#I AM a sucker for a pretty hardback with sprayed edges

[greaseonmymouth]

This is all true and accurate. In commercial book printing the machines that can sew books are manufactured by a company called SMYTH and books made that way are typically referred to as “smyth sewn”. If you poke around on YouTube you can find videos of these machines in action.

I’ve been told smyth sewn books are typically textbooks, encyclopaedias, notebooks and children’s books, and while I can’t speak for the first three I do work with children’s books and can verify that - all our picture books are smyth sewn and casebound (either self-ended or with endpapers) and in the case of paperback editions they’re still smyth sewn but the spine is glued to the cover. Book cloth though, that I only see on high end nonfiction (coffee table) books…for a bookcloth-like texture to imitate a high end finish, hardbacks can be bound in wibalin or arlin, a textured cloth imitation paper. (arlin is slightly cheaper than wibalin.) occasionally we’ll do a “fancy” quarter bound picture book but the spine is never bookcloth, it’ll be wibalin, and then the front and back cover papers will be a smooth paper, which imo kinda defeats the point of a quarter binding since it’s all just paper.

publishing companies will be like ~ooh this is a hardcover oooh it's so durable that will be $35~ and then you see the actual book and it's like. "perfect"-bound with endbands glued on crooked and a completely plain paper cover under the dust jacket. my dudes this shit is a mass market paperback with delusions of grandeur