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Future of Wooden Board Bookbinding

What’s new in wooden board bookbinding? What new functions, structures and techniques extend or depart from the legacy of wooden board technology? Is the craft is at a stand still, or should we consider the continued development of the wooden board bookbinding? Let’s discuss these questions.

background

Wooden board covers for books are typical of early codex bookbinding. The protective and compacting benefits of wood boards were immediately apparent and immediately used from Tibet to Egypt. In a basic application the loose text was bundled and tied between protective planks. Sewn texts were further protected with attached sewn boards. This fundamental application of protective sewn boards is characteristic of eastern Church bookbindings until the time of printing and in Ethiopian Church bookwork into the present day.

The advent of sewing supports laced into wooden boards accentuated an action of transmission of the leverage of the boards. The motion derived from leverage of the board transmitted through the cover to the text is a gymnastic of the codex structure. Variation of sewing supports, stitch patterns, lacing paths and adhered panel linings and other structural features determine the durability, efficiency and haptic influence of this transmission of board leverage.

While control of transmission of board leverage is apparent from the beginning and is managed with different success across the history of wooden board work, one culmination of improved control is a shoulder seated board. This refinement, producing transmission both through the mechanical connections and through pressure applied from the inner and outer bevels of the board edge to the shoulder of the shaped back of the text is apparent by the end of the wooden board era around the mid 16th century

Following the 16th century, wooden board book covers continued in use in specialized work including large antiphonals and smaller devotional bindings. Wooden scabord was also used in the letterpress trade when it proved more economical or more available than paper pasteboard. But, in general, this later work reverts to the earliest function of protective press boards without refined transmission of leverage to the text.

from existing enclaves to a new enclave

Paperbased boards are now so diverse, inexpensive and dependable that they have displaced wooden boards. While paper boards lack strength and working qualities of wood, especially at the lacing paths, these attributes are not particularly relevant in modern hand bookbinding. Even specialties including the rebinding of early manuscripts, do not necessarily involve the use of wooden board covers. The attractive appearance or historical suitability of an exposed wooden board cover is not, in itself, sufficient reason to compel its use.

Today only very small enclaves of hand binders are inclined to use wooden boards. These enclaves include surviving traditional contexts, wider contexts of folk artists working in book format, binders of replica books and conservators producing rebindings for vellum manuscripts. If wooden board bookbinding is to flourish and continue, scenarios for its use will need to be maintained and expanded within these narrow existing enclaves of practice.

The folk art application can be expanded to wider production of wooden boards associated with hand produced wooden boards, papers and textiles as well as folk art bookworks that compile folk artistry in picture making and story telling. Replica teaching models can expand across the whole range of the wooden board legacy and there is also a need for effective design of replica binding specifications for facsimile printing and for accessories of Medieval and Renaissance societies. In conservation practice wooden board work can be extended to damaged items from revivalist or attavistic genres such as Roycroft or Menonite literatures.

The few persistent traditions of historical wooden board book work of earlier eras offer every hope and every despiration for their future. These enclaves of bookwork, such as Ethiopian and Tibetan bookbinding traditions, cannot survive dissipation of their parent cultures. They can also, by definition, not be associated with new developments of wooden board technique.

Due to limits of extension and development of technique within the existing enclaves of wooden board work we should also imagine an entirely new enclave for 21st century. In this new enclave, wooden board bookbinding would be pursued on its own special merits in pure research toward an ever more graceful and practical bookbinding. Such a practice of wooden board bookbinding would address improvements in the sub-structures of fitting and attachment to the textblock and adaptation of endbanding methods, panel linings and foredge closure devises. Fresh revivals of decorative techniques applied to leather before application to the boards are also needed.

Most importantly the new practice can research and develop elegant book action during motions of opening, closing and page turning. We may still hope, by continuing the long development of the wooden board bookbinding, to fulfill ideals of haptic qualities that ease and invigorate reading.

challenges for the new enclave

The sub-structure of the board fitting and attachment needs a fresh, trans-traditional, review. The ideal of the shoulder seated board applying a “drawn on” shape to the text back needs both recognition on its own and it needs conscious refinement in terms of a sculptural aesthetic of the shapes of a book.

