I’ve been given a place at an alternative press fair in London this May, but was a bit surprised to learn that I’d been assigned a third of a table. For my last show, I just took along the box I keep my books in at home — a wooden Ikea dresser-drawer insert. That won’t fit into a third of a table, so I wondered how else I could disply my books in a small space.

This is what I came up with:

It’s a little stand that works like an easel, with a knotted piece of waxed linen thread running from the front to a leg in the back. I also put little shims on the back to hold the leg in place, and glued a small piece of bookbinding cloth to the leg, which acts as a hinge.

My dad gave me a “reciprocating saw” for Christmas — a cross between a jigsaw and a gun — which suddenly makes it possible for me to cut straighter lines through thicker pieces of wood. So, now that I’ve finished the instructional part of the podcast, I find myself coming back to the very beginning: I made my own bookbinding jig, just like the one my mum first told me about, which got me started on this whole adventure. Only now I could make one that’s perfectly tailored to the dimensions of the books I’m making.

The bookbinding jig works on the same principle as the simpler perfect-binding press I demonstrated a while back. It’s a bit more complicated to make, but it stands up on its own, which is very handy.

I stuck a book in it just for illustrative purposes. How I’m binding books now has changed — again — just slightly, and I’m finally able to get a much more reliable result. Here’s how I’m doing it now:

1. Print out the imposed pages.
2. Cut them in half on the guillotine.
3. Fold them by hand. (Yes, it takes forever, but I replaced one bad paper-folding machine with another, and simply don’t believe any contraption that’s available to consumers can reliably fold A5 pages without scrunching them or folding them at wonky angles. Save your money, folks. Now I fold my pages while watching the idiot-box, and I don’t have to feel so guilty because the time’s not wasted.)
4. Clamp the folded pages in the bookbinding jig.
5. Glue the pages along the spine, and allow this to dry. The result will be a nice, solid “book block”.
6. Trim the top and bottom of the book block on the guillotine, but not the outside edge. Note that I haven’t put a cardstock cover on the book block yet: I found that, once the cover was on, the spine would have a bit of a lip on the front and the back, and no matter how tightly I clamped it down in the guillotine, I would get wonky, unpredictable cuts — sometimes ruining the whole book.
7. Trim a piece of black card to the height of the book, and score it so it will fold around the spine.
8. Re-clamp the book block and the scored card in the bookbinding jig. Bend the card back so the spine is exposed, ready to be glued.
9. Hot-glue the spine and fold the cover over it.
10. Let dry, then trim off any excess glue, and re-melt any bits I need to with a heat gun.
11. Trim the outside edge of the book-block and card.
12. Stamp the book with my logo on the back, the title on the front, and a unique serial number inside.
13. Print the overleaf.
14. Trim the overleaf to fit the height of the book.
15. Score the overleaf to fit around the spine, and fold it around the book.

It’s a slight variation on what I showed in the Perfect Binding Supplemental video. The important difference is that I’m trimming the book before I put the cardstock cover on. Between that and folding the pages by hand, I’m getting a much more reliable result, which makes the whole process a lot more fun!