Experiments in Bookbinding

Recently I have been researching nineteenth century political writing, especially about abolition; I feel very strongly about the modern counterparts to those issues and it's important to me to reflect that in my historical reenacting (because history isn't an escape from the present, it's context in which the present exists). I found the very excellent book "An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans" from 1833 on Project Gutenberg, and I wanted to be able to have it on hand while reenacting. But it would be annoying and silly to print the whole think off the internet, so I bought a cheap used paperback of it off Amazon (because of course some college or other used it in a class) and I rebound it!
I looked at probably 25 bookbinding tutorials of all sorts before I began - I found this one especially useful. I just read enough to get a good idea of the general steps and terminology, so that I could reapply the concepts to my project.

The book came with the original 1830s text and a modern section of introductions and appendices, so I split the text block along those lines. I bound the modern section first, so if I made mistakes I could fix them. I had a bit of trouble getting the text block glued into the cover straight; it ended up being a little cockeyed, but the actual book text wound up a bit straighter!

For the main text, I attached end-papers of brown construction paper, and a "super" out of plain thin cotton to be sure everything would stay together.

Then I put together the cover - two cardboard boards for the front and back covers, and another thin bit for the spine. That was all covered with a large sheet of white drawing paper. I stuck another "super" onto the spine section of the cover just to be safe that it would all hold together. Then I folded the paper around the cover, and glued everything carefully down into the grooves between the spine and cover boards.

And that is where I stopped taking pictures, of course.

I added fabric parts along the spine and on each corner for reinforcement (and of course because it looks cool). Then I glued the text block into the cover - I only glued the covers, not the spine, so it would be able to open more easily. And it wound up mostly straight! The covers of the book text and the modern section match, so they look like a set. I need to add some kind of label to the covers still. But the book has been really handy and very functional, and I'm quite pleased with it!