Verso
§ Craft · The bindery, top to bottom

Sixty-two steps
between the mill
and your desk.

A Verso book passes through six sets of hands and three rooms of the studio before it leaves. Here is what happens in each of them, and roughly why.

01
Stage 01

Paper

Every book begins with a decision made a year before the sewing frame comes out: which paper.

We keep four house stocks in rotation — Fedrigoni Arcoprint 100gsm for our default text block, a heavier 120 for ledgers, a slightly warmer Ingres for endpapers, and a cotton-rag Fabriano for archival commissions. Each is chosen for how it takes graphite, ink, and time. Paper is a slow relationship. You do not learn how a sheet ages by reading the specification.

Working notes
Mill
Fedrigoni, Verona
Fibre
70% cellulose, 30% cotton
Weight
100–120 gsm text
Grain
long, parallel to spine
02
Stage 02

Folding

The sheet becomes a signature. Three folds, sixteen pages, one small piece of engineering.

Folded on a beech board with a bone folder — a tool shaped like a butter knife, made from the shin of a cow. Bone compresses paper without abrading it, leaving a crease that catches light the same way as the rest of the sheet. A book has thirty-two folds on average. None of them are done by machine here.

Working notes
Tool
Beech board, bone folder
Format
Sexto · Octavo · Quarto
Pages per signature
16
Signatures per book
6–24
03
Stage 03

Sewing

Six signatures onto three raised cords. Linen thread, a curved needle, kettle-stitches at the head and tail.

The sewing frame is a piece of eighteenth-century furniture that has not been meaningfully redesigned since. Three lengths of hemp cord are strung vertically; signatures are stacked, one at a time, and sewn from spine to spine with 25/3 linen thread. Every fourth pass we tie a kettle-stitch, which locks the previous four signatures in place. The result is a spine that flexes but does not shift.

Working notes
Frame
Late-Victorian, restored
Thread
25/3 unbleached linen
Cords
3 raised hemp
Stitch
Kettle at head and tail
04
Stage 04

Forwarding

The point at which a stack of sewn signatures becomes a textblock — glued, rounded, backed, and edge-trimmed.

PVA glue on the spine, in a thin coat, worked in with a stiff brush. While it is still tacky the spine is rounded with a small hammer against a curved leather cushion, then backed — the outermost signatures are canted outward against a wooden press until the spine takes its final convex shape. This is what makes a hardback open flat without cracking. Skipping the backing is why most modern hardcovers do not.

Working notes
Glue
Reversible PVA
Rounding
Cobbler's hammer, leather cushion
Backing
Job backer & wooden press
Edges
Guillotine, then sanded
05
Stage 05

Casing

Cover boards cut from 2.4mm greyboard, cloth wetted and pasted, corners mitred, all of it fitted around the textblock.

The cover — the case, in our language — is built off the book, not on it, and then married to it at the end. We use Iris book cloth, dyed and starched, or occasionally a quarter-leather binding for ledgers, with cloth sides and a strip of vegetable-tanned goatskin along the spine. Corners are mitred at 45° so the cloth folds without bulking. Everything is pressed overnight.

Working notes
Boards
Greyboard, 2.4mm
Cloth
Iris starched book cloth
Leather
Vegetable-tanned goat
Press
Nipping, 8 hours minimum
06
Stage 06

Finishing

The last hour. Foil, blind-tooling, ribbon, headband, and the small stamp on the rear pastedown.

Titles are stamped in 23-karat gold foil with hot brass type on an Adana press — one letter at a time for short runs, a full line of type for standard editions. The headband and tailband are silk, sewn in ourselves rather than glued on pre-made. A pale blue ribbon marker is bound in at the head before the endpapers are pasted. The last thing we do is press our own mark, blind, into the lower right of the rear pastedown.

Working notes
Foil
23kt gold, silver, blind
Press
Adana Eight-Five
Headband
Silk, hand-sewn
Time
60–90 min per book

Have something you want made this way?

We take on roughly forty bespoke commissions a year — wedding registers, private editions, family cookbooks, artists' books, publisher rebindings. The waiting list runs three months. Start there.

See commission pricing →