Country Tools and How to Use Them (Dover Craft Books)

Dover Craft Bks.: Practical Knots and Ropework by Percy W. Blandford (2007, Paperback)

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It requires knowledge about numerous varieties of book structures along with all the internal and external details of assembly. A working knowledge of the materials involved is required. A book craftsman needs a minimum set of hand tools but with experience will find an extensive collection of secondary hand tools and even items of heavy equipment that are valuable for greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency.

Bookbinding is an artistic craft of great antiquity, and at the same time, a highly mechanized industry.

The division between craft and industry is not so wide as might at first be imagined. It is interesting to observe that the main problems faced by the mass-production bookbinder are the same as those that confronted the medieval craftsman or the modern hand binder. The first problem is still how to hold together the pages of a book; secondly is how to cover and protect the gathering of pages once they are held together; and thirdly, how to label and decorate the protective cover. The craft of bookbinding probably originated in India , where religious sutras were copied on to palm leaves cut into two, lengthwise with a metal stylus.

The leaf was then dried and rubbed with ink, which would form a stain in the wound.

The finished leaves were given numbers, and two long twines were threaded through each end through wooden boards, making a palm-leaf book. When the book was closed, the excess twine would be wrapped around the boards to protect the manuscript leaves. Buddhist monks took the idea through Afghanistan to China in the first century BC.

Similar techniques can also be found in ancient Egypt where priestly texts were compiled on scrolls and books of papyrus. Another version of bookmaking can be seen through the ancient Mayan codex ; only four are known to have survived the Spanish invasion of Latin America. Writers in the Hellenistic-Roman culture wrote longer texts as scrolls ; these were stored in boxes or shelving with small cubbyholes, similar to a modern winerack. Court records and notes were written on wax tablets , while important documents were written on papyrus or parchment.

The book was not needed in ancient times, as many early Greek texts—scrolls—were 30 pages long, which were customarily folded accordion-fashion to fit into the hand. Roman works were often longer, running to hundreds of pages. The Greeks used to call their books tome , meaning "to cut". The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a massive pages long and was used in funerary services for the deceased. Torah scrolls, editions of the Jewish holy book, were—and still are—also held in special holders when read. Scrolls can be rolled in one of two ways.

The first method is to wrap the scroll around a single core, similar to a modern roll of paper towels. While simple to construct, a single core scroll has a major disadvantage: This is partially overcome in the second method, which is to wrap the scroll around two cores, as in a Torah. With a double scroll, the text can be accessed from both beginning and end, and the portions of the scroll not being read can remain wound.

This still leaves the scroll a sequential-access medium: In addition to the scroll, wax tablets were commonly used in Antiquity as a writing surface. Diptychs and later polyptych formats were often hinged together along one edge, analogous to the spine of modern books, as well as a folding concertina format. Such a set of simple wooden boards sewn together was called by the Romans a codex pl.

Two ancient polyptychs, a pentaptych and octoptych , excavated at Herculaneum employed a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on thongs or cords. At the turn of the first century, a kind of folded parchment notebook called pugillares membranei in Latin, became commonly used for writing throughout the Roman Empire. Martial used the term with reference to gifts of literature exchanged by Romans during the festival of Saturnalia.

Skeat, "in at least three cases and probably in all, in the form of codices" and he theorized that this form of notebook was invented in Rome and then "must have spread rapidly to the Near East". Early intact codices were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Consisting of primarily Gnostic texts in Coptic, the books were mostly written on papyrus , and while many are single-quire, a few are multi-quire.

Codices were a significant improvement over papyrus or vellum scrolls in that they were easier to handle. However, despite allowing writing on both sides of the leaves, they were still foliated—numbered on the leaves, like the Indian books. The idea spread quickly through the early churches, and the word Bible comes from the town where the Byzantine monks established their first scriptorium , Byblos , in modern Lebanon. The idea of numbering each side of the page—Latin pagina , "to fasten"—appeared when the text of the individual testaments of the Bible were combined and text had to be searched through more quickly.

This book format became the preferred way of preserving manuscript or printed material. The codex -style book, using sheets of either papyrus or vellum before the spread of Chinese papermaking outside of Imperial China , was invented in the Roman Empire during the 1st century AD. Western books from the fifth century onwards [ citation needed ] were bound between hard covers, with pages made from parchment folded and sewn onto strong cords or ligaments that were attached to wooden boards and covered with leather.

