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The Purple Guide to Learning Bookbinding in 10 Days
A 10-day starter plan to make your first three notebooks by hand — and decide if bookbinding is for you
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Day
Welcome to day one. You are about to make something by hand that you can actually use — a small paper booklet with real pages, a real spine, and a real cover. It won't be a masterpiece. It will be a starting point. And by the end of this first session, roughly an hour from now, you will hold something you made entirely yourself.
Let's start with what bookbinding actually is, stripped of any mystique. At its core, bookbinding is the process of taking loose sheets of paper, arranging them in order, and joining them together with a cover. That's it. Everything else — the leather, the gold tooling, the perfect flat openings — is decoration and refinement. The fundamental act is organizing paper and keeping it together. Today, you're going to do that with the simplest method that exists: folding.
Before we touch a single sheet, let's talk about what you need for this first session. Not a tool, not a special supply. Just a few things you almost certainly already own:
- Four or five sheets of plain printer paper (standard 8.5 x 11 inches works fine, or A4 if you're outside the US)
- One piece of slightly heavier paper, like cardstock, construction paper, or a file folder cut to size — this will be your cover
- A ruler (any ruler will do, a plastic one is fine)
- Something to fold with — a butter knife from the kitchen, a pen cap, or a plastic