Chapter II
Sewing signatures on a kitchen table with a home-made frame
Sewing is the part of bookbinding that looks hardest and turns out to be the calmest. Once the signatures are folded and pierced, it is a matter of following the thread in and out, and the rhythm of it is the reason I keep coming back to the table after a long day.
First written 18 May 2025 · revised 21 July 2025 · 8 minutes’ reading
Folding and gathering
A signature is a group of sheets folded together in half, usually four sheets making sixteen pages. I fold each sheet separately with a bone folder, grain parallel to the fold, then nest four of them together and give the fold a final firm crease. Folding them all at once saves time, but the outer sheet ends up shorter at the fore-edge than the inner ones, and that creep is harder to trim away neatly than it is to avoid in the first place.
Once folded, the signatures go under a stack of heavy books overnight. My pile is three old dictionaries and a cookery book, and it lives on the chair next to the table. Pressing matters more than it looks: it takes the spring out of the folds so the signatures lie flat, and it makes the text block noticeably thinner at the spine, which in turn makes the sewing tighter.
Before piercing, I gather the signatures in order, knock them up square against a block of wood, and pencil a single diagonal line across all the spine folds. If a signature gets turned round or out of order during sewing, the line breaks, and I can see at once which one is wrong. That small habit has saved at least two books from having a section upside down.
Marking and piercing the stations
Sewing stations are the holes along each fold where the thread passes through. For a small notebook I use five or six. The two outermost are the kettle stations, about a centimetre from the head and tail, where the thread links each signature to the one below. The others are spaced evenly between them, or placed where tapes will sit if the book is sewn onto tapes.
I mark the stations on a strip of card cut to the height of the text block and use it as a template for every signature, so that the holes line up exactly. The signature is opened to its centre and laid in a cradle, which in my case is two strips of board taped into a shallow V. The awl goes through from inside the fold, straight along the crease. An angled hole makes a ragged exit on the spine, and the thread will saw at it for as long as the book is read.
It is tempting to pierce with the signature flat on the table, and I did exactly that for my first few books. The holes wandered off the fold on the outer sheets and the sewing never sat quite right. The cradle took ten minutes to make out of scraps and has been used on every book since.
The frame on the kitchen table
For books sewn onto tapes I use a sewing frame, and mine is home-made from a baseboard, two lengths of dowel and a crossbar screwed across the top. It sits on the kitchen table on a folded tea towel so that it does not mark the wood. The tapes run from the crossbar down to the baseboard and are pinned there, taut but not tight, and the signatures are sewn against them one at a time.
The thread is unbleached linen, waxed by drawing it across a block of beeswax a couple of times. Waxing stops it tangling and helps each stitch stay where it is put. I cut a length of roughly the height of the book times the number of signatures, plus an arm's length for knots, and join a new length with a weaver's knot inside a fold when it runs out.
The rhythm is simple once it is learned: in at a kettle station, out and around a tape, back in, along the inside of the fold, out again, and so on to the far kettle station. At the end of each signature the thread links down to the one below with a kettle stitch, a small loop that locks the sections together at head and tail. After the first three signatures I stop, check that the stack is square, and tension the thread by pulling along the line of the fold rather than straight out, which would tear the paper.
What went wrong, and the fix
My first sewn text block had loose kettle stitches, and the result was a spine that fanned open at the head. The signatures were held along the middle by the tapes, but at the ends they could move freely, and the whole thing looked like a paper accordion. I had been so afraid of tearing the paper that I barely pulled the thread at all. The fix was to tension each kettle stitch firmly while holding the signature below with a thumb, so the pull goes into the stack rather than into the paper.
The second problem was swell. Thread adds thickness along the spine, and with a lot of signatures of thin paper, the spine becomes noticeably thicker than the fore-edge. On a small book this is fine, and it even helps with rounding later. On a thick one it makes the text block wedge-shaped. I now use a finer thread for books with many signatures, and occasionally sew two signatures on together, alternating stations, which halves the thread in the spine.
Once sewn, the text block goes back under the dictionaries with its spine glued with a thin coat of PVA and a strip of mull, and it stays there overnight. The next morning the kitchen table is a table again. There is something satisfying about that: the whole bindery packed away into a shoebox and a pile of books on a chair, with a sewn text block sitting on top like a loaf cooling on a rack.
❧
Measurements here come from one kitchen table, one set of tools and the weather in one flat, so check them against your own paper before trusting them. Return to the contents.
— 45 —