A principle, following from the sewing patterns and the accumulated thread swelling, encompasses three interlocking vectors. As swelling increases the round of the back deepens, the angle of the shoulder to the page plane increases while the height of the shoulder from the seat to the endpaper fold, shortens. As swelling decreases the convex of the back flattens, the angle of the shoulder to the page plane diminishes but the height of the shoulder from seat to endpaper fold increases. The demonstration of these interlocking vectors is the continuous gradation of parabolas that accommodates each distinction of each sewing of each book.

In the ideal, the given swelling is distributed between shouldering and rounding. That precept is not conveyed or confirmed by historical work, but it will require deliberate recognition in any new tradition. In essence, the thread swelling should be equally divided between shouldering and rounding. Other refinements of method follow including the accentuation of swelling in outermost gatherings and the determination and inducement of the break of the seat of the shoulder. The interrelated shaping of the inner and outer bevels of the gutter edge of the board is critical and the methods need a new, explanatory geometry and practical methods of working the boards as a mirrored pair.

The anatomy of the cover-to-text attachment needs attention. We must both separate the various components and understand their interacting motions. The use of relatively heavy sewing supports and relatively heavy covering skins causes the board to move off the shoulder on opening. This action must be accommodated and controlled through effective adhesion of the panel linings. The back linings, put down under the board, are primary actors in the opening motion and their materials, fit and their adhesion need close consideration. The lining tongues must be put down with a only slightly opened board so that the leverage of the board begins transmission in the first few degrees of opening and continues to open the book fully without hinging further than 90 degrees.

In transmission of the leverage of closing the laced sewing supports and covering skin are main actors. Here the last few degrees of motion are critical. At the end of the closing motion great compressive force can be applied via the outer bevel. This sudden, clamping action drives the inner bevel against the shoulder and drives the board against the text, expelling air from the leaves, locking up the shape of the back and transforming the whole book into a solid geometry. At that moment, with the covers held closed, the clasps are tripped into place.

Innovations in endbanding and foredge closure should be pursued in the new enclave. Here innovation can easily spring from tradition. The wooden boards are completely ammenable to innovative and secure attachments. Endbands and foredge closures deserve innovation since they have long provided sites for the exuberance of the craft.

The refinements are suggested by historical methods...even thought they never emerged in the long history of wooden board work. These include lying press shouldering or shaping of the sew text prior to board fiting. This is a reasonable extension of lying press rounding during plowing. Natural sewing pattern composites include packing or wrapping stiches confined to outermost gatherings only. This pattern enhances swelling at the shoulders without stiffening the supports across the operating span of the text back. Frayed slips of the sewing support cords need not be cut away. These can be put down as "fish tails" resting in shallow scallups on the exterior of the boards. Adhered endbands can have the slips of their cores preserved and these can be put down to the inside of the boards after covering.

These are just a few of the natural innovations that simply continue the craft approach of the wooden board work.

But, perhaps no other sector of a new enclave of wooden board work can be more surprising and revitalizing then cover decoration. The overall focus is on structural refinements producing graceful reading actions, so the intent in decoration should not be disguise or distraction from that underlying structure. But structure and action can also prompt decoration. We are looking for timeless style, comparable to the esthetic of the induced, flowing shape of the book back, a syncopation and pattern comparable to the methodic sewing and a haptic response in tactile and visual appeal that will associate well with the behaviors of book selection and reading.

Earlier decorative technique such as the punched reveals, vellum strap work, diced and striated spine patterns and simple tooled lozenge and circle repeats of late Coptic decoration will be wonderful for wooden board work of the new enclave. On the other hand, modern technique of onlay and figured tool stamping with gold would be stylistically regressive.

the future of the book

The complete anatomy and graceful action of the wooden board bookbinding enables an ergonomics of reading that will always be important. While the continuing practice of wooden board work will be small and irregularly advocated, the exemplar of the wooden board binding can guide the future of the physical book.

wooden board bookbinding model by Bob Espinosa