June Bindery Update

A first look at The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire

The interiors are printed, the book blocks are assembled and gilded, the Spanish leathers are cut, and the stamps have arrived. Which meant today was our first opportunity to test out how well the stamps fit the leathers.

Initial stamp test.

This was remarkably good for a first attempt, especially considering that it’s the first time we’ve used the softer, thicker Spanish cowhide. There is an amount of shouldering - excessive fill-in - especially on the spine, and you can see that the bottom of the spine was positioned a little too low despite the depth of the strike. But considering it can take up to ten attempts to properly calibrate everything, this is a very good initial attempt.

You can also see how we’ve removed the Castalia History logo from the top of the spine and have added an additional stamp on the rear cover. That’s supposed to be a blind stamp, or a simple debossment without foil, but it looks so good with the foil on it that we might have to consider leaving it that way. We’ll have to produce a case with the blind stamp for the purposes of comparison before we decide one way or the other.

Third stamp test.

Two takes later, and we were pretty much there. The stamp isn’t quite perfect, as there are some broken lines at the top of the spine, but the shouldering is gone, the letters are very clear, and even the small detailing in the tiles and the History logo on the back are cleanly defined. This would be acceptable for a production run, but we’ll continue with the adjustments on Monday, since now it’s time to see how well the rounded book blocks fit the stamped case in the casing-in process.

It fits very well, as it happens. That’s a very good-looking leatherbound book! Now, we need to check the overhangs, which are a millimeter or two larger than normal, in order to make sure they are acceptable, and we still need to test the hubbing process and get the ribbons delivered before we can declare the assembly process to be ready to go and begin our first mass production run.

But we can already see that the quality that is coming out of the bindery is an objective improvement on what our previous production process.

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