During a holiday this summer I made a simple bookbinding jig to help speed up my efforts when creating paperback books (you can read more about the bookbinding jig in this article.)

The bookbinding jig worked extremely well (I’ve made 7 books so far) and I have been having great success using it to make books with glue bindings. So, I decided to put together this quick video to demonstrate the process I use.

The video is edited slightly, but the whole process shown only took about 15 minutes from start to finish and much of the time cut out was waiting for the glue to setup enough to remove it from the jig.If you enjoy this demonstration, please bookmark the page and share it with others.

There are a lot of options available on the market for perfect bound bookbinding equipment. Most are expensive and geared toward companies running fulltime binderies. Others are pitched at the business market and focus on creating bound reports. There are even a few binding solutions aimed at small operations looking to create short runs of perfect bound books. But, they all cost thousands of dollars.

My first experiments in bookbinding involved some extremely low-tech bookbinding tools - paint stirrers and binding clamps. It was tricky to get the pages lined up, position the stirrers, and get the clamps on (they got in the way when applying glue, too). Finally, there was no good way to add the covers. I needed a better solution.