#but thats sort of not what most people who are handmaking books want to have anyways

[hellenhighwater]

Hi hello! So I saw your video about book binding and I wanted to offer a tip for people looking to try it out if that’s ok. So I’m working on binding a book right now and am following a YouTube tutorial. I’ve found most of the process pretty straight forward and relatively easy except for one step. The step where you cut the edge of the text block so that it’s all nice and even after you sew the signatures together. It sounds easy in theory but in practice I find it much harder so I found a solution. Instead of trying to even out the terrible job I did on cutting the pages I called my local staples and they said they’d be happy to give the edge of the text block a neat straight cut using their industrial paper cutter if I bring it by. I’m not sure if every staples would be up for this or have an industrial paper cutter but I figured it might be worth a shot if anyone else struggles with this step of the process. Will update with costs and results when I return from staples in a couple hours.

Staples update: it cost $8 CAD to get the edges of my text block trimmed it would’ve only been like $3 but then I would’ve need to wait a day to pick it up and I need to finish the project today so I had to pay extra for a rush order. Other than that though they did a fabulous job!! It’s so crispy and neat now I am in love with it. I would probably do it again but I would plan better so I don’t need to pay for a rush order lol

Good tip, anon! I've also done that, because trimming text blocks sucks tremendously and it's surprisingly hard to do well.

I will point out that you're likelier to have luck getting someone to do this at a local print shop as opposed to a franchise like Staples. Local shops are usually more able to give you a random price for a weird job, and sometimes the franchises wind up with cashiers that go "I don't have a button on the register for that so we can't do it," even though nobody's going to inventory how many chops the commercial guillotine did and I will hand you ten dollars cash money to go chop my text block. Most print shops will indeed have an industrial cutter, because almost any print shop is going to offer printing services that include full-bleed orders, which means trimming.

Anyway. Go local, and if there's any flexibility to the spine of your text block, make sure that the employee doing the chopping knows exactly how it needs to be positioned during cutting. And also give them registration marks to trim to.