Basics of Book Construction

    As part of a class on preservation, we had to document the physical characteristics and condition of a book, and I stumbled on this trashed Edwardian history book for children, The Pageant of British History, from 1911. In regards to its content, it's only really interesting because of the depth and variation of its white supremacist, patriarchal, and colonial propaganda aimed, again, at children. There's no really useful information in there, but you can find a repaired and legible copy here, courtesy of the Internet Archive.
    As an object, The Pageant serves as a fun lesson in book construction and terminology, especially what gets revealed from the damage that's been done to it. First, we'll cover some basics. Everything you see in the image below is considered a book's binding, including the back cover, spine, and front cover. The thick, hard part of the front and back covers are called boards, and where the boards meet the spine are the joints. The title and the illustration have both been pressed into the binding in a method called tooling, although this was done by machine rather than the usual handmade process. Everything else in the book (a.k.a all of the pages) are called a text block, often made of a number of folded pieces of paper sewn together into quires (or signatures). Riveting stuff, I know.

    Now, we can move onto the fun part: the backing materials. Shout out to time and presumably some children for tearing the binding material off the spine in a really useful way. The image below shows a close-up of what might be hiding behind your average hardcover book. You can see the thick paper spine liner that got pasted directly onto the fabric binding, which also features the raised reverse side of the tooling. The torn red strip of fabric at the top was originally part of the headcap, the top edge of the spine. Some of your hardcover books will have a little roll of fabric or woven thread between the headcap and the text block called an endband, which was originally part of the sewing process of putting text blocks together, but has since become mostly decorative or used to help keep the headcap intact. Keep an eye out for them!
    The backing material that's part of the text block, including the darker, stiffer paper glued down over top of the little bit of beige you can see sticking out (which we'll discuss later) are part of a binding technique called a hollowback. Or as my friends and I like to say, "ain't no hollowback girl". This technique allows hardcover books to lay almost flat when opened, curving the text block away from the spine. In contrast, some hardcover books are tightback bound, where the text block's backing material is glued directly to the spine. I've mainly seen this style in books of essays or old university textbooks from the 40s and 50s. I don't think its a popular construction method, though.

    Moving to the inside, we can see below the front inside joint that originally connected the binding to the text block, also called a hinge or ocassionally a gutter. This book, as most hardcovers do, has an endpaper that consists of the pastedown (on the left) and the free endpaper or flyleaf (on the right). Aside from being fun and decorative, endpapers are attached to the front and back of the text block and later pasted down (hence the name) over the inside of the binding and backing materials, essentially locking the text block and binding together into the finished book!
    But the endpaper that covered this hinge has deteriorated, revealing to you all that I've been lying and deceiving you this whole time. Yes! It's a plot twist! I've been telling you from the beginning that this is about the book's "binding", but it isn't! Although "bound" is the generic term for any text block that's wrapped in some kind of cover, technically The Pageant, along with all other hardcover books, is cased. 
    And here's how we know this is a casing. Although the beige and white tones of the endpaper blend in to the backing materials, you can still see three white bands between them and behind that, a beige loosely-woven fabric (recall seeing hints of it in the damaged spine). These bands, or tapes, are integral part of sewing the quires of a text block together, but in a bound book, they'd be threaded through the boards that make up the binding. Instead, here they've been pasted onto the loose-weave mull (a.k.a 'binding cloth' or 'super'). Together, these are then pasted onto the boards and covered by the endpapers, anchoring it all together into one finished book. Despite the fact that we call it all binding, cased or 'casebound' books are the norm for all hardcover books being published today and in recent history. You're unlikely to find another binding style unless you're working with early printed books, medieval manuscripts, or codexes. 
    And if you were curious, paperback books are bound in a style called 'perfect bindings'. Here, instead of folded papers sewn together, individual pages are trimmed to size, clamped tightly together, and then glued directly to the soft binding material. This is why its easier for paperback pages to fall out when the glue deteriorates or the spine cracks.

    If you have stuck around this long and haven't fallen asleep yet, cheers! I'm going to make that harder. Here's one final thing about the book that I found pretty neat. Below you can see a picture of one of the book's pages being held up to the light. Paper is categorized these days into machine-made vs. handmade, and wove vs. laid-and-chain. If you've ever made hand made paper, you'll know that the fibre pulp gets washed around in a big vat and then drawn up in frames and pressed to draw out excess moisture. The resulting paper can come out a little lumpy or bumpy as the fibres settle down in different directions and overlap. Before the machinization of paper production in the mid 1700s, laid-and-chain paper was the most common way to create smooth pulp distribution. The frames used for these paper sheets were created with thin, evenly-spaced rows called laid lines and thicker and wider-spaces lines called chains. Although not the most common by the 1910s, the use of laid-and-chain paper for this book indicates that it was higher quality or made to seem fancier and more official (part of the book's propaganda, if I had to guess).

    Okay, that's probably more than enough book construction facts to last you a lifetime. Try using this information to investigate your own bookshelves, or if you wanna get fancy with it hit up an antique or secondhand bookstore and hold up books to see if you can find laid-and-chain paper of your own! Maybe you can even impress some cutie at the bookstore by getting real technical about cased vs. bound books. If you do, you WILL have to invite me to your wedding, though. Alternatively, if reading this made you sleepy, I hope you have a good snooze :)