How Beautifully Your Bindings Open!

Pearls of wisdom from times past.

This is still applicable today. Or, at least, it is for a page-block that is sewn, glued, rounded, backed and lined. Which should be—aside perhaps from rounding, which might be absent—the binding construction of any decent hardback bookbinding. This is something a professional bookbinder would still do when first opening a book they had newly bound. Jen Lindsay—a modern bookbinder, author of Fine Bookbinding (2009)—refers to this as ‘controlled opening’.

MATTHEWS, William

Modern Bookbinding Practically Considered

The Grolier Club, 1889, pp. 49–50