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A guy at the bindery in Portland showed me how to round a spine by hand and it fixed my whole approach
Two months ago I drove up to Portland for a small book arts meetup at a shop off SE Division, mostly just to watch and maybe trade some scraps of marbled paper. There was an old guy named Harold there who has been binding since the 70s, and he watched me fight with a book I had sewn too tight, the spine was lumpy and the boards would not sit flat no matter how much I pressed it. He took it from me, grabbed a backing hammer and a tub of wheat paste, and spent about 20 minutes rounding and backing that spine by hand while he talked me through where my shoulders were too square. I had been using a press and a store bought jig for three years and never once tried it the old way because I figured I would wreck the signatures. Turns out my real problem was that I never knocked down the swell before rounding, so the whole block was fighting me. I went home and did it his way on a scrap text block that night, and the difference in how the boards hinged was honestly kind of a shock. If you back your spines by hand, do you use a backing board or just the hammer and your lap?
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