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Watched a guy in Louisville lace a text block and it hit me that I've been rounding spines wrong for years
I was at a bindery meetup in Louisville back in April and this older guy was lacing a text block onto cords, and I noticed he wasn't rounding the spine the way I do. He was doing it in little stages, tapping the block down after each pass with the hammer instead of one big shove like I've always done. I asked him about it and he said something like, you're fighting the paper the whole time if you do it all at once. Went home and tried it his way on a 300 page book I'd been dreading, and the difference was nuts. My signatures used to fan out at the head and tail and I'd have to trim them back, losing maybe an eighth of an inch on each end. This time the block stayed square the whole way through and the backing went on clean on the first try instead of the third. I've been binding for 11 years and I never questioned that one big hit was the right move. Any of you do the staged tapping thing, or am I the last guy to figure this out?
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henderson.oscar21d ago
Been there with the frustration of things not going right on the first try, though my story is about sourdough bread of all things. Spent two years fighting with sticky dough, adding flour when it was too wet, adding water when it was too dry, until a baker friend told me to just wait ten minutes after mixing before touching it. Turns out the flour needs time to soak up the water on its own, and I was making way more work for myself by panicking early. That little pause changed everything, same way your staged tapping probably lets the paper settle between hits instead of fighting back. Funny how the fix is usually doing less, not more.
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