Somewhat of a Mystery Item

 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.

A Lovely Book Sewing Bench

 This is probably, so far, one of my favourite pieces for the bookbinder's shop. It is very similar to the sewing benches being used nowadays by modern, bespoke bookbinders and bookbinding hobbyists. It is the item on top of the table, and you are looking at the back of it, where the folded and pressed papers would sit while they are being sewn together. 

It would be used to sew the signatures, i.e. the stacked pages in equal groups that are folded and then sewn through at the fold. A group of these signatures makes up a book, with sewing through the stitches at the folds forming the spine, which are done in another tool. Again, there are moveable threaded rods, and an adjustable beam to keep the cords taut.

This is the side one works from: the stacked signatures are laid against the cords, which can be tightened by the brass keys at the bottom. The cords go through a slot in the bench, and there is also a slanted finishing edge. The upper beam has a rounded top. All the shaping was done with hand tools; a pin vise drill, sharp scalpel, assorted emery boards and fine sandpapers. I'm not dirtying this one up!

The item leaning against the front of the table is called, in translation, a press aide (persknecht),which I think means that it is used with the presses. It consists of 2 layers of wood, one slightly longer than the other, and has slats at the ends which protrude. The middle is hollow, allowing a certain amount of give. This one is decorated with a thin line of black, with decorative elements at the corners, all around the top of the press aide, and has been antiqued to suggest use.

I need to visit a bookbinder, to learn how these tools all work....

A Pair of Hand Book Presses

 As promised, here is the start of some of the items I've made for my current project, a late 1800's book bindery in a small community. They still use tried and true hand-operated tools, often heirloom family business items, so much of the equipment is simple to operate.

These two presses are slightly different, in that the lighter one doesn't have the brass strip in the lower beam or the feet, like the darker one has. I was able to purchase threaded screw rod locally, which the Carpenter-in-Chief cut to size for me for the screws. Technically, they should be wooden screws, but I haven't the ability or the equipment to make those. The threaded rod was given a light brushing with dark stain to suggest age and use, and the equipment is a bit banged-about and nicked, as well as antiqued. The screw handles were hand carved, and do actually work, while the knobs are wooden beads drilled to take the threaded rod. The upper beam slides and can be held on the books by turning the handles, while the lower beam is fixed. The small slat next to the dark press would be used between books, if several were in the press at the same time, to ascertain the leather or fabric covers wouldn't be unduly marked.

The table is a finishing one, for the more delicate work of adding titles and gilding to leather or fabric book covers, and will have some gilding tools and equipment on top in the completed setting. As some hammering is required even in this part of the work, the table has sturdy legs.

More soon! The photos are on my desk top ready to put on the blog.

Back in a Week

 It's ten thirty at night, and the Carpenter-in--Chief  has just gone out at the request of one of his clients. We're supposed to be on the road at 6 a.m. and the whole day has been like this. Needless to say, there is no photo today, as the computer has been filling out endless government forms. 

This is all volunteer work, and a few days' rest are desperately needed. I'm going to try and get some sleep, and see you soon. Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian mini enthusiasts.

Return to the Bookbinder' Workshop

 Looking back at my older posts, the first two components for this workshop project arrived on my work table for Christmas 2022. The other components (so far) arrived for my birthday last year around this time, I believe. However, I have been working all along on the items to go into the workshop, as they can be made with hand tools while the others need table saws and drill presses. MDF is the basic wood for miniature structures, as it forms the "carcass", as it's often called, for the finished project. There will be layering of decorative features on the outside eventually.

The building is based on typical Dutch village architecture in the Zaan River area, northeast of Amsterdam. These were wooden fishermen's houses, two stories with decorative false fronts, generally two rooms up and two rooms down, with a central staircase. Shops and businesses were housed in very similar structures, and were traditionally painted a vivid green colour, with white bargeboard (Victorian gingerbread) trim. You can check out an open-air museum that houses a number of these homes, along with a large collection of operating windmills, by looking up "Zaanse Schans Museum".

This building has one large room upstairs, and one downstairs. There will be a false back wall with windows and if I can fit it, a door, leading outside, with the actual back wall featuring a photo of a country scene along a river or perhaps an industrial backyard - it depends on what I can find! Along the left wall is a staircase with a half landing, leading to the upper floor. This floor is storage, office space and mail room space, with a table to sit and eat your lunch at. The front facade has one upper window in the peak, and a central door flanked by two windows. I may change that to one large window, however, with an offset door.

This is an overview of the equipment realised so far; shelving and work tables, of course, but also a block for hammering leather along with the heavy wooden maul, hand book presses, a press aide, sewing bench, bookbinder's guillotine, a small box with a padded leather top and a drawer that holds gold leaf sheets, and some small tools, brushes, glue pots, small hammer, etc. Still to come are a bookbinder's saddle and a large floor press.

And of course, endless tool-type items; knives, engraving rollers for decorative leather work, paper, glues, cardboard, and the usual sort of workshop clutter. Funny thing: I volunteer for museum accession work, and this past week a question came up regarding some tools found in a museum storage area that no one was able to identify. However, I recognised them as the engraving rollers from a bookbinder's workshop. A quick look at the original file listed the tools as.... engraving rollers for leather work on book covers! Research for minis can make you look very clever....

I'll feature the items in more detail starting this week. We're away for Canadian Thanksgiving, which is also a family birthday and a family wedding weekend, as well as our first chance to see the house and land my son and his wife (and puppies) moved on to in July. My son will be away, but we'll visit with our daughter-in-law and my husband's sister, the birthday girl. The wedding is a small affair, the widower of a cousin of whom we are all fond, to an old friend. We're all happy they found each other again!

Testing....

 This is a test to see if we can move photos, and it appears this one, at least, worked. It's not an item I made, as it is life-size, but one I'm hoping to make in scale for my bookbinder's workshop project, based on this photo and the measurements that were included with it. (This Real Life press is/was offered for sale, and I love the sturdy wooden gestalt of it much more than the instructions for the press that came with the project). It's my hope that I can now begin to showcase photos of some of the pieces I have made in scale for that project.

It's become a very frustrating multi-step job to do the photo thing; we've had to move all old photos off my old camera off the card into a file. Moving a photo at the moment involves the "gallery" setting as well as moving between various files, but we're hoping to simplify the process. If we can't, I'll hire a computer guru to come and work with me at home for a couple of hours. The new computer we got earlier this year lost my entire address book while the info was being transferred, and the newer program has just made every function that much more complicated, and I'm not happy with the whole experience. There was some sort of non-communication with older, less pixilated photos on the old photo card. I'm barely literate in computer stuff....

I wish I could just verbally dictate to my computer, along the lines of "just take that photo of the press and move it to the top of the new blog entry"  -- but I suspect that isn't far off with all the AI stuff currently.

That would be a whole another thing, as I am very much NOT impressed with AI sub-titling; we end up laughing ourselves silly sometimes about the errors a supposed marvelous "brain" makes!