Welcome to my monthly blog post (Oh! Look What I Found!), all about shit I found while researching for some creative project. I do a lot of random digging and searching and connecting to try and flesh out my stories, worlds, and characters. Now, I want to share some of it with you!
Between Two Points
This month I’m working on revising (so many things lol), but one of those things is a short story! It’s a secondary world fantasy where a young library page goes in search of her sister and the other girls who have gone missing from the city’s library. As you can imagine, books and libraries play a huge part in the story and its themes.
Another aspect that plays a huge part is what holds books together. How they grow, shrink, fold, fall apart, and are bound in general. I’m not a bookbinder, nor have I ever tried to learn. Mainly, I’ve been looking at what types of bindings books can have and what they mean or how they may affect the book and a reader’s relationship to that book.
When it comes to bookbinding techniques, there are:
- Case bindings
- Used for hardcover books. Pages are sewn in sections that are glued to endpapers that are then glued to the book’s spine
- Perfect bindings
- Used for softcover books. Made from coated or laminated cardstock, the cover and pages are glued together.
- Saddle stitching
- Used for magazines and chapbooks. Pages are stacked and stitched together using metal staples.
- Comb/Spiral
- Used frequently for educational books. Holes are punched into pages and a comb or spiral is used to hold it all together
- Thermal binding
- Pages are glued to the spine by heating it up.
- Boardbook binding
- Used for picture books. Thick pages are assembled into the book block
- Screw/Post binding
- Used for menus and portfolios. Screws are used to hold pages together between two covers
- Anthropodermic bibliopegy aka Skin binding
- Using skin to bind books.
In my story, the main character loves the way books feel and how they open to her. In her world, books are powerful and carry weight. They don’t just detail accounts, spells, and histories, but create whole new worlds and characters. The story is an older one I wrote years ago during my August writing challenge of writing a new story a day. While the research side of this revision won’t take that long, nailing the lines and ending of the story will. But hopefully, I can reach the end of the story by the end of the month.
Thanks for swinging by and reading about what I’ve been up to the past couple of weeks. I appreciate it. I’d appreciate it even more if you’d consider subscribing to my blog or checking out some of the books, games, and stories I have available for fans, followers, and readers.
Aigner Loren Wilson Writer & Editor 
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