How to Prepare a Book to Be Drilled for Binding

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Gary for Expert Village. Now we are going to prepare the book for drilling. We need to make sure that when we drill, that we drill down the side here and we want to make sure that we catch all the pages. What happens is if a book is in need of repair, often times the pages are away from the seam. They can actually be protruding a little bit like we see in this book. We see that this book is closed properly even the two book covers are even. We see that the pages are out. If you look over here, we see that there is a space here, a big gap, over here that there is actually no pages; the pages are actually protruding over here. So what is going to happen here is when you make the holes in the spine, they are actually going to be drilling into hollow spaces. They are not going to catch any pages. The first thing that we want to do is when we bind the book, we want to make sure the pages are all the way to the inside and they are pressed hard. We just kind of press the pages in and make sure that they are sitting against the back spine of the book and we see that the pages are all the way to the back. So when we makes the holes down this part of the book, we will catch the pages there. That obviously is going to be the key in protecting and making sure the book has a nice strong binding. Another thing that we want to do when we prepare for the drilling, is we want to take a look at the book. What we want to do is see how much space over here, down the middle, we actually have between the spine, the seam over here and the actual written words that are on the page. We see that in this book it is very hard to open. There is a lot of resistance here. Once we open the book, it is not so comfortable. When this book was done, the holes were probably made too far out. They should have been made closer in to give us more room to open up the book but if you drill the holes too far in, what is going to happen is it is going to be bound very tight from this point so it is very important to find a good location where to drill the holes. In order to do that, it is going to be helpful if we push those pages all the way in and we take a look at the inside to see where the written words start and where we can actually make the holes and how much room we have to play with to make those holes. "