Anything that has been printed can be arranged nicely in a frame and hung up after it has left the press and dried.

However, there are prints that require further work. They want to be folded and bound to become a book. So here we arrive in the bookbinder’s world, needing bone folder, thread and paste.

The picture on the right shows a house in Pirna (Saxonia) that originally must have been the home of a bookbinder. The writing says: “What scientist and scholars find, we truly paste and trim and bind”.
 

Be it a simple sheet of paper, be it marbled or printed – most of them have to be cut to size. By hand, of course. The cutting machine is an old KRAUSE built in 1912.

Binding a book starts with a sheet of paper be it blank or printed

that has to be neatly folded to make a section

and all sections have to be assorted in right order.

Then the sections are sewn together with a needle and strong linen thread

starting with a folded sheet of endpaper (which has a pawn pattern in the foto below).

You can see the sections on the top left and the bookblock on the top right, below the open book.

The book wants a case that has to be made separately from strong board and a piece of cloth

then the bookblock is cased-in.

to make the book complete.

This special handmade book has two pages with an inlay of walnut leaves - resembling the titel which is “The Branch of the Nut-Tree”

The book shown is “Das Nusszweiglein” a fairy tale by Ludwig Bechstein.

Bookbinding step-by-step.

bleikloetzle’s speciality are book covers from cloth, that is, I don’t usually use normal bookbinding cloth for the covers of my books. I choose lovely patterned cloth, be it hand woven, African batik, fine cutwork from India, coarse sackcloth, corduroy, damask, a nicely printed cotton or a gorgeous silk. The picture on the right shows books bound in African batik made by hand (sold by TWIGA-Design at Heidelberg’) – the picture on the left shows a cover made from an outstanding cutwork cloth that has been handmade in the traditional way in India.

A couple of bookbinding techniques I have studied at Buchbinder-Colleg in Stuttgart, among these were traditional, experimental and Japanese stitching techniques, making of mediaeval inks and paints, making decorated paper. Thus at bleikloetzle’s you can find the classically stitched and bound book, like e. g. “Annette’s and Guenter’s Fine Far Eastern Cooking Book” as seen on the right, and there are books that resemble objects, like the twin concertina book “Human-Dignity-Rights” (shown on the left).