A Glossary of Hand Bookbinding

Terms of the bench, the press and the finishing stove, from awl to yapp edges — a composed reference site: every term a page, every group a grid of cards.

Tools

The tools of the bench: what pierces, folds, cuts, holds and presses.

Materials

What a binding is made of: thread, adhesives, cloth, leather, board.

Paper

Papers and their properties, from grain to deckle.

Structures

Ways a book is put together, from a single pamphlet to laced boards.

Techniques

The operations of forwarding: folding, sewing, rounding, covering.

Parts

The anatomy of a bound book, from head to tail and spine to fore-edge.

• Bolt

  The folded, uncut edge of a section at head or fore-edge.

• Doublure

  A lining of leather or decorated paper inside the board in place of a plain paste-down.

• False bands

  Strips glued to a hollow spine to imitate raised bands.

• Flyleaf

  The free leaf of the endpaper, facing the paste-down.

• Fore-edge

  The front edge of the leaves, opposite the spine.

• Guard

  A strip of paper or cloth folded and sewn in to carry a plate or a map.

• Gutter

  The inner margin where two facing pages meet at the fold.

• Head

  The top edge of the book.

• Headband

  The band of thread or cloth at the head of the spine, worked or stuck on.

• Headcap

  The covering shaped over the head of the spine, above the headband.

• Hinge

  The flexing strip of endpaper, cloth or mull at the joint, inside the cover.

• Joint

  The groove or hinge between the spine and each board.

• Label

  A separate piece of leather or paper lettered and pasted to the spine or board.

• Paste-down

  The half of the endpaper pasted to the inside of the board.

• Raised bands

  The ridges across a spine where the sewing cords lie under the covering.

• Section

  A folded sheet, or several nested, sewn through its fold as one unit.

• Shoulder

  The ledge formed by backing, against which the cover board sits.

• Signature

  The mark that identifies a section's order, by extension the section itself.

• Spine

  The back of the book, where the sections are sewn and the title stands.

• Square

  The margin of board that projects beyond the text block on three sides.

• Stub

  The narrow strip left when a leaf is cut away, to which a replacement may be attached.

• Tail

  The bottom edge of the book.

• Text block

  The sewn or glued gathering of all the book's leaves, before or without its cover.

• Turn-in

  The margin of covering folded over the board's edge onto its inside.

Formats

Sizes, foldings and the furniture a book is kept in.

Finishing

What decorates and names a finished binding: tooling, edges, lettering.

A demonstration: the craft terms are real, the site is invented. Built by plinth from EDN and Markdown; every page is complete without scripts.