Tearing apart a book

For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing. We covered technology (from scrolls to scrolling), the impact of the book on culture, economics (how publishers and bookstores make money), and much more. I invited authors and editors to class. We toured a printing company and an audiobook studio. A ghost-writer friend came one Halloween. A book restorer told harrowing tales of damaged books and her heroic efforts to repair them.

One of the highlights for me was slicing and dicing a book in front of the class.

In a room full of writers, readers, and bibliophiles, cutting up a book never failed to elicit wide-eyed gasps and groans. There was a serious point to the cutting: to familiarize students with the parts of a book. As I cut, tore, and otherwise mutilated the book, I marked its various parts and passed around the remains.

I pointed out the two boards that made up the cover and noted the inner and outer hinges. I pulled back the endpapers and pointed out the pastedown and flyleaf. I marked up the front matter: the title page and the verso of the title page, with its copyright material, ISBN, and mysterious edition numbers. Sometimes there was a cloth headband atop the spine of the book, and we speculated about its purpose (protection of the spine or decoration?). It was rare to find a full-length sewn-in headband. 

We examined the text block of the book and pulled apart its signatures. (In a later class, I would give students a large-sized piece of paper with sixteen numbered blocks and challenge them to fold it to a correctly numbered signature.) We noted the gutter, the margin where the left and right pages come together. We looked at the ways in which the signatures were bound and contrasted that with the less expensive perfect binding and burst binding, which inevitably led to a discussion of textbooks that fall apart when you read them. One time, we got into a discussion of the differences between hot-melt adhesives and organic glues.

After the initial horror of the dissection, the students learned a lot from the exercise and were able to pick up just about any book and understand how it was made. 

You can try this exercise at home, with a thrift-store hardback, a Sharpie, and a box-cutter. Just remember to cut away from your body. Safety first.

^{Featured image by Karim Elmissiry via Unsplash.}