The old clamp trick I learned at a bindery workshop last week

I went to a small bookbinding workshop at a local shop in Portland last Saturday. The instructor showed us how to use a simple clamp to hold the spine while gluing instead of using weights. I had been struggling with crooked spines for months, and this one trick fixed it in about 15 minutes. He said he learned it from a binder in the 80s who worked on restoration projects. I tried it on a paperback I was rebinding, and the results were way better than anything I did before. Has anyone else tried clamping the spine instead of using stacks of books?

3 comments

3 Comments

stella_baker2mo ago

Wait, hold on, @kim191 - you did a full reback on an old textbook with this? Like, you actually took the old spine off and put a new one on? I've been messing with that technique for a while and always chickened out on the full reback, that's wild. I only tried clamping on a simple paperback, but hearing you say the spine came out straight for the first time makes me want to try something more ambitious. Did you use a specific kind of clamp or just a regular hardware store spring clamp?

iris_davis901mo ago

Three weeks ago I spent a whole Saturday clamping a beat up 1950s cookbook and I swear the spine came out more crooked than when I started. I used two of those cheap spring clamps from Harbor Freight, one at the top and one at the bottom, and the pages still slid around like they had a mind of their own. Not trying to knock Kim's success but I think the weight stack method at least lets you adjust things as you go, you know? Maybe I just need better clamps but that one attempt was enough to make me real nervous about trying it on anything I actually care about.

kim1912mo ago

Ngl, I was totally one of those people who thought stacking books was the only way. But then I tried the clamp thing after reading this, and yeah, it's a total game changer. I did a whole reback on an old textbook last weekend, and my spine came out straight for the first time. The clamp just holds everything so much more even than random piles of books. I was skeptical at first, but now I'm never going back to the weight stack method.