The book covers may be divided into two classes, cloth and leather bindings. The cloth covers are made on machines which automatically glue the cloth and fold it around the cardboard sides, already cut to the proper size. It will doubtless surprise most visitors to learn that fully 280 large barrels of glue and paste are used every year at Riverside in book-making. Any design or lettering can be printed upon the cloth, while, if gold is used, it is laid on by hand, after the covers are prepared by “sizing” to make the gold leaf adhere to the surface of the cloth when stamped with heated dies. More than $25,000 worth of gold leaf is put on the bindings and edges of books every year in this department. The last step in book-making comes when the books, properly shaped, are pasted securely to the covers and put under pressure until dry and ready for sale.
In the case of the leather bindings a great many steps are required, and it is an interesting fact to note that the processes now in vogue are practically the same as they have been for generations, modern machine methods being possible in only a very few stages of the work. The important thing to bear in mind about leather binding's is that the cover becomes an integral part of the book itself, for the tapes or strings on which the book is sewed are worked into the cover before the leather is drawn on. Hand-tooling is necessary to get a sufficient brilliancy into the gold designs on leather, and where these designs are elaborate, there are so many different tools used that it may easily take a skillful finisher an entire day to do the panels on the back of a single volume. There is a special department under an artist expert where the highest grade of fine leather binding is done, and its work is generally considered among the best in America.
One of the old buildings on the river bank has been remodeled and refitted for the production of the beautifully printed books issued in limited Riverside Press Editions, which have met with the warmest and most sincere commendation from book-lovers, collectors, and critics of both literature and art. With its walls of brick, large, heavily mullioned windows, and open-timbered roof, this room presents something of the attractiveness of the earlier printing establishments, before the advent of machinery. This attraction, however, is due almost wholly to the
21
