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Took me 9 hours to fix one crooked spine because I kept guessing instead of measuring
Last month I was casing in a copy of Moby Dick for a friend and the spine came out visibly slanted, maybe 3/16 of an inch off square. I tore it off, re-glued, and it went crooked again, then a third time, and I burned a full Saturday plus Sunday morning on it. The fix ended up being embarrassingly simple: I started checking my boards against a square after every single glue-up instead of once at the start. Part of me says this is basic stuff every binder should already do, and another part says a lot of us learned by feel and skip the square because it slows us down. So which is it, is checking square after each step overkill or just the job? Curious how long a crooked spine has cost other folks before they figured out their own gap in the process.
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tylerblack11d ago
Laughing at myself here because I did the exact same thing with a rebind last year, except mine was closer to a quarter inch off and I blamed the glue, then the weather, then my clamp, before finally admitting I never checked square once. Guessing feels faster in the moment, but it cost me two whole evenings and a lot of wasted paper, so yeah, checking after each glue-up is just the job, not overkill. When you learn by feel like a lot of us did, the square feels like training wheels, but the trade-off is you spend hours chasing a problem that a ten second check would have caught. Doing it every step sounds slow, but it is way faster than tearing a spine off three times. So my vote is that it is basic, and skipping it is just borrowing trouble you have to pay back later.
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