This has been one of the more complex items to make for the bookbinders' workshop, and I believe it is a form of bookbinder's plough, a type of office guillotine machine for cutting the page edges evenly. Once upon a time, this was done by a type of chisel and a hammer, which of course left the edges of the pages rather ragged; these days a version of that is the deckle edge, which most often in my experience shows up in modern books of poetry. Every once in a while, a collector's edition of a novel might also have a deckle edge.
The plough consists in this case of a clamp, operated via the handle at the top. The circular edge just peeking out of the housing is the knife blade. However, what I can't figure out is how this arrangement allows the blade to cut the pages. The modern version of a bookbinder's plough has a very different shape.
It was an interesting item to make in miniature; the vertical posts are square in cross-section, and fit into square openings. The horizontal bar moves up and down by means of the handle at the top of the plough, to hold the signatures in place, but how does that knife cut a stack of pages?
If anyone has any ideas, please enlighten me....
It was great "fun" hollowing out the housing for that circular knife in the base of the plough, and involved a lot of sandpaper strips in between applications of emery boards and scalpel blades! I am almost convinced there has to be some sort of a handle involved in manipulating that circular knife blade.
Soon I'll begin tackling the building, but I have some other projects to finish up first.
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