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My mentor told me to stop using PVA on every spine, and he was right
Three months ago I was rebinding a 1930s atlas for a regular and reached for the PVA like always. My old mentor, who has been binding for 42 years out of a garage in Boise, grabbed my wrist and said 'that spine needs to move, you're gluing it into a brick.' I switched to a wheat paste mix on the spine and the book opened flat for the first time in decades. Now I keep two pots going and match the adhesive to the paper grain. Anyone else split their glues by project or am I late to this?
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miles79825d ago
Man, the grain direction thing is real and nobody talks about it enough. If you glue a spine with PVA and the paper grain runs vertical, that book is never opening right no matter how nice the rest of the binding is. I learned that the hard way on a run of cheap Bibles where the pages fought me every time. Wheat paste lets the paper shift a hair as it dries, which sounds like nothing until you see a book lay flat after 80 years. The old guys in Boise knew what they were doing.
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