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.
It looks amazing! I have no idea how these tools work...! The bookbinding I have done I learned in High School crafts class a very long time ago. I remember it was all very hand made... hand sewing the pages and assembling them together at the spine. I remember making the covers too... but we didn't do any fancy edge-cutting or pressing that I recall.... but I might just be forgetting steps! Lol! I really look forward to seeing your shop.... and the in-progress items too! :)
ReplyDeleteI don't know how this tool will be used, but I can speculate: The book would be held with the edge to be cut sitting on the rails. The screws could adjust the clamp to the thickness of the book, and that would help keep the cut straight/even. Then the book would be pushed through by hand so that the blade could bite into the pages. You might have to put the book through several times to cut through it all if it was an especially thick one. In this case, you'd tighten the clamp with each successive pass of the book until all the pages were cut through. You'd have to go through this process three times - once for the top horizontal edge of the book, once for the middle vertical edge, and once for the bottom horizontal edge.
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