Making Books

As noted in “On notetaking”, I take notes so that I can get a book printed at the end of the year to put on the shelf. Having a physical object that collects journal entries, notes, readings, and everything else boosts my mental health in so many ways. I look forward to the ritual of getting it put together and printed every year.

The one problem with getting someone else to print and bind my book of most closely kept thoughts is that I have to share those thoughts with someone else. The book for 2025 became an experiment. Could I print and bind the book myself?

The answer is a resounding, “yes”.

Talas has terrific instructions. My first attempt worked, though I naturally made some mistakes along the way that I want to learn to correct over time. From printing at home, to folding signatures, to punching and sewing, and finally gluing, it’s an involved process. That first book took a while to get right, and even then it’s got a number of imperfections. Some of that was a lack of skill and practice (e.g. remembering to add the binding tape during the sewing process rather than forcing it in after). Some of it was missing certain specialty tools.

That Talas link is a great introduction to binding a hardcover book of any kind. I’d stop reading here and go read that instead if you’re interested at all in the process. What follows here are some loose notes on what else I’ve learned when binding my own books.

Typst is Amazing

I use Typst to prepare my PDF manuscripts. It does everything I need for getting a reasonable PDF draft together, and it does it very, very well.

1. I almost always start with Markdown to just get things started, and then use Pandoc to convert from Markdown to Typst.
2. I then iterate on the Typst manuscript to get the PDF formatting the way I want. I stick with 8.5 x 11 (US Letter) for the page size, as that’s what I’m working with when printing (more on how we get the pages assembled later). The following block is what I’m using for basic setup.

#set page(
  paper: "us-letter",
  margin: (inside: 4cm, outside: 3.5cm, y: 4cm),
  numbering: "1",
  number-align: center,
  footer: "")

#set par(
  justify: true,
  first-line-indent: (amount: 1.75em, all: true)
)

#set text(14pt, font: "Georgia")

3. I manually insert page breaks to get everything to flow the way I want it to, tweaking document settings and manually massaging layouts where it makes sense to get the PDF preview of the physical book to look right.
4. Once that’s ready, we can get on to Imposition

Imposition

Imposition is a fancy word for “Take a PDF and turn it into something that, when printed, can be physically assembled into the pieces you need to actually bind a book”. There’s plenty of jargon in bookbinding (like any other specialized domain), and that’s one word that you need to know when you’re getting into making your own books. This doesn’t really apply if you’re just binding blank pages into a book, since you don’t care about how the pages are assembled in that scenario.

I’ve been using BookbinderJS which takes a PDF and converts it into the exact format you need. It has all of the bells and whistles, including a neat feature for making books that are 1/2 or 1/4 the size of your paper (which saves paper and makes for nice, small books). After skimming that Talas link, check out BookbinderJS and play around with it to get a feel for how it works. It’s free, easy enough to tune the knobs on, full-featured, and fast.

How you bind a book determines how you “impose” your pages. For me, I’m using the method in that Talas blog post, which involves “signatures.” A signature is a group of often 8 sheets that you sew together. The sewing goes through the middle of the stack of 8 sheets, almost making a “mini book”. This means that as you turn the pages in that signature, the first and last page of this little mini-book are actually right next to each other when printed. They are separated by folding the stack of sheets in half, and then you sew down the middle of the inside of that fold. This is what starts to make up the spine of your book.

The more sheets you stick in a signature, the thicker it becomes (and the more uneven the pages will be when you’re done). This means that if you’re using US Letter and a normal “folio” signature (where you just fold the sheet in half along the long side), each sheet gives you four pages (two on each side, with a fold down the middle). So, a folio-folded signature of 8 sheets gives you the first 32 pages of your book. A book with 100 pages then rounds up to 4 signatures - three with 8 sheets, and one with just one sheet. Typically you will also have some endpages that are part of the binding process, adding a couple extra sheets, but you get the idea.

If any of this doesn’t make sense, go read the Talas blog post and try assembling a booklet yourself. There’s more than one way to assemble a book (on a Mac, you can print a single signature as a booklet if you go fishing around in the print settings for page layout).

Assembly

If you have clamps, glue, a printer and paper, some sturdy thread + a needle, cloth, an exacto knife and/or scissors, and cardboard, you’ve got enough ingredients to make a book. if you want to make a nice book, you will probably want to get real book cloth, a bone folder (seriously, don’t underestimate this thing), a curved needle, a punching cradle, and a book press. I made my own book press recently using some hardware store parts, it cost about as much as the one Talas sells but it’s nice making things by hand too. The book press and punching cradle, in particular, do a lot. I think you could manage if you printed out the sewing marks from Bookbinder and just used a needle, and clamps + weights or heavy books can do a lot for the work of assembling the book itself. But a book press has helped simplify the work involved to make what I need.

Measure twice/cut once remains good advice, along with having material scraps to experiment with (especially with putting stuff on covers - book cloth has been one of the harder parts for me, since it’s easy to make it look bad with glue oozing out).

Fancy Details

A cricut machine or similar was helpful with making some decorative cardboard cutouts that I put underneath the book cloth for some raised geometric effects. Debossing the cover board didn’t really work and was too subtle under the book cloth. I intend to try iron on vinyl next for cover decoration.

I like the headbands you can glue in to the top/bottom of the spine. I haven’t quite figured out a good source for Japanese paper mentioned in the Talas article, hoping I can figure that one out soon.

The Finished Product

My year book for 2025 turned out pretty good. Getting the book cloth to adhere to the geometry details I tried to layer to the board was a bit tricky. I’m hopeful that as I practice I’ll get more intuition around how glue and paper behave, and how to best print it all out. I’d like to try better paper than normal printer paper as well, though I’m also interested in not spending a fortune on bespoke materials (what’s that quote about artists looking for cheap turpentine again?).

Summary

1. Try hobbies like book binding. They are extremely satisfying.
2. You can just make stuff.
3. Good tools and materials make a huge difference.
4. Even with good tools and materials, practice makes progress. The worst stuff in the best hands could come out better than the best stuff in the least experienced hands.