to be written in. These include accounting ledgers, guestbooks, logbooks, notebooks, manifold books, day books, diaries, and sketchbooks. Printed books are produced through letterpress printing, offset lithography, or other printing techniques and their binding practices include fine binding, edition binding, publisher's bindings, and library binding.

Bookbinding is a skilled trade that requires measuring, cutting, and gluing. A finished book requires many steps to complete. This is usually determined by the materials needed and the layout of the book. Bookbinding combines skills from the trades of papermaking, textile and leather-working crafts, model making, and graphic design. The trade of bookbinding is both a craft done out of creativity and passion and a process happening in a factory. But each type of bookbinding always resolves three problems in making a book: (i) how to bind the paper sheets into a book block; (ii) how to cover and protect the bound pages; and (iii) how to label and decorate the book covers that protect the pages.

Writers in the Hellenistic-Roman culture wrote longer texts as scrolls; these were stored in boxes or shelving with small cubbyholes, similar to a modern wine rack. Court records and notes were written on wax tablets, while important documents were written on papyrus or parchment. The modern English word "book" comes from the Proto-Germanic *bokiz, referring to the beechwood on which early written works were recorded.

The book was not needed in ancient times, as many early Greek texts—scrolls—were 30 pages long, which were customarily folded accordion-fashion to fit into the hand. Roman works were often longer, running to hundreds of pages. The Ancient Greek word for book was tome, meaning "to cut". The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a massive 200 pages long and was used in funerary services for the deceased. Torah scrolls, editions of first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Israelite (or Hebrew) Bible, were—and still are—also held in special holders when read.

Scrolls can be rolled in one of two ways. The first method is to wrap the scroll around a single core, similar to a modern roll of paper towels. While simple to construct, a single core scroll has a major disadvantage: in order to read text at the end of the scroll, the entire scroll must be unwound. This is partially overcome in the second method, which is to wrap the scroll around two cores, as in a Torah. With a double scroll, the text can be accessed from both beginning and end, and the portions of the scroll not being read can remain wound. This still leaves the scroll a sequential-access medium: to reach a given page, one generally has to unroll and re-roll many other pages.

In addition to the scroll, wax tablets were commonly used in Antiquity as a writing surface. Diptychs and later polyptych formats were often hinged together along one edge, analogous to the spine of modern books, as well as a folding concertina format. Such a set of simple wooden boards sewn together was called by the Romans a codex (pl. codices)—from the Latin word caudex, meaning "the trunk" of a tree, around the first century AD. Two ancient polyptychs, a pentaptych and octoptych, excavated at Herculaneum employed a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on thongs or cords.

At the turn of the first century, a kind of folded parchment notebook called pugillares membranei in Latin became commonly used for writing throughout the Roman Empire. This term was used by the Roman poet Martial. Martial used the term with reference to gifts of literature exchanged by Romans during the festival of Saturnalia. According to T. C. Skeat, "in at least three cases and probably in all, in the form of codices" and he theorized that this form of notebook was invented in Rome and then "must have spread rapidly to the Near East". In his discussion of one of the earliest pagan parchment codices to survive from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Eric Turner seems to challenge Skeat's notion when stating "its mere existence is evidence that this book form had a prehistory" and that "early experiments with this book form may well have taken place outside of Egypt".