Since early books were exclusively handwritten on handmade materials, sizes and styles varied considerably, and there was no standard of uniformity. Early and medieval codices were bound with flat spines, and it was not until the fifteenth century that books began to have the rounded spines associated with hardcovers today.

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These straps, along with metal bosses on the book's covers to keep it raised off the surface that it rests on, are collectively known as furniture. The earliest surviving European bookbinding is the St Cuthbert Gospel of about , in red goatskin, now in the British Library , whose decoration includes raised patterns and coloured tooled designs. Very grand manuscripts for liturgical rather than library use had covers in metalwork called treasure bindings , often studded with gems and incorporating ivory relief panels or enamel elements.

Very few of these have survived intact, as they have been broken up for their precious materials, but a fair number of the ivory panels have survived, as they were hard to recycle; the divided panels from the Codex Aureus of Lorsch are among the most notable. The 8th century Vienna Coronation Gospels were given a new gold relief cover in about , and the Lindau Gospels now Morgan Library , New York have their original cover from around Luxury medieval books for the library had leather covers decorated, often all over, with tooling incised lines or patterns , blind stamps , and often small metal pieces of furniture.

Medieval stamps showed animals and figures as well as the vegetal and geometric designs that would later dominate book cover decoration. Until the end of the period books were not usually stood up on shelves in the modern way. The most functional books were bound in plain white vellum over boards, and had a brief title hand-written on the spine.

Techniques for fixing gold leaf under the tooling and stamps were imported from the Islamic world in the 15th century, and thereafter the gold-tooled leather binding has remained the conventional choice for high quality bindings for collectors, though cheaper bindings that only used gold for the title on the spine, or not at all, were always more common.

Country Tools and How to Use Them

Although the arrival of the printed book vastly increased the number of books produced in Europe, it did not in itself change the various styles of binding used, except that vellum became much less used. In the 8th century Arabs learned the arts of papermaking from the Chinese and were then the first to bind paper into books at the start of the Islamic Golden Age.

The people who worked in making books were called Warraqin or paper professionals. The Arabs made books lighter—sewn with silk and bound with leather covered paste boards, they had a flap that wrapped the book up when not in use. As paper was less reactive to humidity, the heavy boards were not needed.

The production of books became a real industry and cities like Marrakech , Morocco , had a street named Kutubiyyin or book sellers, which contained more than bookshops in the 12th century. The famous Koutoubia Mosque is named so because of its location on this street. Because the Qur'an itself was considered a sacred object, in order to beautify the book containing the holy scripture, a culture of calligraphy and lavish bookbinding developed.

Bookbinding in medieval China replaced traditional Chinese writing supports such as bamboo and wooden slips , as well as silk and paper scrolls. With the arrival from the East of rag paper manufacturing in Europe in the late Middle Ages and the use of the printing press beginning in the midth century, bookbinding began to standardize somewhat, but page sizes still varied considerably. In the early sixteenth century, the Italian printer Aldus Manutius realized that personal books would need to fit in saddle bags and thus produced books in the smaller formats of quartos one-quarter-size pages and octavos one-eighth-size pages.

With printing, the books became more accessible and were stored on their side on long shelves for the first time. Clasps were removed, and titles were added to the spine.

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Leipzig , a prominent centre of the German book-trade, in had 20 bookshops, 15 printing establishments, 22 book-binders and three type-foundries in a population of 28, people. In the German book-distribution system of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the end-user buyers of books "generally made separate arrangements with either the publisher or a bookbinder to have printed sheets bound according to their wishes and their budget".

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Plus, an access and resources section with suggested further reading, supplies, services, and much more to get you started making something that is truly your own, from the first step to the last. The Joy of Handweaving.

Publisher Series: Dover Craft Books

Growing Plants for Natural Dyes and Fibers. Natural Dyes and Home Dyeing. Early American Weaving and Dyeing. Craft of the Dyer: Colour from Plants and Lichens. Home Life in Colonial Days. Nearly every hand tool you are likely to use around the house is described in the first chapter: Chapter two covers the common power tools: Chapter three covers measuring tools from rules and tapes to calipers, micrometers, and squares with detailed instructions on how to use each one.

Chapter four describes the common nails, screws, bolts, nuts, rivets, and other fasteners you are likely to use.

Publisher Series by cover

Chapter five describes grinders and shows how to sharpen and care for screwdrivers, chisels, drills, and snips. The final two chapters cover such miscellaneous tasks and tools as metal cutting operations, stripping insulated wire, and soldering techniques.

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