In Praise of the Signature

A signature is a small piece of engineering disguised as a habit. Take a sheet of paper — ours is a 120gsm Fedrigoni Arcoprint, warm-white, laid — and fold it once, twice, three times. You now hold sixteen pages: eight leaves, printed and folded so that the numbers land in the right order once the whole thing is opened out. Do it thirty-two times, sew them together at the spine, and you have a book.

This is how books have been made for six hundred years. It is also, quietly, the reason a well-made book opens flat in your lap and a badly-made one springs shut like a mousetrap. The signature is what lets the pages breathe.

What the machine cannot fold

There is a version of bookmaking — the version that produces most of what you find at an airport bookshop — that skips the fold entirely. Sheets are cut into single leaves, stacked, and glued along one edge with a hot polyurethane called PUR. It is fast, it is cheap, and it works, mostly. It also produces a book that resists being read. You have to break its spine to see the inner margin. After a year the glue crazes, and the pages start to release, one by one, like the last leaves off a plane tree.

A signature is what lets the pages breathe. Everything downstream — the way a book opens, the way it ages, the way it feels in the hand at the end of a long afternoon — is decided in that first fold.

Sewn signatures do not do this. The thread, once it is through the fold, is doing structural work. It holds the gathering together along a line, not a plane. The spine can flex because the fold is elastic; the fold is elastic because it is a fold and not a glued butt-joint. If you have ever wondered why an antiquarian book from 1780 opens beautifully and a paperback from 2018 does not, this is the answer, and it is not nostalgia.

The bone folder

We fold on a beech board with a bone folder — a small, cool tool shaped like a butter knife, made from the shin of a cow. Bone compresses paper without abrading it; a plastic folder, which we tried for a season, leaves a faintly polished streak along the crease that catches light differently from the rest of the sheet. Nobody notices this consciously. Everybody notices it.

We are not romantic about the fold. It is a working technique, one that happens to have outlasted several centuries of attempts to replace it. When someone asks why our notebooks cost what they cost, this is usually where we begin — not with the leather, or the endpapers, or the foil on the spine, but with the sixteen pages that a single sheet becomes when it is folded three times, correctly, by hand.