Weekly Bookbinding Report: mistakes, progress, confidence

Week ten as an apprentice bookbinder at York Bookbinding

Week ten entailed repairing pages of a Bible, and sewing it up, and making up a cohort of blank inners for a brief.

Week ten accomplishments:

• Repaired pages successfully, despite mistakes made.
• Strong sewing technique in good timing!
• Glued up the blanks successfully, becoming more confident in the method.

New skills acquired:

• Problem solving - I repaired pages wrongly but was able to undo my mistake.
• Undoing repairs by removing Filmoplast with heat and careful technique.
• Although not new, I practiced gluing up books to a confident level.

What I need to improve on:

Mistakes - although inevitable when learning, they take a lot of time to undo.

Notes of the week:

• If there are section markers, they are not to be ignored just because they book came bound the way it did. This needs to be rectified, unless something prohibits this !
• When there are loose items in the books being repaired, keep them in a separate wallet. They can be slotted back in later.