The Advent and Development of Perfect Binding
The first early attempts at perfect binding employed traditional, flexible animal jelly glues, however attempts at perfect binding only really became commercially viable with the development of synthetic resin dispersion technologies using water to help allow the adhesives seep into the paper’s pores at the site of adhesion.
In the first perfecting binding techniques of this type, the adhesive solution used typically consisted of 40-50% water which would require evaporating away as part of the curing process.
Adequate drying facilities had to be incorporated into the in-line drying facilities thanks to this, meaning that the equipment had to be large and therefore expensive.
One such method for drying books to which the adhesive had been applied was via high frequency drying, where hot air was passed through an oven through which the books would pass through, heating and evaporating away unwanted moisture and curing the adhesive.
Using cold glues in techniques derived from the above led to books with the tendency to become brittle over time or with frequent use. Nearly 50 years after the advent of the first perfect binding methods and commercial viability of automated bookbinding, the process was developed further with the DuPont Company introducing a hot-melt binding process c.1940.
The advent of hot-melt adhesives provided several advantages to the manufacturing side of book crafting; volatile organic compounds which can pose health risks to those exposed to them are either greatly reduced or eliminated and the adhesive curing step is also eliminated.
The fact that there is no curing step involved with hot-melt adhesives leads to a greatly reduced setting time, which in manufacturing terms means much less space is required to store the unfinished products and the turnaround time for a product batch is also slashed
The introduction of hot-melt adhesive in bookbinding allowed for the first time high-speed in-line finishing and trimming on larger binding systems and brought feasibility to the development of smaller scale binding machines, allowing the production of smaller, cheaper binding machines with a lesser output.
The production of books in this manner saw the advent of the phenomenon we see now as an everyday thing; the widespread production and uptake of the paperback book. The original pioneers of the paperback book, Pocket Books is now a division of Simon & Schuster, a successful publishing company now in the top 6 of all US publishers.
This is the second part in a short series detailing the evolution of traditional bookbinding up to the modern day and a short insight into developments made in the field of perfect binding.
