In this video, I will explore using fabric or cloth not intended for use on books, as a book covering material.
In a perfect world, I would reserve the name bookcloth for commercially made materials, and call what I'm going to
demonstrate in this video something else.
But I think that would be confusing, so I'll stick with bookcloth for this video.
So what is bookcloth?
For this video, I'm going to define it as a material where the external facing surface is a woven fabric, and the
essential characteristics are that the material needs to be stiff enough to easily work on a book, and that there is
some property that stops adhesive striking through to the outside.
Optional characteristics are that there is some sort of protective coating which protects from dirt and or water,
which may allow the book to be cleaned in the future.
The other optional characteristic is that the material will accept hot foil.
In this video, I'll demonstrate a few different methods for achieving these characteristics.
Prior to the early 1800s, covering of books with cloth mainly used rough canvas and other similar heavy fabrics.
Bookcloth was one of the materials that came out of the period at the end of the Industrial Revolution, as book
production ramped up.
This was the same period that saw the rise of wood pulp paper and cased books.
The first cloth manufactured specifically for the use in bookbinding is attributed to Archibald Leighton in 1822.
The first cloth met the essential characteristics by filling fabric with starch and colour additives.
This initial cloth was found to be not hard wearing and failed the optional characteristic of protecting the fabric.
Soon other companies started making bookcloth, and the competition spurred on innovation, which saw the addition of
oils that produced a plastic-like filling material.
Bookcloth soon became a popular covering material, replacing much leather work.
And towards the end of the 19th century, there were fancy embossed bookcloths used on heavily decorated case bindings,
where the cover designs were impressed with strong blocking presses, often involving a lot of gilding.
Into the 20th century embossed bookcloth fell out of fashion and cheaper paperback cloth became available, as
mechanization pushed book prices lower and lower.
At the end of the video I'll quickly mentioned some great sources of information about the history of bookcloth.
In this video, I'll demonstrate two techniques to back cloth with paper, which produces a stiffness that enables it to be
used to cover books.
And the paper acts as a barrier, stopping adhesive striking through to the surface.
The resulting bookcloth from these two techniques do not provide any surface protection to the material and will not
enable hot foiling.
In the next bookcloth video, I'll demonstrate filling the cloth with starch or methyl cellulose, just like the
original bookcloth from the 1820s, and then using paste/acrylic mix, which provides a significantly more
robust surface, which accepts hot foil.
Maybe the easiest way to make fabric into put cloth is to back it with paper.
And there are two common ways of doing this: using a heat set adhesive, or wet adhesive.
And the easiest of the easy methods is using the heat set adhesive.
So that is what we'll look at first.
The sewing world is a mystery to me.
But I understand that something called fusible interfacing is used to make fabrics stiff for various uses.
One of these materials called HeatnBond Ultra Hold is popular for backing cloth with paper for bookbinding.
HeatnBond is readily available in Australia and the US, so that is the type of interfacing material I'm going to use.
However, if HeatnBond isn't available where you are, I'm sure there's another commercially available product that you
can use. I start by cutting a piece of cloth that is generously large for the application I have in mind.
I buy the HeatnBond off a roll that is 43 centimetres wide .
For efficiency, if I have enough material, I'll simply make one of the dimensions a bit larger than 43 centimetres.
The HeatnBond is a release paper with a heat-set adhesive on one side.
I don't want to be applying this adhesive to the surface I'm ironing on.
So I cut the HeatnBond to slightly smaller than the material I've cut.
Then I follow the instructions to apply the adhesive to the fabric.
I use an ordinary clothes iron on medium heat and steam turned off.
I place the HeatnBond on the fabric with the adhesive side facing the fabric and the paper sideside uppermost.
I iron on my workbench, but I don't want to melt my cutting mat, so I place a heavy board on the bench.
Then I simply iron over the HeatnBond, trying to follow the instructions to hold the iron over each section for about 8
seconds. If you hold the iron on the fabric too long, the adhesive can strike through the fabric, in which case you
have to start again and maybe reduce the dwell time to 6 seconds.
Once you've applied the adhesive to the fabric and it has cooled, peel the lining paper off.
Now you want to apply the paper to the fabric.
The paper grain and the resulting bookcloth must follow the same rules as paper grain in all other aspects of
bookbinding, and must go head to tail of the book.
Cloth does have a type of grain direction.
It usually stretches more in the weft direction.
I try and have the paper grain aligned in the warp direction, but I don't consider this essential.
Any acid-free bond office type paper, 80 gsm or less, will work fine.
The lighter the weight the better.
I use the versatile Permalife.
Cut a piece of paper larger than the area covered with adhesive.
You don't want the adhesive on the plate of your iron.
And then iron the paper to the fabric in the same way that the adhesive was applied.
Once it is cooled, trim up the edges and you have your piece of cloth.
The second method for backing cloth with paper is to use wet adhesive.
It's similar to how silk is backed with paper in Japanese bookbinding.
However, you don't want the adhesive to strike through to the front surface of the fabric.
So you have to apply the adhesive to the paper.
I'm going to use starch paste adhesive, though you could use wheat flour adhesive or methyl cellulose.
You could use PVA, but there's an issue with using PVA that I'll talk about later.
Start with a piece of fabric that's larger than the application that you need, and a piece of paper that's
larger than the fabric, that gives at least a 1 inch, 25 millimetre, margin all around the fabric.
Again, the grain direction in the paper must be such that the resulting bookcloth has the paper grain going head to
tail in the book. I'm using the same medium weight Permalife paper that I used in the previous example.
I'm going to use a piece of wooden dowel to help maneuver the wet paper.
A sheet of glass is the best surface to work on.
Rigid plastic works okay as well.
But then you'll scratch that up when you remove the cloth.
Grey board works well and it doesn't matter if you scratch that up, you can just replace it.
I'll start by moistening the fabric.
I'll spray it on the front and then flip it and then spray it on the back.
If you don't have a spray bottle, you can just use a moist rag or sponge.
I'm not trying to saturate the cloth.
I just want it moist - enough that it sticks to the surface of the glass.
Moistening the cloth does a number of things.
The most important is that it holds the cloth in place on the glass.
So you can get the pattern straightened out and not worry too much about it being distorted when you put the paper on
. It also relaxes the cloth.
However, it's not quite the same as relaxing a piece of paper that you're laminating, because cloth and paper
stretch differently.
The third benefit is it stops the cloth from drawing the adhesive from the paper and potentially striking through to
the front of the cloth.
This is an extension of Richard Feynman's example of the second law of thermodynamics, where he explains that you
can't dry yourself with a wet towel.
A really wide stiff bristled brush is a really handy tool for making this type of bookcloth or laminating paper in
general. Once I've got the cloth in position, I'll paste out the paper and I'll let it relax.
I'll let the moisture soak into the paper, and then I'll lift the paper up carefully with the dowel and place it over
the cloth. Once the paper is in position, I'll use the big brush to smooth out the paper, get rid of any wrinkles or
bubbles.
I'll try and avoid using too much force because I don't want to force the adhesive through to the front surface of the
fabric. Then I'll let it dry on the glass.
The paper that extends past the edges of the fabric will stick to the glass and hold firm.
And as the paper and the cloth shrinks as it dries, it'll be drawn nice and taut and kept very
flat. To remove the completed bookcloth, I'll just simply cut around the edges of the fabric.
And the bookcloth will come off the glass easily, because it's not adhered to the glass.
And to clean up the remaining paper that stuck to the glass, I'll just put water on that.
And let the water soak into the paper and reactivate the adhesive, and then that will wipe off easily.
And this is the main problem with using PVA.
It's much harder to get rid of the scrap of paper.
It's just easier to use either paste or metal cellulose, which is trivial to clean up.
So is it better to use heat-set adhesive or wet adhesive to back cloth with paper?
Each has pros and cons.
The heat-set adhesive method is fast and easy.
It also seems to work really well for embroidered fabrics and fabrics that have an uneven surface.
If I don't know what the composition of the fabric is, and I suspect that it is synthetic, then I use the heat-set
adhesive, being very careful not to potentially melt the fabric.
However, the long term stability of heat-set adhesives are questionable.
If I have the time, I know the fabric is a natural fiber, and it is fairly smooth, I will use paste to back cloth.
For all the techniques in this video, I always wash and iron the fabric before I use it.
This is to get rid of any coatings, anything that's been put on the fabric that might stop adhesive sticking to it.
For the HeatnBond method, I used to not wash the fabric, thinking that it would, if there was any protective coating
on the fabric that might be useful for the finished bookcloth.
However, then I read the instructions for HeatnBond, and it does say to wash the fabric before using it.
The best book on the history bookcloth is "Bookcloth: 1823 to 1990" by Thomlinson and Masters, as well as a history of
bookcloth, this book gives us a detailed history of the Winterbottom Company, that dominated the bookcloth trade
during the peak of cloth usage.
Another great book is "Book Cloth in America and England: 1823 to 1850" by Andrea Krupp, which has a focus on
embossed, or grained, patterns.
There are lots of hard-to-get historical sample books and, of course, modern sample books.
The last book I'll mention is a wonderful little thing called "The Making of Bookbinding Fabrics" that was
published by Holliston Mills, which goes from cotton in the field to finished bookcloth, and includes little sample
swatches. So that's it for today.
In the next video on bookcloth I'll look at impregnating cloth with paste, methyl cell and acrylic mix.
I hope you've enjoyed this video.
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Until next time, cheerio.